A Strangely Funny Russian Genius

May 2, 2015 12:48 PM

Russia is the funniest country in the world. Some countries, like America and England, are funny mostly on purpose, while others, like Germany and France, can be funny only unintentionally. (But that counts! Being funny is tricky, so any way you do it counts.) Russia, however, is funny both intentionally (Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov) and unintentionally (Vladimir Putin singing, as he did at a televised event a few years ago, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill”). Given the disaster Russian history has been more or less continuously for the last five centuries, its humor is of the darkest, most extreme kind. Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.

Daniil Kharms, previously.
ДАНИИЛ ХАРМС

"The following is a collection of some of Kharms' wonderfully absurd short stories that I have found in various places on the net."
"Collected works (in Russian, English and German)"
"Welcome to the Searchable Daniil Kharms!"

The Old Woman

In the courtyard an old woman is standing and holding a clock in her hands. I walk through, past the old woman, stop and ask her:
-- What time is it?
-- Have a look -- the old woman says to me.
I look and see that there are no hands on the clock.
-- There are no hands here -- I say.
The old woman looks at the clock face and tells me: -- It's now a quarter to three.
-- Oh, so that's what it is. Thank you very much -- I say and go on.

The Absolute Nonsense of Daniil Kharms: Translation — Alex Cigale

Kulakov squeezed himself into a deep armchair and immediately fell asleep. He fell asleep sitting up and several hours later woke up lying in a coffin. Kulakov realized right away that he was lying in a coffin and was seized with a paralyzing terror. With his clouded eyes he looked around, and everywhere, in every direction he could cast his gaze, he saw only flowers: flowers in baskets, bouquets of flowers, wrapped in ribbons, wreaths of flowers, and flowers scattered separately about.

“I am being buried,” Kulakov thought to himself, filling with horror, and suddenly felt a sense of pride, that he, such an insignificant person, was being buried with such pomp, and with such a quantity of flowers.

More at The New York Times:

Let us consider Daniil Kharms, the Russian writer often described as an absurdist, largely unpublished in his lifetime except for his children’s books, who starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government for, among other reasons, his general strangeness.

The New Yorker:

Born in St. Petersburg in 1905, Daniil Kharms was one of the founders, in 1928, of OBERIU, or Association of Real Art, an avant-garde group of writers and artists who embraced the ideas of the Futurists and believed that art should operate outside the rules of logic. In his lifetime, Kharms produced several works for children, but his writing for adults was not published ... The following texts have never been published in English.

The London Review Of Books:

An old woman leans out of her window and, ‘because of her excessive curiosity’, leans too far: she falls to the ground and shatters to pieces. A second old woman leans out of her window to see what has happened to the first – and also leans too far, tumbling to the same fate. More women follow suit (a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth), a chain that ends only because the narrator of this story, ‘sick of watching them’, breaks off to go to the market.

Lapham's Quarterly: "Plummeting old women, masturbation obsessions, false mustaches, and NKVD arrests for subversive children’s literature. Aidan Flax-Clark explores the life of Russian surrealist Daniil Kharms, reading some of his prose miniatures and speaking with translators Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto about their new book, I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary: the notebooks, diaries, and letters of Daniil Kharms."
Russia Beyond The Headlines: Daniil Kharms, Master of Deadpan, Father of the Absurd

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was the best known nom de plume of Daniil Ivanovich Iuvachev. Daniil Kharms was a poet and writer of sluchay (tales) although later in his career he was only allowed to officially publish children’s literature. Kharms rested on the cusp of oblivion for most of the twentieth century.

"“Professionally” reviewing the work of Daniil Kharms amounts to masochism: it’s violence done against the self. "

posted by the man of twists and turns (30 comments total)

"That's the size of the cucumbers sold in the shops these days!"
posted by Splunge at 12:56 PM on May 2, 2015

Will read the article now but I was completely thrown off balance by the thought of Putin and "Blueberry Hill".

Here it is.
posted by honestcoyote at 1:16 PM on May 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

I don't know much about Kharms, but doesn't he represent European absurdism or surrealism more than typical Russian humour?
posted by Segundus at 1:24 PM on May 2, 2015

Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.

