Anemone, Anthony and Scotto, Peter (eds). ‘I am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary: The Notebooks, Diaries and Letters of Daniil Kharms (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 528 afterword to the English edition, which will be of interest to Russia specialists of all stripes. The afterword would have served better as a foreword or preface, as in conjunction with the conclusion it makes a powerful and accessible empirical case for the relevance of the book’s topic to contemporary theology and ecumenism, contemporary philosophy, and the study of post-Soviet Russian society. Interestingly, it simultaneously attempts to make a normative case for the application of religious ideas, such as those espoused by key contributors to The Way, to contemporary social problems in Russia, Ukraine and the West. Throughout The Way, Arjakovsky does not hide his sympathies for certain Russian émigré intellectuals’ positions — for example, he clearly favours those who, like George Fedotov, promoted the replacement of the Slavonic liturgy with a Russian liturgy — but it is in the afterword that Arjakovsky plunges unabashedly into advocacy of normative positions. In the process, he demonstrates great concern for, and thorough knowledge of, post-Soviet Russia, where such issues as the permissibility of a vernacular liturgy have reemerged as controversies within the Russian Orthodox Church. Not every reader will welcome Arjakovsky’s support for the revival of political theology, even in a modernist mode, just as not every reader will agree with every aspect of his analysis of recent Russian history. For example, there is not a little wishful thinking in Arjakovsky’s notion that Russia’s slide into authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin ‘could have been averted’ had Russian society been ready for serious engagement with the legacy of émigré Russian religious thought, a legacy that Putin invoked and continues to invoke, at the time of Putin’s accession to power (p. 580). Nevertheless, the relevance of the ‘mythological ’ thinking of the generation of The Way to our present time — whether we accept such thinking or reject it — cannot be denied. This interdisciplinary and international relevance makes Arjakovsky’s research all the more valuable. School of Public Policy, Russian Presidential Christopher A. Stroop Academy of National Economy and Public Administration Anemone, Anthony and Scotto, Peter (eds). ‘I am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary’: The Notebooks, Diaries and Letters of Daniil Kharms. Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2013. 586 pp. Chronology. Selected bibliography. Commentary. Glossary. $69.00. ‘I am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary’ is the first selection in English of the thirty-eight notebooks kept by Daniil Kharms between the mid REVIEWS 529 1920s and his final arrest in 1941. Little survives from the years 1936, 1938 and 1941. Six notebooks were confiscated by the Soviet security service never to be seen again. In their introduction, Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto cite the opinion of Kharms’s close friend, Iakov Druskin, that Kharms is among those authors whose ‘outer’ work can only be truly understood if one comprehends their ‘inner’ life. Kharms’s notebooks, argue Anemone and Scotto, ‘represent our best chance to recover [his] inner life’ (p. 10). Kharms used his notebooks to record things of both passing and lasting interest: expressions of love and pain over his first wife, Ester; sexual fantasies; lists of clothes, likes and books; chess moves; letters (probably unsent); desperate ruminations on hunger and poverty; plans for (unrealized) literary projects; and works later published and now regarded as part of his literary heritage. To this mix the editors have added other biographical material: early letters from Kharms to his father; reviews of his performances; and transcripts from his arrests in 1931 and 1941. There is also the only surviving genuine diary, kept from 1932 to 1933 on his return to Leningrad after enforced exile in Kursk. Yet not everything could, nor should, be included: Kharms’s zaum´ (trans-sense) word lists and notes on Egyptology, for example, did not make the editors’ cut. In producing this volume Anemone and Scotto have faced not just a challenge of translation, but also one of organization and interpretation. They have extracted material from the notebooks and arranged it in chronological order. They have added a potted biography, notes on their approach to the selection and treatment of the notebook entries...