On a snowy hill, on Nevsky, now hidden by the blizzard, now reappearing, stands an unknown poet: beyond him there is emptiness. Everyone had left long ago. But he does not have the right, he cannot leave the city. Let everyone flee, let death come, but he will remain here and protect Apollo’s high temple.
Kharms did not share the messianic cultural illusions of his friend Vaginov. The hero of his absurdist prose exists not in the mythical Hellenic Petersburg but in the real nauseating Leningrad.
The house on the corner of Nevsky is being painted a revolting yellow. Have to turn off onto the street. I am pushed by people coming toward me. They all recently moved here from villages and haven’t learned to walk on the streets yet. Their clothes and faces are filthy. They come trampling from all sides, growling and shoving.
Most of the characters in Kharms and Zoshchenko are related, they “growl and shove” in the same world: one that is dark, cruel, and threatening, a world that has nothing to do with the “temple of Apollo” that came to Vaginov in a dream. Khodasevich had taken ninety-nine short stories by Zoshchenko and found at least ninety-nine characters who break the law in some way: they kill, cheat, counterfeit, and brawl—drunk and sober. They do it for absurd reasons, suffering neither doubts nor pangs of conscience “à la Dostoyevsky,” vaguely feeling that they are both “masters” of the new life, as they are told by the posters all around them, but also its victims.
In Kharms’s prose, the darkness gets ever thicker. One of his characters replies this way to a charge that includes rape: “First of all, she wasn’t a virgin anymore, and secondly, I was dealing with a corpse, and she’s not going to complain now. What of the fact that she was supposed to give birth any minute? I pulled out the baby, didn’t I?” But in Kharms’s cruel and surrealistic short parables, which he called “incidents” and which have parallels with Kafka and Céline, there appear also alienated intellectuals, closer to the frightened and despairing heroes of Vaginov.
“A man with a thin neck climbed into a trunk, shut the lid, and started to suffocate.” Thus begins one such metaphorical narrative by Kharms, in which the typical representative of the Leningrad intelligentsia of those years sets up a humiliating experiment on himself to test the ability to survive in a hostile environment. In another “incident” called “The Dream,” a certain Kalugin was reduced to such nervous exhaustion by a recurring nightmare involving a dreaded policeman that when a medical-sanitation inspection team going through the apartments “found him antisanitary and useless,” it had him tossed into the garbage: “Kalugin was folded in half and thrown out like trash.” Akhmatova, commenting on similar surrealistic moments in Kharms’s prose, said, “He managed to do what almost no one else could, write the so-called prose of the twentieth century. When they describe, for instance, how the hero went out into the street and suddenly flew up into the air, no one else can do that convincingly, only Kharms.”
In the epilogue to his
The son of a high-ranking tsarist bureaucrat, Sollertinsky quickly became a local landmark, the “city genius.” He walked around Leningrad in a shabby coat and when asked why he, such a famous lecturer, could appear in trousers worn to a sheen, replied, “It is the sparkle of Soviet musicology!” His genius pose was also a mask for dealing with life, but of a different sort than Zoshchenko’s. Sollertinsky enjoyed playing the absentminded professor, even though he never missed an opportunity to jab an opponent with a sarcastic remark. In a public discussion of a derivative symphony by a Leningrad composer, he said, “It’s the water in which Rachmaninoff’s chamber pot was rinsed!”103