Unfortunately, this latter part - the part where you actually die - often tends to get lost in translation. In Kharms' case, I think it's because his prose seems rough on the surface due to being so curt and to the point. He relates things the way they are: an old woman fell out the window and that's that. She didn't plunge or tumble or anything like that; she just fell. And so did the second, the third and so on. After the second old woman falls out the window, however, the translators starts to feel strange about what he's doing and he begins editing the text to make it less rought and more like proper literature, with synonyms and all that stuff. What he doesn't see is that introducing these differences to the text changes its rhythm. It creates the expectation that something big will happen, that all these deaths are building up to some kind of a climax, while the story is really about how there is no climax, about how something tragical can begin to seem normal.
posted by daniel_charms at 1:27 PM on May 2, 2015 [18 favorites]

When I saw he died in 1942 I became curious as to how exactly he died. Unsurprisingly it was due to the war, although indirectly as he died in a cell in a Leningrad psychiatric ward during the Nazi siege. Likely he was abandoned there and died of, essentially, neglect.

This seems fittingly anticlimactic and tragic. Perhaps he approved.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:46 PM on May 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Previously: The Dying Russians
posted by djb at 2:05 PM on May 2, 2015

I also stumbled on Blueberry Hill.
posted by kanewai at 2:29 PM on May 2, 2015

Now I'm wondering if Norm MacDonald was reading Kharms when he came up with the infamous moth joke.
posted by lagomorphius at 2:33 PM on May 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

"we used KGB arrest papers as the background for his spooky poem about the man who left home and never came back."

This!
posted by clavdivs at 2:38 PM on May 2, 2015

I find myself recommending Harpo Marx's memoirs,Harpo Speaks, in every conversation, which I'm sure is annoying to everyone around me, but he was the first American comedian to perform in the USSR after it was recognized by the U.S., and he had some really interesting observations on what parts of his acts worked with Russian audiences and what didn't. For instance, they loved the slapstick that happened when the guy walked into the doctor's office, but they really wanted to know why he walked into the doctor's office in the first place.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:45 PM on May 2, 2015 [9 favorites]

The thing about Russians is a lot of then are very find of Stalin because there have been things before and since they consider worse. When Russian monarchism, Russian Communism and Russian Capitalusm are all that grim you do wonder if its a national inclination towards bad luck or something else.
posted by Artw at 4:03 PM on May 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

If it was raining borscht, they'd be out there with forks.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:19 PM on May 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

My wife and I watched a show on Netflix (A Young Doctor's Notebook), mostly to see John Hamm. It got very dark, very quickly. Having taken Russian in high school and college, I got a real rush of recognition. "Yeah, that's Russian!"
posted by rikschell at 6:18 PM on May 2, 2015

who starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government

That is tied with Rasputin for worst Russian death ever.
posted by vorpal bunny at 6:20 PM on May 2, 2015

Unfortunately, this latter part - the part where you actually die - often tends to get lost in translation.
posted by daniel_charms at 1:27 PM on May 2 [7 favorites]

Eponysterical, Russian edition.
posted by otherchaz at 6:58 PM on May 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Lagomorphius, I kid you not, I am in the same room with Norm. He's about to go onstage, but I'll ask him when he's done. (Helium, portland )
posted by Philipschall at 7:30 PM on May 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Once I read a great Russian novel. In the end, everybody died.

Then I read a great Russian tragedy. In the end, everybody died.

But then I read a great Russian comedy. In the end, everybody died. But they died happy!
posted by SPrintF at 7:37 PM on May 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

The strange thing about Russia is that it has always been a backward country, although with its natural resources you'd expect it to be a wonderful place to live. The problem seems to be that the country has always been in the grip of one totalitarian ideology or another. For instance, the Renaissance and age of enlightenment that did so much for the rest of Europe passed Russia by completely. The country was very much ruled by Russian Orthodox theocrats, who resisted change to the last ditch, and it was quite isolated and xenophobic. In the seventeenth century there were times when foreigners were mobbed and killed by crowds for no other reason than for being non-Russian. Peter the Great, who was quite progressive in most ways, basically had to drag his country into the modern era by the scruff of its neck. As a young Tsar he wanted to leave Russia to tour Europe, meet other heads of state, and visit shipyards, factories, military forts and other such sites in order to learn about new technologies that he could then bring home to his own country. It was an excellent thing for Russia that he do so, but his proposition met with nothing but resistance. No one could understand why he'd want to do such a thing. He was tsar so he could do whatever he wanted, so he just did it, but his people weren't happy about it and I think he was the very first Russian tsar to leave Russia for any other reason than war.

