ABSTRACT
Since he was rediscovered by Soviet scholars in the late 1960s (Aleksandrov and Meilakh 1967), Daniil Kharms (1905–12) has emerged as one of the most important figures of the Soviet pre-war literary avantgarde. In all that time, scholars have persistently regarded him as a writer of the Absurd avant la lettre, more interested in questions of existence, meaning and ultimate origin than in more “mundane” issues such as those of gender and sexuality (see, for example, Gibian 1987, and Cornwell 1991). Critics wishing to portray Kharms as an Absurdist first and foremost have found ample evidence not just in the man's literary output — where the rules of life as we know it are either distorted or discarded altogether — but also in his general behaviour, and in his diary writings. Indeed, as he put it in his journal in 1937, at the height of Stalin's purges: “I am interested only in nonsense [‘chush′’], everything that has no practical significance” (Kharms 1991, 501).
