Narrow Search

Displaying results 1 to 1 of 1.

  1. The child and the child-like in Daniil Charms
    Published: 30.12.2014

    In his lifetime Daniil Charms only succeeded in publishing two of his poems for adults. Publicly he was a children's author: a job in the Soviet Union which traditionally attracted many writers whose literature for adults was either rejected by the... more

     

    In his lifetime Daniil Charms only succeeded in publishing two of his poems for adults. Publicly he was a children's author: a job in the Soviet Union which traditionally attracted many writers whose literature for adults was either rejected by the official literary system or had to be hidden altogether if its creators wanted to avoid trouble.

    In fact up to the present day it is still Charms the children's author who is best known and loved, although finally under new historical and political conditions the writer for adults has also been allowed to make his debut. However, whatever he wrote, Charms' work was always dominated by an absurdist world view, a view that usually denied all dogma or ideology. His only aim seems to have been to present a world upside down and play around with literary and other conventions, i.e. more than anything else he wanted to be different, acting as a sort of literary "punk".

    Although Charms and his associates were preceded by European absurdist authors, such as A. Jarry (1873-1907), it is very difficult to establish any relationship of influence between examples of Western European absurdism and Daniil Charms. Nonetheless, Charms' work, as well as that of Jarry, Ionesco and Beckett, all share the "grotesquely comic as well as irrational" (Abrams 1981: 1) quality of the absurdist movement in its larger modernist context.

     

    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Article
    Format: Online
    DDC Categories: 891
    Subjects: Charms, Daniil; Kinderliteratur; Absurde Literatur
    Rights:

    publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/home/index/help

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess