Daniil Kharms. The Life of a Man in the Wind

Daniil Kharms (Yuvachev; 1905–1942) is one of the key figures of Russian letters of the last century, the leading representative of Russian and world avant-garde of the 1920s–1930s, a well-known children’s writer, and a person whose appearance and way of life gave rise to legends and anecdotes. The biography of D. Kharms is written based on his own diaries and notes, recollections of people close to him, and archival materials, and it includes a number of new facts about the writer and his family. The heroes of the book include Kharms’s associates in OBERIU ("Association of Real Art")—Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Oleynikov, and Nikolai Zabolotsky—and his intellectual interlocutors, the philosophers Yakov Druskin and Leonid Lipavsky. Among more than two hundred illustrations is a reproduction of Kharms’s drawings and photographs of him and his contemporaries. Many unique documents were published for the first time by Valery Shubin.