Daniil Kharms in China

Abstract

Daniil Kharms — a distinguished representative of the post-revolutionary avant- garde — was rediscovered in Russia in the 1990s. Chinese scholars began the study of his literary heritage in 2010 after a number of Kharms’ works had been translated into Chinese. Today, Kharms studies have become one of the most relevant trends within Chinese Slavic studies. This paper aims to examine Chinese interpretation of the core philosophical and aesthetic features of Kharms’ poetics in comparison with Russian scholarly interpretations and to analyze the mechanisms of reception of Kharms’s poetry and philosophy in China. Chinese scholars relate Kharms’ artistic techniques to the idea of the helplessness of a human being in the face of ontological problems. In general, Chinese scholars share an opinion that the originality of Kharms’ poetics meets the requirement of the new artistic style characterized by deconstruction of causality and the shift of the space-time continuum. The new state of art corresponds to the logic of human knowledge: within the process of renunciation (negating the negation itself), the new knowledge develops out of the opposite side of the old knowledge, which explains why the avant-garde is eternal.

Keywords

• d. kharms
• avant-garde causality
• the fifth value
• motif of dream
• human existence
• space-time continuum
• chinese literary criticism.