Abstract
Daniil Kharms` s works have been a hot topic of research worldwide for several years. The present study discusses Kharms’s black humor writings of the 1930s, exposes aesthetic potential and humanistic content of black humor as an avant-garde phenomenon, and defines the role of black humor in the plot of works containing allusions to arrest in secret, hospitals and the life of Soviet children. As paper suggests the themes and subjects of Kharms’s black humor are designed to enhance humanistic content. In Kharms’s art world of black humor, “purity” is a kind of harmonious world order representing the earth as “a space, filled with madness and fear” on a real level while on an artistic level it functions as the purity of creative mind generating circular compositional structure and using semantic shift and narrative interruption. In other words, purity embodies the real world while belonging to it. The popularity of Kharms may be, firstly, explained by a clear feeling of absurdism and black humor, the root of which is his requirement for humanization of life and firm faith in God. Kharms believed that religion is “ambiguous and amorphous” and should be expressed in some form or object, without which the essence of religiosity would be lost, even if the most reliable authority and firm dogma are there. Thus, overtly inhuman elements which give a false impression of writer’s spiritual value, do not express the essence of his worldview, but reflect surrounding senseless reality. Out of dissatisfaction with reality, Kharms uses black humor to respond to the evil and absurdity of life.
Highlights
In the world of universal standardization, black humor is a pithy paraphrasis of fundamental ideas of the postmodern literature as well as the motives of rebellion and freedom that prevails among existentialists
Proceeding from the perception of the world as absurd and chaotic, combined with the rigidity of social norms, black humor denies the consistency of choice and individuality, which is central to existentialism and related to misanthropic humor, and through this, it evolves into the only truly human reaction to the general absurdity of being
Secondary laughter and its unique psychotherapeutic effect serve as the motive of black humor, which reveals the object of its amusement in overturning moral values that cause a grim laughter
Summary
In the world of universal standardization, black humor is a pithy paraphrasis of fundamental ideas of the postmodern literature as well as the motives of rebellion and freedom that prevails among existentialists. Two dog’s injury and tragic event are presented in a deliberately light form, which gives the impression of absurdity It seems like for Kharms sadistic even black humor and inhuman elements are only way to survey the long windings of destiny. The light-hearted tone of the message (beating people to death) and trying to present as mounting a defense in court can be considered as indicating a lack of guilt He called the murder a trivial crime (“пустяшное преступление”), which recalls the “trivial thing” (“дело пустяшное”) of Luzhin in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (1866); Luzhin called the false accusation of theft that he leveled against Sonya a “trivial thing”. Commenting on other stories of Kharms, Anemone found that, it “can be read as Kharms’s confession of the radical avant-garde’s role in the moral collapse and indiscriminate violence of Stalinism” [18, p. 88], presenting the seemingly incongruous image of the narrator humbly bowing his head
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