- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd (27 Aug 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0715637711
- ISBN-13: 978-0715637715
- Product Dimensions: 20 x 13.6 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 422,719 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'Kharms's work is exhilarating ... We're reminded that narrative is not life, but a trick a writer does with language to make beauty' -- George Saunders, New York Times Book Review. 'Kharms's playful and poetic work ... [draws] critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco' --New Yorker
'A dazzling book that gives me new hope for an avant garde writing that speaks to a larger audience' --Times Literary Supplement
'[Kharms's] enigmatic blend of laughter and violence will shock, delight and baffle' --Guardian
'A dazzling book that gives me new hope for an avant garde writing that speaks to a larger audience' --Times Literary Supplement
'[Kharms's] enigmatic blend of laughter and violence will shock, delight and baffle' --Guardian
Product Description
Daniil Kharms was one of the most iconoclastic writers to emerge from the hotbed of the early Soviet avant garde, but has only recently been recognised internationally. English language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms's cult reputation as a master of formal invention and of what today would be called micro-fiction . Kharms s uniquely deadpan style developed out of and in spite of the absurdities of life in Stalinist Russia. An exciting discovery for fans of writers as disparate as George Saunders, John Ashbery, Diane Williams, and Martin McDonagh, 'Today I Wrote Nothing' is an invaluable collection for readers of innovative writing everywhere.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I have nothing but praise for this book. Finally, a window for us non-Russian speakers into the brilliant and yet so often neglected mind of Daniil Kharms.
Matvei Yankelevich writes a terrific introduction (with plenty of helpful notes and references), in which he alerts us to the dangers of both oversimplification and overinterpretation. In a nutshell, he argues that neither is it fair to regard Kharms as an eccentric man who wrote nothing but nonsense nor is it particularly helpful to regard him as a mere martyr whose apparently absurd texts were nothing but a cover to subversive, anti-Stalin rhetoric.
As for the texts themselves, it's a great selection indeed: not only do we get Kharms's most famous pieces ("Blue Notebook #10" and "The Old Woman" among them) and other miscellaneous texts, but also the transcript of his famous "blue notebook". This was, for me, a most delightful surprise: his notes are in turn hilarious ("Returning home after my walk, / I suddenly exclaimed: Oh my God! / I've been walking four days in a row! / What will my family think of me now?"), poetic, mundane and insightful, and sometimes they even allow a hint of his tragic "hungry artist" condition to show.
Some interesting notes to the texts are unobtrusively placed at the end of the book, as well as a most enlightening glossary of names (of Kharms's fictional characters and real-life companions). The only problem with it is that you never know if a name you come across will be in the glossary or not until you actually flick through it.
All in all, an engaging and accessible edition to an estranging and obscure writer.
Matvei Yankelevich writes a terrific introduction (with plenty of helpful notes and references), in which he alerts us to the dangers of both oversimplification and overinterpretation. In a nutshell, he argues that neither is it fair to regard Kharms as an eccentric man who wrote nothing but nonsense nor is it particularly helpful to regard him as a mere martyr whose apparently absurd texts were nothing but a cover to subversive, anti-Stalin rhetoric.
As for the texts themselves, it's a great selection indeed: not only do we get Kharms's most famous pieces ("Blue Notebook #10" and "The Old Woman" among them) and other miscellaneous texts, but also the transcript of his famous "blue notebook". This was, for me, a most delightful surprise: his notes are in turn hilarious ("Returning home after my walk, / I suddenly exclaimed: Oh my God! / I've been walking four days in a row! / What will my family think of me now?"), poetic, mundane and insightful, and sometimes they even allow a hint of his tragic "hungry artist" condition to show.
Some interesting notes to the texts are unobtrusively placed at the end of the book, as well as a most enlightening glossary of names (of Kharms's fictional characters and real-life companions). The only problem with it is that you never know if a name you come across will be in the glossary or not until you actually flick through it.
All in all, an engaging and accessible edition to an estranging and obscure writer.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I actually feel privileged, alongside my so far only fellow reviewer Wolfgang, to review this astonishing compendium of the poetry and prose of the playfully deadly Russian writer Daniil Kharms (1905-42).
