The Author and Authority: Daniil Kharms and the Russian Absurd by Larissa Shmailo Russian Absurd: Selected Writings Author: Daniil Kharms; Translator: Alexander Cigale Northwestern World Classics, Northwestern University Press LCCN 2016047114 ISBN 9780810134577 (Paperback) | ISBN 9780810134584 (E-book) sPages: 280 As some of us are coming to know as we shake our heads, saying “how can that be?” the absurd may be characteristic of authoritarian regimes. If so, then the reading of Daniil Kharms is quite urgent in our day. When all norms are violated, it may be that only the absurdist pen can accurately swath through the fuzzy edges of alternative facts and fake news. Russian Absurd is thus a book for our age. With a devoted following in Russia and a growing cult of readers in the United States, writer Daniil Kharms (pen name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev, 1905–1942) is achieving a fame that would have surprised him. Often compared to his hero Gogol, lionized by surrealists, and called an heritor of Kafka, this poet and master of the short sketch lived a short, vivid, and tragic life and suffered every imagined indignity of a totalitarian regime. Still, Kharms sees this state as an existential, rather than purely political, force of the “absurd manifestation of life.”. At first glance, Kharms seems mainly a writer of the Soviet byt, its daily environment of poverty and oppression. Given its nature, Soviet life under Stalin often needs but a