Research for this article, which is based in part on my dissertation, was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, a Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship in the Humanities, and a Research Travel Grant from the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) at Stanford University. I would like to acknowledge in particular the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Provost's Office at Dartmouth College for their research support while I completed this article during my tenure as a Dickey Postdoctoral Fellow. An earlier version was presented at Amherst College and some of the ideas were presented at Yale University. I am indebted to Polina Barskova, Lazar Fleishman, Gregory Freidin, Luba Golburt, Monika Greenleaf, Seth Lerer, Gabriella Safran, and David Weld for their comments and contributions, and I particularly thank Monika and Luba for their efforts coordinating this cluster. I also wish to thank Mark D. Steinberg and my two anonymous reviewers at Slavic Review for their keen comments and helpful suggestions and Jane Hedges for her editorial eye.

The epigraph is taken from Daniil Kharms, “Inkubatornyi period,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1997), 2:84. Unless otherwise specified, all translations in this article are my own.

1. For a sensitive study of the absurd in literature that positions Kharms within the context of a wider western tradition of absurdity, see Cornwell, Neil, The Absurd in Literature (New York, 2006), 158-83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cornwell highlights some paradoxes that underlie the literary absurd, such as existence/nonexistence, reason/absurdity, and object/subject, which have relevance in the context of this article, as does memory/amnesia. Ibid., 2-10.

2. Sigmund Freud was one of the first psychologists to articulate the widely observable concept of infantile amnesia, though the psychoanalytical context he places it in might be disputed. “What I have in mind is the peculiar amnesia which, in the case of most people, though by no means all, hides the earliest beginnings of their childhood up to their sixth or eighth year.” Freud, Sigmund, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in Strachey, James, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 7:174.Google Scholar A decade later Freud articulates it somewhat differendy, “I mean the fact that the earliest years of life, up to the age of five, six or eight, have not left behind them traces in our memory like later experiences.” Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis,” in Strachey, ed., Standard Edition, 15:200.

Since its early identification by Freud, the phenomenon of infantile amnesia has attracted scientific attention up to the present day. For an excellent summary of previous scholarship on the issue that also ventures an explanation for infantile amnesia, see Howe, Mark L. and Courage, Mary L., “On Resolving the Enigma of Infantile Amnesia,” Psychological Bulletin 113, no. 2 (1993): 305-26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Howe and Courage postulate that the autobiographical organization of information within a spatio-temporal context depends upon an independent sense of self and a personal frame of reference. Other research in child development has posited a role for language, or narrative ability, in the creation of socially accessible memory. See, for instance, Pillimer, D. B. and White, S. H., “Childhood Events Recalled by Children and Adults,” Advances in Child Development and Behavior 21 (1989): 335.Google Scholar Recent research has established that infants can form nonverbal declarative memories but that these may be accessible only within the same ontogenetic epoch— the infancy period itself. See Meltzoff, A. N., “What Infant Memory Tells Us about Infantile Amnesia: Long-Term Recall and Deferred Imitation,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 59, no. 3 (June 1995): 512.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

3. Lejeune, Philippe, “The Autobiographical Pact,” On Autobiography, ed. Eakin, Paul John, trans., Leary, Katherine (Minneapolis, 1988), 9.Google Scholar

4. For instance, in Pered voskhodom solntsa (Before sunrise), Mikhail Zoshchenko foregrounds die issue as he proceeds through layers of memory to recover the earliest impressions of infancy, even as he explores questions of authenticity, reality, and dream. See Zoshchenko, Mikhail, Pered voskhodom solntsa (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

5. One might compare Kharms's writings to the claims to preternatural memory of another absurdist modernist writer. Samuel Beckett repeatedly insisted that he had memories from inside the womb and once remarked, “Even before the foetus can draw breath, it is in a state of barrenness and of pain. I have a clear memory of my own foetal existence. It was an existence where no voice, no possible movement could free me from the agony and darkness I was subjected to.” Beckett thus also links infancy to an existential state of powerlessness and lack of voice as do Lev Tolstoi and Kharms. See Cronin, Anthony, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York, 1996), 1–2.Google Scholar

