Kharms’s ‘1st Destruction’

Abstract

The historico-ideological reality lying behind Kharms’s poem ‘1st Destruction’ has been explained and reconstructed in detail by Lazar Fleishman in his article of 1987 [translated and reprinted above, Ed.]. Without such a reconstruction, much in this poem would have remained not entirely comprehensible. First and foremost at least an elementary knowledge of the history of the Soviet calendar is called for here; namely, the fact that from October 1930 the Soviet Union converted to a five-day week of four working days and one day off and to a new system of year-counting, starting from 1917 and not from the birth of Christ (the new year was to be observed on 7 November; this system was abolished in June 1931; for details, see Fleishman, above; Seleshnikov, 1977, pp. 169–71). As Fleishman has shown, this calendar system in particular entered the structure of ‘1st Destruction’.