Scope and Contents

These bizarre and wildly imaginative pieces, written in Soviet Russia forty years ago, are as vital and disturbing as the best of today's absurdist literature. The two members of the avant-garde literary group called Oberiu wrote in Leningrad during the late 1920's and the 1930's with no hope of publication.They were arrested injust before World War II and died in 1941 or 1942. The manuscripts circulated in Eastern Europe where George Gibian edited them and translated them. He also contributed an extensive political and cultural background to these works which he subtitled " A Literary Discovery." The book contains a manifesto of the avant-garde Oberiu literary group and a bibliographical note. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Wikipedia: Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev was born in St. Petersburg, into the family of Ivan Yuvachev, a well known member of the revolutionary group, The People's Will. By this time the elder Yuvachev had already been imprisoned for his involvement in subversive acts against the tsar Alexander III and had become a religious philosopher, acquaintance of Anton Chekhov during the latter's trip to Sakhalin. Daniil invented the pseudonym Kharms while attending high school at the prestigious German "Peterschule". While at the Peterschule, he learned the rudiments of both English and German, and it may have been the English "harm" and "charm" that he incorporated into "Kharms". Throughout his career Kharms used variations on his name and the pseudonyms DanDan, Khorms, Charms, Shardam, and Kharms-Shardam, among others. It is rumored that he scribbled the name Kharms directly into his passport. In 1924, he entered the Leningrad Electrotechnicum, from which he was expelled for "lack of activity...