6. Tolstoi, L. N., “Komu u kogo uchit'sia pisat', krest'ianskim rebiatam u nas ili nam u krest'ianskikh rebiat?” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. Chertkov, V. G., 91 vols. (Moscow, 1935-64), 8:301-24.Google Scholar For a historical account of Russian childhood in the revolutionary period, see Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (New York, 2000).Google Scholar See also Kelly, Catriona, Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (New Haven, 2007).Google Scholar For a recent collection of articles related to Russian childhood that, in part, pertains to this period, see Balina, Marina and Rudova, Larissa, eds., Russian Children's Literature and Culture (New York, 2008).Google Scholar

7. Daniil Kharms, “la ne liubliu detei … ,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2:88. Originally included in A. Ustinov and A. Kobrinskii, “Dnevnikovye zapisi Daniila Kharmsa,” Minuvshee. Istoricheskii al'manakh 11 (1991): 503.

8. Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York, 1989), 19.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., 20-21.

10. See L. N. Tolstoi, “Moia zhizn',” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 23:470.

11. The text of Tolstoi's first, unfinished attempt to write an autobiography, dated to 1878, was published in an incomplete version under the title “Pervye vospominaniia” in 1892. See N. N. Gusev, “'Moia zhizn“: Istoriia pisaniia i pechataniia,” in Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 23:561. Tolstoi's account of his earliest memories is quoted in full in Biriukov's biography of Tolstoi. Biriukov, Pavel, Biografiia L. N. Tolstogo (Moscow, 2000), 38–39.Google Scholar

12. Remizov argues for the determinative significance of childhood in Tolstoi's writings. Remizov, V. B., ‘“Sila detstva’ kak tvorcheskii stimul L'va Tolstogo,” Tolstovskii ezhegodnik (Tula, 2003), 256-83.Google Scholar

13. Tolstoi, “Moia zhizn'” 469.

14. L. N. Tolstoi, “Vospominaniia,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 34:355.

15. In the first book of Confessions, St. Augustine describes his own transition from the state of the speechless infant to that of the speaking child who has gained the symbolic capacity of language and escapes the helpless state of infancy. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward Pusey (New York, 1914), 1. 8. Rousseau also notes that infans “signifies ‘one who cannot speak.'” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Alan Bloom (New York, 1979), 88-89.

16. Kristeva, Julia, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in Oliver, Kelly, ed., The Portable Kristeva (New York, 1997), 35–36.Google Scholar See also Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Gora, Thomas, Jardine, Alice, and Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Waller, Margaret (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

17. Tolstoi, “Moia zhizn',” 469-70.

18. Ibid., 470.

19. In the 1930s story “Byl Volodia na elke … “ (Volodia was at a Christmas party … ) , the preverbal infant Volodia similarly finds himself trapped in a helpless object position by his lack of language. See Daniil Kharms, “Byl Volodia na elke … “ Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3:239-40.

20. Shklovskii, Viktor, “Iskusstvo kak priem” (1917), Gamburgskii schet: Stat'i, vospominaniia, esse, 1914-1933 (Moscow, 1990), 64.Google Scholar

21. Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 42-43.

22. Tolstoi, like Rousseau, was firmly opposed to swaddling (Russian svivat’ or pelenat’) and considered these customs outmoded in his day. Their opposition has had an inordinate influence to the present day, including in studies of “psychohistory” by Lloyd deMause and Patrick Dunn that further extend the political metaphor for swaddling. deMause, Lloyd, “The Evolution of Childhood,” in Mause, Lloyd de, ed., The History of Childhood (New York, 1974), 37–38 Google ScholarPubMed; Dunn, Patrick P., “That Enemy Is the Baby: Childhood in Imperial Russia,” in de Mause, , ed., History of Childhood, 386-87.Google ScholarPubMed A more historical account of swaddling in Russia is included in David Ransel's study of motherhood in Russia. Ransel, David, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Talaria (Bloomington, 2000), 204-11.Google Scholar A seminal study of swaddling from a child development perspective is Earle Lloyd Lipton etal., Swaddling, A Child Care Practice: Historical, Cultural and Experimental Observations (Springfield, III., 1965). More recent studies of swaddling reverse centuries of reactions against it and instead document its soothing physiological effects. See, for instance, Rosemary Gates Campos, “Soothing Pain-Elicited Distress in Infants with Swaddling and Pacifiers,” Child Development 60, no. 4 (August 1989): 781-92.

