Summary
Daniil Harms: Completely ordinary nonsense
"I'm only interested in nonsense," noted Soviet "underground" writer and poet Daniil Harms as his creative credo in the 1930s. Ignored and bullied by the authorities, living off the help of his relatives and the publication of nursery rhymes, this genius marginalist left in his notes and notebooks a treasure of strange stories and out-of-the-way thoughts.
Absurdity, grotesqueness and paradox characterize his brilliant miniatures, with which he expressed his departure from the gloomy Stalinist and petty-bourgeois environment. Due to the truly senseless accusations of "counter-revolutionary activity", he was not allowed to publish his "nonsense", so that as a proven "class enemy" he died tragically and senselessly at the age of 37 in a Stalinist casemate.
With this book, in which most of the texts and illustrations are previously unpublished in our country, "The Colorful Shop" proudly points to another exceptional and undeservedly insufficiently known author. May we be allowed to end this line somewhat Harmsian: he is so brutally good that it is pointless to recommend him for reading!
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