Daniil Kharms

“Daniil Kharms” was the main, and subsequently the sole, pen-name of Daniil Ivanovich Iuvachev [pronounced Yuvachóv] (1905-1942), who has been rediscovered, since the end of the 1960s, and successfully promoted as an important (perhaps the most important) Russian twentieth-century absurdist writer. The son of a St Petersburg political, religious and literary figure (Ivan Iuvachev), Daniil Kharms spent his entire life (other than during periods of arrest and exile) in that city, by then known as Leningrad, achieving limited renown as an avant-garde eccentric and a writer of children's stories. Indeed, apart from two early poems, none of his “adult” writings were published anywhere until decades after his death.

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