23. Bergson, Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Brereton, Cloudesley and Rothwell, Fred (Los Angeles, 1999), 65.Google Scholar

24. Freud, Sigmund, With and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Brill, A. A. (London, 1999), 196.Google Scholar

25. Tolstoi's views might be compared to Levin's awestruck reaction to childbirth, which mingles both awe and horror. Tolstoi, L. N., “Karenina, Anna,” Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, ed. Akopova, N. N. (Moscow, 1960-65), 9:325.Google Scholar Cf. the exchange between Natasha and Sonia in Voina i mir (War and peace), where Natasha says in a whisper, ‘“You know, I think [ … ] that when you go on and on in recalling memories, you at last reach a point of recollection where you remember what happened before you were in the world.'—'That's metempsychosis [metempsikoza],'—said Sonia, who always studied well and remembered everything.” L. N. Tolstoi, “Voina i mir,” Sobranie sochinenii, 5:309. Andrei Belyi also took up this idea in his authorship, both in the epigraph to Kotik Letaev, which quotes this line from War and Peace, and in the entirety of the novel, which explores the inaccessible interiority of a young child from conception and birth to consciousness and language. Andrei Belyi, Kotik Letaev (St. Petersburg, 1922).

26. Tolstoi, “Moia zhizn',” 470-71.

27. Interestingly, this abstract philosophical interest did not necessarily dispel the horror and aversion the infant sometimes provoked in Tolstoi's own life or in the lives of his literary characters, such as Levin in Anna Karenina.

28. Peter Barta links Tolstoi to modernists in his study of the depiction of childhood by Tolstoi, James Joyce, and Belyi. Peter Barta, “Childhood in the Autobiographical Novel: An Examination of Tolstoy's Childhood, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Bely's Kotik Letaev,” in Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok, eds., Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World (Tübingen, 1987), 49.

29. For an investigation of the extensive interest in children's art, language, perception, and cognition exhibited by representative figures in avant-garde art, literature, and theory, see Sara Pankenier, “in fant non sens: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1909-1939” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2006).

30. The modernist period might even be characterized by a compulsive return to the remembrance of childhood, such as in the memoirs and autobiographical writings of poets like Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Vladimir Nabokov, and many others. The extensive list of writings about children also include fictional works like Boris Pasternak's Detstvo Liuvers (The childhood of Liuvers, 1922) and partially fictional examples of what Andrew Wachtel calls the pseudo-autobiography, such as Belyi's Kotik Letaev, which details a precocious onset of memory particularly noteworthy in the context of this article. Yet, the sheer implausibility and fictional nature of Kotik Letaev also makes it qualitatively different from Tolstoi's and Kharms's autobiographical fragments, which still display the effect of infantile amnesia, while Belyi pursues the fictional space created by the complete recovery of infant memory. Indeed, Kharms's writings may also represent a reaction to Belyi's far more fictional accounts of infant consciousness, though his autobiographical fragments remain possible, if wildly improbable. See Belyi, Kotik Letaev. For a study of the pseudo-autobiography, see Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, 1990).

31. See Daniil Kharms, “Sud'ba zheny professora,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2:104-5.

32. See Daniil Kharms, “Menia nazyvaiut kaputsinom … ,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2:134.

33. Other modernist poets who, like Kharms, celebrate paedophobia and infanticide may also be reacting against the prevailing cult of childhood and the kitsch poetry of the day. Notable among these is Vladimir Maiakovskii, who writes in “Ia” (I, 1913), “1 love to watch as children are dying [Ia liubliu smotret', kak umiraiut deti\.” Vladimir Maiakovskii, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1965), 53.

34. Anthony Anemone writes eloquendy on the anti-world of Kharms. See Anemone, Anthony, “The Anti-World of Daniil Kharms: On the Significance of the Absurd,” in Cornwell, Neil, ed., Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials (New York, 1991), 71–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Childlore often proves subversive in its basis; it is a form in which a group that lacks a sanctioned voice in society has an opportunity to express its opposition against authorities. The seminal scholars of childlore Peter and lona Opie describe how “through these quaint, ready-made formulas the ridiculousness of life is underlined, the absurdity of the adult world and their teachers proclaimed, danger and death mocked, and the curiosity of language itself is savored.” Many obvious comparisons to Kharmsian prose arise immediately from this description of childlore. See lona, and Opie, Peter, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (New York, 2000), 18.Google Scholar

