Daniil Kharms (1905-42) is known as an author of Russian absurd literature. It is generally overlooked that the pseudonym Kharms encodes Sherlock Holmes's Russian name of Kholms. An intertextual comparison between Kharms and Holmes shows how Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes made his way into Russian absurd literature. This article originally appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Volume 28, Issue 2.

As featured in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Times Book Review. Daniil Kharms has long been heralded as one of the most iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era, but the full breadth of his achievement is only in recent years, following the opening of Kharms's archives, being recognized internationally. Thanks to the efforts of translator and poet Matvei Yankelevich, English language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms's literary reputation a reputation that grew in Russia even as the Soviet establishment worked to suppress it. Both a major contribution for American scholars and students of Russian literature and an exciting discovery for fans of contemporary writers as eclectic as George Saunders, John Ashbery, and Martin McDonagh, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharmsis an invaluable collection for readers of innovative writing everywhere. Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich

The "texts" of Russian artist and thinker Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) were so many and varied and often unique (narrative, dramatic, philosophical, poetic, mathematical, pictographic, diagrammatic, musical, biographical) that they defied categorization—and, thus, thorough study or appreciation—through much of the twentieth century. This book, the first in English to view Kharms’s oeuvre in its entirety, is also the first to offer a complete, inclusive, and coherent understanding of the overall project of this artist and writer now considered a major figure in the modernist canon of Europe.

This volume of essays and other materials offers an assessment of the short prose, verse and drama of Daniil Kharms, Leningrad absurdist of the 1920s and 1930s, who was one of the last representatives of the Russian literary avante-garde.

A writer who defies categorization, Daniil Kharms has come to be regarded as an essential artist of the modernist avant-garde. His writing, which partakes of performance, narrative, poetry, and visual elements, was largely suppressed during his lifetime, which ended in a psychiatric ward where he starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. His work, which survived mostly in notebooks, can now be seen as one of the pillars of absurdist literature, most explicitly manifested in the 1920s and ’30s Soviet Union by the OBERIU group, which inherited the mantle of Russian futurism from such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. This selection of prose and poetry provides the most comprehensive portrait of the writer in English translation to date, revealing the arc of his career and including a particularly generous selection of his later work.

Absurdist fiction is a genre of fictional narrative (traditionally, literary fiction), most often in the form of a novel, play, poem, or film, that focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value. The critic Augst Nemo selected seven short stories of the absurd for his appreciation: - A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka - In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka - Before the Law by Franz Kafka - Ex Oblivione by H. P. Lovecraft - Andrey Semyonovich by Daniil Kharms - A sonnet by Daniil Kharms - Symphony no. 2 by Daniil Kharms For more books with interesting themes, be sure to check the other books in this collection!

This book contains 350 short stories from 50 classic, prize-winning and noteworthy authors. Wisely chosen by the literary critic August Nemo for the book series 7 Best Short Stories, this omnibus contains the stories of the following writers: - Sheridan Le Fanu - H. and E. Heron - Charlotte Riddell - Flora Annie Steel - Amelia B. Edwards - Margaret Oliphant - Edward Bellamy - Arnold Bennett - S. Baring-Gould - Daniil Kharms - E.F. Benson - John Buchan - Ella D'Arcy - Jacques Futrelle - Frank Richard Stockton - John Kendrick Bangs - Kenneth Grahame - Julian Hawthorne - A. E. W. Mason - Richard Middleton - Pierre Louÿs - Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole - Ethel Richardson - Gertrude Stein - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Arthur Quiller-Couch - Mór Jókai - Andy Adams - Bertha Sinclair - Fitz James O'Brien - Eleanor H. Porter - Valery Bryusov - John Ulrich Giesy - Otis Adelbert Kline - Paul Laurence Dunbar - Frank Lucius Packard - Barry Pain - Gertrude Bennett - Francis Marion Crawford - William Pett Ridge - Gilbert Parker - Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford - Elizabeth Garver Jordan - Richard Austin Freeman - Alice Duer Miller - Leonard Merrick - Anthony Hope - Ethel Watts Mumford - Anne O'Hagan Shinn - B. M. Bower

The Letter Killers Club is a secret society of self-described “conceivers” who, to preserve the purity of their conceptions, will commit nothing to paper. (What, after all, is your run-of-the-mill scribbler of stories if not an accomplished corruptor of conceptions?) The logic of the club is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday, members meet in a firelit room filled with empty black bookshelves where they strive to top one another by developing ever unlikelier, ever more perfect conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; the double life of a merry medieval cleric derailed by a costume change; a machine-run world that imprisons men’s minds while conscripting their bodies; a dead Roman scribe stranded this side of the River Acheron. But in this book set in an ominous Soviet Moscow of the 1920s, the members of the club are strangely mistrustful of one another, while all are under the spell of its despotic President, and there is no telling, in the end, just how lethal the purely conceptual—or, for that matter, letters—may be.

It was a movement so artfully anarchic, and so quickly suppressed, that readers only began to discover its strange and singular brilliance three decades after it was extinguished-and then only in samizdat and emigre publications.

Soviet 'incidents' that perfectly capture the surreal spirit of the times