Owing probably to centuries of brutal repression there's a certain fatalist strain in Russian culture and it doesn't surprise me that the national sense of humour is also dark. I watched A Young Doctor's Notebook too just this past week. It stars Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe and is a British production, but it was based on a book of short stories titled A Young Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov, and yes, it's all black humour.
posted by orange swan at 7:44 PM on May 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Well, yeah, us Brits like us a bit of fatalism and black humour, so it's natural we'd want to film something like that. On the other hand, let's face it, we're amateurs by comparison.
posted by Artw at 7:53 PM on May 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

Just got back from the show. Norm said he was reading Tolstoy, couldn'the remember the specific book. He is also still incredibly funny.
posted by Philipschall at 9:29 PM on May 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

Nothing about Elizaveta Bam? I can't find it on the internet, sadly. It may be a play but as a piece of writing I still found it very affecting; and it's not as though he was prolific.
posted by solarion at 10:06 PM on May 2, 2015

Mod note: A few comments deleted. Sorry, folks but sarcastically complaining about May Day observances is a major derail here, and the post/thread does not deserve to be highjacked this way.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:41 PM on May 2, 2015

> Nothing about Elizaveta Bam? I can't find it on the internet, sadly.

Yeah, that's too bad. In lieu of the text, I'll quote Neil Carrick's description in the Reference Guide to Russian Literature (p. 435):

Elizaveta Bam defies ready plot summary, for it features a number of outlandish and illogical "events". The play is divided into 19 "bits" (kuski) rather than acts, which follow one another in apparently arbitrary manner. A certain cyclical pattern is, however, established with the last "bit" recalling the first almost word for word. The lack of lateral progression underlines Kharms's insistence in "The OBERIU Declaration" that art has a logic of its own quite separate from the logic of life.

The opening scene introduces two characters, Petr Nikolaevich and Ivan Ivanovich, who have come to arrest one Elizaveta Bam for a crime she has yet to commit. That crime, of which she is accused, Elizaveta and the audience learn [...] later, is the murder of Petr Nikolaevich, one of the same characters who has come to arrest her. Defenceless against the powerfully articulated, but false logic of her accusers, Elizaveta Bam is branded a criminal because she has no voice. Thus the animating event of the play is arbitrary arrest. Such manifest absurdity and injustice are perfectly acceptable within the peculiar world of the play, which allows for persistent inversion of the normal course of cause and effect, leading to random association of disparate events.

He says it owes a lot to Gogol's Revizor (The Government Inspector) as well as the Futurists, and prefigures the Theater of the Absurd; "the play introduces some of the darker themes that were to preoccupy Kharms in his work of the 1930s, which changes in political and personal circumstances consigned to the desk drawer."

Otherwise, I said my piece on Kharms here, and I stand by it.

*falls over*
posted by languagehat at 8:42 AM on May 3, 2015 [4 favorites]

In post-soviet Russia, the comedy laughs at you!
posted by rankfreudlite at 3:08 PM on May 3, 2015

watched a show on Netflix (A Young Doctor's Notebook),

...based on the fictionish/memoirs of Mikhail Bulgakov, the writer of 'The Master and Margarita' and other unusual things...
posted by ovvl at 3:26 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

In the courtyard an old woman is standing and holding a clock in her hands. I walk through, past the old woman, stop and ask her:
-- What time is it?
-- Have a look -- the old woman says to me.
I look and see that there are no hands on the clock.
-- There are no hands here -- I say.
The old woman looks at the clock face and tells me: -- It's now a quarter to three.
-- Oh, so that's what it is. Thank you very much -- I say and go on.

I think I get this:

The woman knew what time it was, and it had nothing to do with whether or not the clock had hands. She was just using it to smash toads or something. She always smashes toads at a quarter to three. Her life had become such a mundane routine she could tell what time it was just by looking at what she was doing. The asker already knew that the clock had no hands and that it was being used to smash toads. That's why he took it in stride when she knew what time it was despite the clock having no hands. He was actually not so much interested in what the particular time was, he wanted to know when she smashed toads.
posted by rankfreudlite at 3:41 PM on May 3, 2015

The first paragraph of the New Yorker article reminds me of "In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound. A literary style that I regard as the verbal equivalent of the Impressionism movement:

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."
posted by rankfreudlite at 3:53 PM on May 3, 2015

And yes if I didn't make it clear I love everything Kharms has written.

How easy it is for a person to get tangled up in insignificant things. You can walk for hours from the table to the wardrobe and from the wardrobe to the couch and never find a way out. You can even forget where you are and shoot arrows into some small cabinet on the wall. “Beware, cabinet!”
posted by solarion at 4:27 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I should refer to internet arguments as "cabinet-shoots" but nobody would understand what I mean.
posted by solarion at 9:13 AM on May 4, 2015

I think some Goya would work well as illustrations for Kharms' stories.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:23 AM on May 6, 2015