Description
Book SynopsisIn addition to his numerous works in prose and poetry for both children and adults, Daniil Kharms, (1905-42), one of the founders of Russia's “lost literature of the absurd,” wrote notebooks and a diary for most of his adult life. Published for the first time in recent years in Russian, these notebooks provide an intimate look at the daily life and struggles of one of the central figures of the literary avant-garde in Post-Revolutionary Leningrad. While Kharms's stories have been translated and published in English, these diaries represents an invaluable source for English-language readers who having already discovered Kharms in translation desire to learn about the life and times of an avant-garde writer in the first decades of Soviet power.
Trade Review“[Kharms’s notebooks] are generously sampled and gracefully translated by Anemone (The New School) and Scotto (Mount Holyoke College). . . . Not only have they succeeded in producing a vivid, often poignant portrait of Kharms, they offer a host of new texts in English—many as funny, violent, and profoundly existential as any seen before. . . . Highly recommended.” —M. Kasper (emeritus, Amherst College) in CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, August 2013
“Gives the best sense of any book in English of Kharms both within his context and as a deeply fascinating individual whose work can’t be ... explained away by the circumstances of its creation. . . . A huge addition to the Kharms canon in English. . . . Dozens of entries translated here for the first time that are just as great, as weird and delightful and mysterious, as his better-known works.” —Chris Cumming, review published on BOMBlog, August 1, 2013
“Anemone and Scotto do an outstanding job in conveying the texture of Kharms’s writing. . . . The notebooks, diaries, and letters presented in ‘
I am a Phenomenon’ show the breadth of Kharms’s interests, in literature, music, art, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, religion . . . the book documents Kharms’s hopes, doubts, frustrations, and physical and psychic pains about work and life. . . . Anemone and Scotto have done an excellent job. They state, ‘We believe that we have remained true to the spirit of the notebooks’ (p. 43). Absolutely!” —Ellen Chances, Princeton University. Review published in
The Russian Review, January 2014 (Vol. 73, No. 1)