36. His wife Marina Durnovo observes, “I see that much in his diary is expressed in a completely childish manner [sovsem po-detski]. Yes, in Dania there was this childishness [detskoe], and this was why he was as he was.” Glotser, Vladimir and Durnovo, Marina, Moi muzh, Daniil Kharms (Moscow, 2000), 55.Google Scholar His mistress Alisa Poret makes similar observations: “I remember him as I myself knew him,—like a big mischievious child [bol'shim ozornym rebenkom], whose words and jokes adults repeat with a smile.” Alisa Poret, “Vospominaniia o Daniile Kharmse,” in Daniil Kharms (Moscow, 2003), 425. Iakov Druskin also compares Kharms to a child, specifically the child in Hans Christian Andersen's “The Emperor's New Clothes.” He writes, “Kharms is like that litde boy. He was not afraid to say, ‘But the king's got nothing on'” and later speaks of Kharms's “naive, almost infantile cynicism.” lakov Druskin, “On Daniil Kharms,” in Cornwell ed., Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd, 23, 25. A rhetoric of hatred for children has proven quite common among prominent male children's writers; Hans Christian Andersen, Roald Dahl, and Daniil Kharms are only a few examples. These statements may have a mimetic component, or perhaps this paedophobia represents a safer alternative than its opposite, as demonstrated by the case of Lewis Carroll.

37. Druskin, “On Daniil Kharms,” 29.

38. Daniil Kharms, “Strannyi borodach,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3:77

39. Daniil Kharms, “Teper’ ia rasskazhu … ,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2:82-84; Kharms, “Inkubatornyi period,” 2:84.

40. Bergson, Laughter, 39. For a philosophical discussion of Kharmsian uses of Bergson and Kant, see Fink, Hilary L., “The Kharmsian Absurd and the Bergsonian Comic: Against Kant and Causality,” Russian Review 57, no. 4 (October 1998): 526-38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Tolstoi, “Moia zhizn',” 469-74.

42. Bergson, Laughter, 88.

43. Kharms's personal papers and diary writings are surprisingly indistinguishable from his creative prose in style, subject matter, and tone. See Ustinov, A. and Kobrinskii, A., “Dnevnikovye zapisi Daniila Kharmsa,” Minuvshee. Istoricheskii al'manakh 11 (1991): 417–583.Google Scholar See also Kharms, Daniil, Zapisnye knizhki, ed. Zhakkar, Zh.-F. and Sazhin, V. N., 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 2002).Google Scholar

44. Cf. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact” and “The Autobiographical Pact” (bis), On Autobiography, 3-30, 119-37.

45. Kharms, “Teper’ ia rasskazhu …,” 82.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 82-83.

50. Ibid., 83.

51. Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York, 1991).Google Scholar Sterne's recent lionization by Viktor Shklovskii brings him to the forefront of literary relevancy in this very period. See Viktor Shklovskii, “Parodiinyi roman,” O teoriiprozy, (Moscow, 1929), 177-204.

52. Kharms, “Teper'ia rasskazhu … ,” 83.

53. The subtle joke here, in its obscene and scatological aspects, also resembles folk or childlore.

54. Kharms, “Teper'ia rasskazhu … ,” 83-84.

55. Kharms's diary writings give evidence that he was troubled by impotence along with writer's block, which may explain the richness of these interlinked motifs in his creative writings. See Daniil Kharms, “Dnevnik: 22 noiabria 1932-10 sentiabria 1933 g.,” Zapisnye knizhki, 2:217-18.

56. See Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah, trans. Zohn, Harry (New York, 1968), 217-52.Google Scholar

57. Kharms, “Teper’ ia rasskazhu … ,” 83.

58. Ibid.

59. Bergson, Laughter, 88.

60. “The Kronia belong to the ‘Saturnalia-like’ festivals, as has often been stated. As in the case of carnival or one of its medieval equivalents, ‘la fête de fous,’ social and hierarchical roles are reversed: the fool is king and rules at will.” H. S. Versnel, “Greek Myth and Ritual: The Case of Kronos,” in Jan Bremmer, ed., Interpretations of Greek Mythology (London, 1987), 135-36. Mikhail Bakhtin develops the symbolic implications of the carnivalesque in literature at length in his study of François Rabelais. Mikhail Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia renessansa (Moscow, 1965).

61. By the Old Style Calendar, he was born on 17 December 1905.

62. Kharms, “Inkubatornyi period,” 2:84.