On Daniil Kharms

Abstract

Artists can be divided into types according to whether their art is directly connected with life, or not. Kharms and Vvedensky were both keenly aware of the distinction. At the end of the 1920s, Vvedensky said that Kharms was not creating art, but was himself art. At the end of the 1930s, Kharms used to say that the most important thing for him had always been not art, but life: to make his life into art. This is not aestheticism since ‘making life into art’ was not an aesthetic category for Kharms, but, as we now say, an existential one.

This essay is published here for the first time, though some of the material in it is to be found in earlier Druskin publications (see Druskin 1985; Druskin 1989). Like these other posthumous publications from Druskin’s notes and memoirs, it appears to have been written in the 1970s.