The Rudiments of Daniil Kharms: In Further Pursuit of the Red-Haired Man

This essay looks at the phenomenon of the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms (1905-42), examining his career and his reception (in particular the awakening of interest from the 1960s in his writings: in the West and, more recently, in Russia). Attention is then turned to the mini-text 'Blue Notebook No. 10' (sometimes referred to as 'The Red-Haired Man'), which, for all its brevity, has already been the subject of considerable critical discussion. The characteristics of this fragment are discussed and compared to extracts from much longer works by Conan Doyle, Poe, Hamsun, Henry James, and David Lindsay (some of which, at least, Kharms would have known). The common denominator underlying these writings, it is suggested, is 'neo-Romanticism'. A further example, not cited in this essay, is to be found in an almost contemporaneous work by Vladimir Nabokov, then writing in Russian in emigration: Invitation to a Beheading (first published 1935-36).