Those dates tell their own story, especially when you realise he was writing at the height of the general rabbit-hole madness that was early Stalinist Russia. But Kharms was no high-profile Bulgakov or Babel, or writer-in-exile Bunin, but a more elusive, less pin-downable artist.
This expertly assembled American paperback is a valuable, if not vital, primer of Kharms`s surprisingly varied and gratifyingly readable poems, prose pieces and aphorisms. This is no humourless post-modernist, nor is he so much of an `experimental` writer as he may seem, even now. His experiments, at least to this reader, are invariably approachable, unsentimentally whimsical, often very funny, occasionally heart-stoppingly moving. Beckett would have liked Kharms, and I think he might have appealed to such diverse figures as Paul Celan or ee cummings.
There is the same knockabout willingness to gambol and flirt with language as we find in cummings (I honour his lower case preference) and an uneasy, queasy, damaged sensibility such as Celan presented to an astounded, wounded world.
Kharms is a real find for me. I am not, as a rule, drawn to consciously avant-garde
writers, but as soon as I opened this book and read a few lines, I knew I was in the presence of an original, even lovable, character with whom I wished to spend more time.
He is endlessly quotable (no solely experimental writer, or `deconstructionist`, would be so quotable) but it is very difficult to lift a quote from this generous selection of his work that exemplifies the riches to be found within.
Here are a few lines from one of the poetic pieces in "The Blue Notebook":
"Your cowardly eyes are unpleasant to the gods
Your mouths open at the wrong time"
"Eat your soup - that`s your business.
Sweep your rooms - that`s what the age demands of you.
But take those bandages and stomach straps off me,
I live on salt and you live on sugar."
"Don`t get in my way, I stand on my own, and you are only
a quart of smoke to me."
There`s barely a line or a phrase in this book that won`t in some way give a sympathetic reader pause for thought. Kharms may have been a better, more timeless writer than he knew - the Soviet authorities, damn their eyes, preferred not to allow him to find that out - but we have this book. Much of it is far more (seemingly) frivolous than the above quote. For example:
"A dog in a small hat came up. Footsteps sounded and splashed. A fly was throwing the windows open. Let`s look out the window!"
Did I say frivolous? On the surface perhaps...
Kharms was born, more prosaically, Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev - he idolised Sherlock `Holmes` and there are conscious echoes of both `charm` and `harm` in his chosen pseudonym. He was always, by nature and by political necessity, something of a shape-shifter, and this quality comes through loud and clear in nearly everything he wrote.
Discover him for yourself. He`s a one-off.
Those dates tell their own story, especially when you realise he was writing at the height of the general rabbit-hole madness that was early Stalinist Russia. But Kharms was no high-profile Bulgakov or Babel, or writer-in-exile Bunin, but a more elusive, less pin-downable artist.
This expertly assembled American paperback is a valuable, if not vital, primer of Kharms`s surprisingly varied and gratifyingly readable poems, prose pieces and aphorisms. This is no humourless post-modernist, nor is he so much of an `experimental` writer as he may seem, even now. His experiments, at least to this reader, are invariably approachable, unsentimentally whimsical, often very funny, occasionally heart-stoppingly moving. Beckett would have liked Kharms, and I think he might have appealed to such diverse figures as Paul Celan or ee cummings.
There is the same knockabout willingness to gambol and flirt with language as we find in cummings (I honour his lower case preference) and an uneasy, queasy, damaged sensibility such as Celan presented to an astounded, wounded world.
Kharms is a real find for me. I am not, as a rule, drawn to consciously avant-garde
writers, but as soon as I opened this book and read a few lines, I knew I was in the presence of an original, even lovable, character with whom I wished to spend more time.
He is endlessly quotable (no solely experimental writer, or `deconstructionist`, would be so quotable) but it is very difficult to lift a quote from this generous selection of his work that exemplifies the riches to be found within.
Here are a few lines from one of the poetic pieces in "The Blue Notebook":
"Your cowardly eyes are unpleasant to the gods
Your mouths open at the wrong time"
"Eat your soup - that`s your business.
Sweep your rooms - that`s what the age demands of you.
But take those bandages and stomach straps off me,
I live on salt and you live on sugar."
"Don`t get in my way, I stand on my own, and you are only
a quart of smoke to me."
