Danil Harms's prose miniature The Blue Notebook No.10 (Golubaja tetrad' NolO, 1937) from the cycle Cases (Slučai, 1933-1939) is one of those absurdist texts that challenge/parody everuthing constituting canonized literature (fabularity, the “classic” narrator, fully shaped characters, poetic language, patheticness, moralizing, instructions...). The story about the “reddish-brown” man is transformed into an anti-story of the shapeless, i.e. non-existent, man. The gradual grotesque dismemberment of the “hero” results in his total depersonalization and becomes reduced to a literary zero. A member of the “OBERIUTI” group (active during the late twenties and the thirties and connected to Hlebnjikov's tradition of the destruction of literary genres), Harms, with his poetics of the grotesque absurd, disrupts the stable hierarchy of literary norms, as well as the norms of the “byta" (the everyday) and the “balance of the 'midle'“ (A.Flaker). The literary heritage is reevaluated; it becomes the material with which to wage polemics but also to establish dialogues (Gogol's and Dostojevski's grotesque tradition is essential to the grotesque avantgarde). Rebellion, antiestheticism, provocation, deconstruction, the absurd, illogical occurances, alondside the fracture of “the optimal projection” connect the poetics of “OBERIUTA’ Harms with similar phenomena in English nonsense-fiction, “dadism” and European surrealism.
