Danil Harms: “...and all rusian literature...“ (introduction to harms's negation of russian 19th century literature)

Abstract

Daniil Hanns belongs to the group of artists from the rearguard of the Russian avantgarde - the Oberiu group. The article deals with the basic terns of Oberiutic poetics as shown in programmatic utterances and their relation to the canon of Russian literature which occupies a high place in the hierarchy of culture. The Oberiutes, “people of the concrete world, objects and words“ - as they style themself in their Manifesto - have put their poetic concept (“real art“: hence the title of the group, Association of Real Art) in contrast to the “old-fashioned“ literature of “shabby gilding“^ and its value. But they are not total destructors - they negate, but also re-affirm the 19th centuiy Russian literature. Harms and the Oberiutes will mainly negate the tradition by parodising the “great“ literature (sparing neither the writers nor their commonplace essence, “byt*“), i. e. by remodelling old senses; but with the aid of semantic clashes they will also attempt to create a new “real“ (“healthy“) sense of the world. The basic motifs of Harms are encoded in the aesthetic-ethical provocative text quoted above, a poem, which is for that very reason chosen as the epigraph to this article.