There`s barely a line or a phrase in this book that won`t in some way give a sympathetic reader pause for thought. Kharms may have been a better, more timeless writer than he knew - the Soviet authorities, damn their eyes, preferred not to allow him to find that out - but we have this book. Much of it is far more (seemingly) frivolous than the above quote. For example:
"A dog in a small hat came up. Footsteps sounded and splashed. A fly was throwing the windows open. Let`s look out the window!"
Did I say frivolous? On the surface perhaps...
Kharms was born, more prosaically, Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev - he idolised Sherlock `Holmes` and there are conscious echoes of both `charm` and `harm` in his chosen pseudonym. He was always, by nature and by political necessity, something of a shape-shifter, and this quality comes through loud and clear in nearly everything he wrote.
Discover him for yourself. He`s a one-off.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Today I Read Everything
1 July 2009
Format:Hardcover
I have read Kharms both in English and Russian quite a few times since my dad (a journalist and "ghost" writer in the USSR) introduced me to Kharms in mid 80s (after he had reportedly "snagged" the last copy of the "Incidences" from some street bookseller in Perestroika-era Moscow).
Each time I read Kharms I'd browse through any given compilation of "selected writings" and read at random. In later years I'd either re-read the stories I had liked or, on the contrary, choose only to read the ones I had skipped on previously. But today I read everything - the entire "Today I Wrote Nothing" from cover to cover.
Two reasons: this particular collection of Kharms' writings is skillfully organized: the incidences/old woman/blue notebook/other writings sequence is an excellent warm-up. Each pattern-interrupting-absurdly shocking-non sequitur-laden "incidence" - like a notorious Moscow pothole - violently shakes up the mind and loosens the inflexibly default of expectations of sense and logic. These "incidences" quickly warm up the reading mind for the absurdly cold scenery of the "Old Woman" novella. Just as you begin to tire of the "Old Woman" you are thrown into the paradoxical vortex of the 29 vignettes from the "Blue Notebook." And after that - with the mind cracked open for possibilities - you sail off into the greater philosophical, esoteric, metaphysical depths of "other writings" where you after such a deep dive as "On Phenomena and Existences," with compiler's astute guidance, you are helped to resurface to the by-now-familiar "shallows" of the absurd.
The sequence of this presentation is no small achievement. Consider that the people behind this collection have been charged with a mandate of dosing micro-shocks, with a task of figuring out how to tactfully deliver Kharms' literary micro-concussions. Reading Kharms - any Kharms' collection - is on par to spending an evening in a batting cage where each and every ball is a curveball of the oddest spin.
Confusion - as I have learned from Kharms - is a prerequisite for enlightenment. Kharms models that we have to lose our mind (our "equalibrium" - a genius rendition of intentional misspelling by the translator Yankelevich) to find our consciousness, our sense of self. Kharms - as I am more and more convinced - wasn't an absurdist or a literary shock-jockey, he was a mystic with a Zen bent who, I believe, wrote to stay awake during one of the darkest dreams in modern history (Stalin years).
For an English-speaking Russian, Kharms seems deceptively easy to translate. But he is anything but easy. Kharms' subtle connotation-level puns coexist next to the grotesque and the idiosyncratic. Translating Kharms' koans is like translating a haiku: with often so few lines of text to work with, one linguistic misstep, one connotational bias and you end up reading an entirely different story. Matvei Yankelevich has skillfully navigated the fiords of Kharmsian translational incidentals.
Kharms is a "monk that walked into a mausoleum" and never walked out; an inquisitive and quizzical mind born at the wrong time and in the wrong place who seems to have managed to complete the long existential arc from neurosis to acceptance just in time to die hungry in a Leningrad jail, utterly unrecognized and unknown. In this literary mausoleum, I see Kharms next to Kafka and Hamsun. I wonder where you'll place him...
Pavel Somov, Ph.D.
Each time I read Kharms I'd browse through any given compilation of "selected writings" and read at random. In later years I'd either re-read the stories I had liked or, on the contrary, choose only to read the ones I had skipped on previously. But today I read everything - the entire "Today I Wrote Nothing" from cover to cover.
