Today I Wrote Nothing is a selection of poetry, plays, and prose by the early Soviet avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms. While not a political writer, per se, Kharms depicts the absurdities of modern life in Lenin and Stalin’s Russia in a style reminiscent of Samuel Beckett by way of Diogenes by way of Jacques Tati by way of the Three Stooges by way of Leonora Carrington by way of Charlie Kaufman by way of Kafka by way of Gallagher by way of Joy Williams by way of Abbie Hoffman by way of Mitch Hedberg by way of a fortune cookie.
— Eli
Description
A major contribution for American readers and students of Russian literature and an exciting discovery for fans of contemporary writers as eclectic as George Saunders, John Ashbery, and Martin McDonagh, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms is an invaluable collection for readers of innovative writing everywhere.
Featuring the acclaimed novella The Old Woman and darkly humorous short prose sequence “Events (Sluchai),” Today I Wrote Nothing also includes dozens of short prose pieces, plays, and poems long admired in Russia, but never before available in English.
Daniil Kharms has long been heralded as one of the most iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era, but the full breadth of his achievement only followed the opening of Kharms’s archives being recognized internationally. In this brilliant translation by Matvei Yankelevich, English-language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms’s literary reputation a reputation that grew in Russia even as the Soviet establishment worked to suppress it.
