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Anna Goodall
posted 27 February 2007

Incidences at first appears to be a collection of stand-alone texts, often no more than a page or so in length, sometimes just a few lines. It seems a daunting prospect, and unlikely to make sense as a whole. But this collection of Russian writer Daniil Kharms' work is absolutely compelling. The book has a consistent style and voice, and is full of obsessively repeated, somewhat disturbing motifs and ideas; once read, a thread of powerful darker meaning emerges from the whole.

Kharms' life story is all too shockingly familiar. Born in St Petersburg in 1905, he emerged onto the artistic scene in the 1920s, and in 1927 formed an avant-garde group with fellow writers Alexander Vvendensky and Nikolay Zabolotsky - the OBERIU group. The group's off-kilter approach and public performances soon brought the unwelcome notice of the state and as a result OBERIU quickly disbanded, but Kharms was still arrested and temporarily exiled. Although he returned from exile quickly, and was initially allowed to write and publish work for children (this collection contains none of his writing for younger people, but one imagines he might be Russia's answer to Roald Dahl), his name had been blackened. So although he escaped the major purges of 1937, it was only a matter of time, especially as Kharms was not able to repress the avant-garde tendencies of his writing entirely, before he was in trouble again. He was rearrested in 1941 and died in February 1942, probably of starvation, in a prison hospital. His widow, Marina Malich, and a friend, the philosopher Yakuv Druskin, kept his work until Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy meant it could finally be published.

This collection is divided into several different sections - 'The Old Woman' (1939) - a short story and by far the longest prose piece in the book (coming in at an 'epic' 30 pages); the Incidents (1933-37); Assorted Stories (1930- 41); a farcical genre play, Yelizaveta Bam (1927); and various assorted and non-fictional letters and scribblings. What is immediately striking about the collection is its mad, macabre humour and its extraction of the farcical from the everyday. Sometimes I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud over things like bricks coming and hitting people on the head for no logical reason, or the narrator closing his tale very abruptly, or getting too irritated with the story to continue and simply breaking off in the middle: 'And that's just about it'; or 'No, here we have patently reached an impasse. … Goodbye for now.' Or most memorably: 'What else? Nothing else. Nothing, this is it in a nutshell! Keep your filthy snout out when it's not needed!' The satire of the pieces is rich and thick, and often written in coarse, colloquial language, which makes it all the funnier. Nonsense, amusing literalism and striking or surreal visual evocations find the citizens of St Petersburg constantly subjected to bizarre happenings. However they hardly flinch and seem to take them as relatively normal occurrences, just incidentals as the title suggests. The Incidents and Assorted Stories are like low-down messy parables, but more fragmentary - they are glimpses, moments, and energetic explosions of aggression, absurd misfortune and curious human behaviour; violent unresolved fairy-tales that, for those who are well versed in this nation's literary history, have an unmistakeably Russian flavour.

For example, '(3) The Plummeting Old Women' begins: 'A certain old woman, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of a window, plummeted to the ground and, and was smashed to pieces'. Hot on her heels comes a seemingly endless stream of old ladies, who, being rather curious about the previous old lady and her precipitous fall, also fall out in turn! It only ends when the narrator puts a stop to his observations (not the stream of old ladies): 'I was fed up watching them, and went off to Mal'tsevisky Market where, it was said, a knitted shawl had been given to a certain blind man.'

However, beneath the satirical, humorous surface lie metaphors for the struggles of existence under a Soviet regime. In '(12) The Dream' a man is haunted by strange dreams of policemen hiding behind bushes from which he cannot wake up. Having slept solidly for several days, he is so emaciated that he is not recognised by those who know him. He is deemed unhygienic and simply 'folded in two and thrown out as rubbish.' Or in '(8) The Carpenter Kushakov' where a carpenter falls over so many times that when he goes home he is not permitted to enter because his face is obscured by plasters. The suggestion of being forgotten by friends and family, and erased from the public consciousness is underlined by more obviously sinister incidents. A Kafka-esque darkness is apparent as accusations seem to spring from nowhere, and illness, death and imprisonment occur with no explanation. It's certain that Kharms had a good idea of what was going on, and no doubt what he could expect for himself. Take 'The Drawback', where a saucy discussion between a man and a woman over the latter's stockings, ends, for no apparent reason, in their arrest by an official and two soldiers. They are escorted from their apartment, and then, 'The man in the black coat locked the door of Irina's room, and sealed it with two brown seals'. Or the creepily entitled, 'Comprehensive Research' where a 'research pill' is administered almost by means of a syntactical trick before the recipient can really understand, and which results in his instant death.

