Daniil Kharms is The Decade's Best

Today I Wrote Nothing, translated by Matvei Yankelevich was included in The Mark’s (CAN) “Ten Best Books of the Aughts” list: “When Daniil Kharms died of hunger in a Soviet asylum in 1942, he was still a young man, an ascending writer who enjoyed a modest popularity in his native Russia as the author of children’s stories. It wasn’t until the 1970s that his work for adults – night-town fairy tales warped in a funhouse mirror – appeared in his home country. Finally, we have an English version. Kharms was a major writer who died too early, but the little he left us is haunting, deeply human, terrifying, and often hilarious.”

In other Daniil Kharms news, on Saturday, January 9th at 8pm, New Yorkers are in for a avant garde treat. The Drama Book Shop (40th St between 7th and 8th Ave) will be hosting a raucous night of theatre including three Daniil Kharms vignettes translated by Matvei Yankelevich.

Also in New York this month, Brooklyn theater trio The Debate Society is performing Kharm’s play "A Thought About Raya" at the 2010 Other Forces Festival.

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New in Paperback: TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF DANIIL KHARMS

Now available in bookstores is the long-awaited paperback edition of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil KHARMS. Daniil Kharms has long been heralded as one of the most iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era, but the full breadth of his achievement is only in recent years, following the opening of Kharms' archives, being recognized internationally. In this brilliant translation by Matvei Yankelevich, English-language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms’s literary reputation—a reputation that grew in Russia even as the Soviet establishment worked to suppress it.

London Review of Books Features TODAY I WROTE NOTHING by Daniil Kharms

Tony Wood considers the achievements of the Russian writer Daniil Kharms and Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, in the current issue of The London Review of Books. "Yankelevich has written a sensitive introduction that treads a careful path through the many interpretative possibilities open to Kharms readers. What emerges most strongly from the selection is the character of Kharms’s world: both the one he created, in which Gogol and Pushkin tumble across a stage cursing each other and four-legged crows have five legs, and the one in which he was uncomfortably living. It would be wrong to draw too direct a line between the two, but their most obvious shared feature is the violence: carried out, in the case of the stories, or misanthropically imagined, in the case of diary entries and other writings."

Matvei Yankelevich Pays Tribute to DANIIL KHARMS on January 16

Matvei Yankelevich, editor and translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, will participate in a reading and reception tomorrow night in Brooklyn. The event is sponsored by A Public Space magazine, Russian American Cultural Center, and Overlook. Matvei will be joined by Eugene Ostashevsky for this night devoted to Russian Absurdism. Wednesday, January 16, 7pm at A Public Space, 323 Dean Street, Brooklyn, NY. For more information: 212-673-2524.

The Translated Man: Matvei Yankelevich on Daniil Kharms

Matvei Yankelevich, editor/translator of Overlook's Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, talks to Michael Helke of the Stop Smiling website about the iconoclastic writer. Yankelevich's collection of prose and poetry by Kharms includes many works that have never been published before in the English language, and has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Times Book Review.

TODAY I WROTE NOTHING Featured in The Guardian and New York Post

The Daniil Kharms revival continues with a feature story by Daniel Kalder on the Guardian Unlimited website. Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, was also included in Billy Heller's "Required Reading" column in The New York Post. And the excellent blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts & Letters Daily, is featuring the George Saunders essay in The New York Times Book Review.

Soviet Deadpan: George Saunders on DANIIL KHARMS in NYTBR

George Saunders considers Daniil Kharms in a long endpage essay in this week's The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Recently published to rave reviews, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, was edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich. For the first time, English-language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms’s literary reputation as one of the most brilliant and iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era.

TODAY I WROTE NOTHING Among the BOOKS OF THE YEAR in The Times Literary Supplement

Marjorie Perloff points out Today I Wrote Nothing as one of the "Books of the Year" in this week's issue of The Times Literary Supplement (TLS): "A dazzling book that gives me new hope for an avant garde writing that speaks to a larger audience. The Russian OBERIU poet Daniil Kharms, whose writings went unpublished in his lifetime (1905-42), was, as Matvei Yankelevich, the excellent editor and translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, remarks, much more than a 'Stalinist victim' or Soviet absurdist."

Daniil Kharms featured in THE NEW YORKER

The latest issue of The New Yorker features excerpts from Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1905, Daniil Kharms was one of the founders, in 1928, of OBERIU, or Association of Real Art, an avant-garde group of writers and artists who embraced the ideas of the Futurists and believed that art should operate outside the rules of logic. In his lifetime, Kharms produced several works for children, but his writing for adults was not published. In 1931, Kharms was charged with anti-Soviet activities and briefly exiled from Leningrad. In 1941, he was arrested by the N.K.V.D. for making “defeatist statements”; sentenced to incarceration in the psychiatric ward of a prison hospital, he died of starvation the following year, during the siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t until the late nineteen-seventies that Kharms’s playful and poetic work began to appear in mainstream publications in Russia. Several books followed, as did festivals in Kharms’s honor and critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco.

Overlook TV: Matvei Yankelevich on Daniil Kharms' TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITINGS

The gentleman translator of The Overlook Press' forthcoming Fall 2007 title TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITING OF DANIIL KHARMS visited our offices and graced our conference room today. Check out the video, featuring a reading of "Blue Notebook #10" from the piping-hot galleys that have just arrived.