Two reasons: this particular collection of Kharms' writings is skillfully organized: the incidences/old woman/blue notebook/other writings sequence is an excellent warm-up. Each pattern-interrupting-absurdly shocking-non sequitur-laden "incidence" - like a notorious Moscow pothole - violently shakes up the mind and loosens the inflexibly default of expectations of sense and logic. These "incidences" quickly warm up the reading mind for the absurdly cold scenery of the "Old Woman" novella. Just as you begin to tire of the "Old Woman" you are thrown into the paradoxical vortex of the 29 vignettes from the "Blue Notebook." And after that - with the mind cracked open for possibilities - you sail off into the greater philosophical, esoteric, metaphysical depths of "other writings" where you after such a deep dive as "On Phenomena and Existences," with compiler's astute guidance, you are helped to resurface to the by-now-familiar "shallows" of the absurd.
The sequence of this presentation is no small achievement. Consider that the people behind this collection have been charged with a mandate of dosing micro-shocks, with a task of figuring out how to tactfully deliver Kharms' literary micro-concussions. Reading Kharms - any Kharms' collection - is on par to spending an evening in a batting cage where each and every ball is a curveball of the oddest spin.
Confusion - as I have learned from Kharms - is a prerequisite for enlightenment. Kharms models that we have to lose our mind (our "equalibrium" - a genius rendition of intentional misspelling by the translator Yankelevich) to find our consciousness, our sense of self. Kharms - as I am more and more convinced - wasn't an absurdist or a literary shock-jockey, he was a mystic with a Zen bent who, I believe, wrote to stay awake during one of the darkest dreams in modern history (Stalin years).
For an English-speaking Russian, Kharms seems deceptively easy to translate. But he is anything but easy. Kharms' subtle connotation-level puns coexist next to the grotesque and the idiosyncratic. Translating Kharms' koans is like translating a haiku: with often so few lines of text to work with, one linguistic misstep, one connotational bias and you end up reading an entirely different story. Matvei Yankelevich has skillfully navigated the fiords of Kharmsian translational incidentals.
Kharms is a "monk that walked into a mausoleum" and never walked out; an inquisitive and quizzical mind born at the wrong time and in the wrong place who seems to have managed to complete the long existential arc from neurosis to acceptance just in time to die hungry in a Leningrad jail, utterly unrecognized and unknown. In this literary mausoleum, I see Kharms next to Kafka and Hamsun. I wonder where you'll place him...
Pavel Somov, Ph.D.
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
This book saved my life.
10 Jun 2009
Format:Hardcover
I learned of daniil Kharms from the Dutch Band, De Kift, who recorded an opera based on Kharms' play, Elizabeth Bam. I was kinda down when this book came in the mail. Almost immediately my spirits were lifted. The violence, the "non-sensical" banter, the poetry of the absurd captivated me. I continuie to search for more Daniil Kharms.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Absurdist Russian literature at its best
22 Jun 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Daniil Kharms is probably one of the best Absurdist Russian writers I've read from the OBERIU class.
And this book is the best selection from Kharms that I've read.
If you read this and can't help but laugh. You either take him too seriously or don't understand the genre.
Every piece is thoroughly laced with the absurdist style. Some are more funny than others. I especially like this book because it has a diverse selection: Short stories (sometimes only a paragraph or two, but also sometimes a couple pages), Poems, miniature plays.
From stories about people that are essentially nothing--a name for a nonexistent thing -- to people falling out of windows and shattering.
If you've read the Diapsalmata from Kierkegaard's Either/Or I, and enjoyed that, this is for you.
If you are interested in the Russian Absurdist group. I highly recommend OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (European Classics).
And this book is the best selection from Kharms that I've read.
If you read this and can't help but laugh. You either take him too seriously or don't understand the genre.
Every piece is thoroughly laced with the absurdist style. Some are more funny than others. I especially like this book because it has a diverse selection: Short stories (sometimes only a paragraph or two, but also sometimes a couple pages), Poems, miniature plays.
From stories about people that are essentially nothing--a name for a nonexistent thing -- to people falling out of windows and shattering.
If you've read the Diapsalmata from Kierkegaard's Either/Or I, and enjoyed that, this is for you.
If you are interested in the Russian Absurdist group. I highly recommend OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (European Classics).
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
