Daniil Harms, the failed performance (the questioning of drama)

Abstract

The late Russian avantgarde writer Daniil Harms reevaluates (aesthetically, ethically, morally and socially) the entire system of realistic poetics. The literatures canonised by mimemis are challenged by Marais' amimesis (metatextuality, citation, associativeness, reductionism, desematisation, defabularisation, depersonalisation, fragmentation, alogicism, the absurd, infantilism, ludism, seraility, coincidence, dislocation, conflict of verbal sense....) Creating a new fictioon the author mounts a genric-stylistic dehierarchisation and decanonisation of "outmoded" literature. Alongside prose works (primarily the novel as the dominant genre of realism) and poetry, Harms's dramatic texts challenge the existing laws of its composition by departures from the essential charcteristics of the genre, most significantly through the parody of existing genres with characteristic elements of the grotesque and black humour. Harms' unconventional dramatic forms, created in most part by parodically laying bare traditional dramatic patterns, by challenging and destroying (frequently to degree zero!) them, signify, within the context of "realistic art", a desire for a new, amimetic drama, that is for a new, "pure", amimetic theatre.