The key element to all the writing is a strong sense of instability. Everything can flip over in a second, bringing destruction and death; a simple trip to the shops can lead to you being banished from the normal life you woke up to that morning. The commonplaces of everyday existence and the workings of brutality are co-existent, and almost one and the same. Solzhenitzyn's The First Circle (1968) is perhaps the greatest and most comprehensively damning satire on Soviet Russia, and Kharms' work, although preceding it historically is, in literary terms, like the postmodern, fragmented fallout that inevitably accompanies this powerfully humane account of the absurdities of Stalin's regime.

In Kharms, death goes unnoticed like any banal incidence. Amongst several recurring motifs, like unexplained falling objects or people, irksome urchins, cripples and, bizarrely, carpenter's glue, there is often a crowd present, watching. The disinterest of the crowds that are described gathering around the horrifying and bizarre scenes is perhaps the most potent metaphor of all. Constantly observing, but never reacting, the crowd is normally very mild, sometimes perplexed and often already on their way to another absurd happening. The protagonist may be surrounded by lots of people, but he/she is distinctly beyond their help or anything more than their cursory interest. In the cramped apartments and dirty streets where the stories are set, the neighbours can hear your every move, and the crowd always gathers to see what is happening, but do nothing to help. People disappearing or neighbours in trouble or being arrested are everyday facts, unavoidable and unstoppable - almost inconsequential.

Kharms' use of language throughout is effortlessly precise and compact, and has a sort of purity of intent. It's the language of fairy tale, or proverb, but also of theatre, and one could easily imagine many of the dialogues and monologues being performed on stage. There is a continual self-consciousness in the text: playing with the idea of watching and being watched; of writing and of the reader reading what is written; of constantly being aware of an audience - friendly or perhaps otherwise. Kharms is particularly satirical on the figure of the writer (and includes himself in his ironical attack). In particular, 'The Old Woman' could, on a purely comic level, be read as the story of a desperate writer finding the ultimate excuse not to write anything (although there are many deeper strands to this excellent tale). Amusingly, our author/hero only manages to squeeze out the magnificent opening line of his masterpiece: 'I grab the pen and write, "The miracle worker was on the tall side."'

Although language can be seen as a means of misunderstanding, and thus a reason for, or buttress of, violence, Kharms is always revelling in the written word's ability to give clarity. He celebrates its transcendent qualities and its power to surprise and give hope or solace. At the end of 'The Old Woman', which is written in the terse matter-of-fact style characteristic of the collection, our hero watches a 'big, green caterpillar' and drops to his knees. 'I look round. No one can see me. A slight shiver runs down my back. I incline my head and quietly say, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, now and forever. Amen."' It is a strangely affecting moment.

The captivating nature and flow of 'The Old Woman' made me wish that Kharms had written many more, longer works. But perhaps to question his brevity is to miss the point. Kharms' intention is not to satisfy the reader with succinct beginnings and endings, but rather to give a sense of the natural order of things being disjointed and upset - a formal representation of what he was living through. He wrote in his notebooks, that, 'I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation.' And as the translator Neil Cornwell revealingly points out, 'This last, apparently frivolous remark, was written in 1937, at the height of the purges.' In retrospect, one feels that behind every joke or absurd observation, there is tragedy and suffering, repression and fear. And the vivid, truncated world that he creates shows that just as the 'natural' progression of his writings are disrupted and turned upside-down, in the world from which he wrote, life, too, was all too often cut absurdly and incongruously short.