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"I am a Phenomenon Quite out of the Ordinary": The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms (Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century)
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About "I Am A Phenomenon Quite Out Of The Ordinary": The
Product Description “I am a Phenomenon Quite out of the Ordinary” offers a fascinating look into the life and mind of poet and prose miniaturist Daniil Kharms (1905- 1942). One of the legendary figures of the “Last Soviet Avant-Garde,” Kharms was the tutelary spirit of “Russia’s lost literature of the absurd.” His work, rescued from oblivion by a dedicated group of friends and scholars, has attained an almost cult-like status among present-day Russia’s literary elite. In this volume, Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto translate a wide-ranging selection of materials from Kharms’ private notebooks, diaries, letters, and even documents from the KGB archives detailing Kharms’ tragic end in a psychiatric prison hospital—most never before published in English. This is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian literature, Soviet culture, and the inner workings of the mind of a quirky genius. Review “Gives the best sense of any book in English of Kharms both within his context and as a deeply fascinating individual whose work can’t be explained away by the circumstances of its creation. . . . A huge addition to the Kharms canon in English. . . . Dozens of entries translated here for the first time that are just as great, as weird and delightful and mysterious, as his better-known works.” -- Chris Cumming ― BOMBlog “[Kharms’s notebooks] are generously sampled and gracefully translated by Anemone (The New School) and Scotto (Mount Holyoke College). . . . Not only have they succeeded in producing a vivid, often poignant portrait of Kharms, they offer a host of new texts in English―many as funny, violent, and profoundly existential as any seen before. . . . Highly recommended.” -- M. Kasper (professor emeritus, Amherst College) Anemone and Scotto do an outstanding job in conveying the texture of Kharms's writings. . . . The notebooks, diaries, and letters presented in ‘I Am a Phenomenon’ show the breadth of Kharms's interests, in literature, music, art, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, religion. . . . Certain sections of the book can be seen as a creative workshop for Kharms's literary works. . . a glimpse of contexts into which readers can place their knowledge of his literary works. More than that, the book documents Kharms's hopes, doubts, frustrations, and physical and psychic pains about work and life. . . . Anemone and Scotto have done an excellent job. They state, ‘We believe that we have remained true to the spirit of the notebooks’ (p. 43). Absolutely! -- Ellen Chances ― The Russian Review, January 2014 “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, a chronology of events from Kharms’s life and times, a glossary of people, places and concepts, and a copious commentary to contextualize the entries. Yet, for all this imposed order, they have striven to represent the ‘wild heterogeneity’ (p. 45) of the original notebooks. The result is a fascinating, if disjointed, read. . . . Whether they represent a new genre or a collision of genres, the notebooks certainly offer another point of departure for elaborating Kharms’s artistic legacy. . . . Remaining true to [Iakov] Druskin’s view that life and art are close to indistinguishable in an author like Kharms, Anemone and Scotto have adopted a policy of maximum disclosure. This excellent compilation of Kharms’s notebooks can be seen, therefore, as both a biographical portrait and a literary-critical assessment.” -- Neil Carrick ― The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 92, No. 3 (July 2014) “As the [editors] themselves clearly indicated in the section about their translation, their intention to write “a creative biography in documents” has been thoroughly accomplished. It
