Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aatseel.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavic and East European Journal.
http://www.jstor.org
RUSSIAN MINIMALISTPROSE:GENERIC
ANTECEDENTSTO DANIIL KHARMS'S
"SLUCHAI"
AdrianWanner,PennsylvaniaState University
BcTpeqa
BOT OAHaW)lbIOAHH qIenOBeKnoumeJiHa cJiyaK6y, aa no gopore BCTpeTHJI
npyroro
KynHBnonibCKHfi6aTOH,HanpaBJIaJIcK ce6e BOCBOSCH.
qeJiOBeKa,KOTOpbIm,
BOT,co6CTBeHHO,H Bce. (PSS 2:345)
A Meeting
The other day a man went to work, but on his way, he met another man, who had bought a
loaf of Polish bread and was on his way home, to his own place.
That's about all. (Gibian 59)
The text contains several elements that we can associate with conven-
tionalnarrativity.It featuresa title and an openingformulawhichlooks like
the traditionalbeginning of a story: a deictic marker (vot) points to a
specific temporal moment (odnazhdy) and individual (odin chelovek),
whom we expect to be the principalcharacterin the event that is going to
unfold. The rest of the openingsentence, introducinga second character,is
hardlysurprisingeither. It confirmsour expectationstriggeredby the title:
since the story is called "A Meeting,"we expect the protagonistto encoun-
ter anothercharacter.The fact that this person is carryinga pol'skii baton,
a commontype of bread at that time, seems to add an element of daily-life
realism. Several questions arise at this point: Does the narratormention
this detail simplyfor the sake of "atmosphere,"or will the breadplay a role
in the story? At the same time, a potential tension or conflict arises: one
characteris going to work, while the other is going home. Why?Are they
workingon separateshifts? Does the firstcharacterresent the fact that he
has to go to work, while the other one will be relaxingat home with his
newly acquiredloaf of bread?Have they met before, or are they complete
strangers?
We will never know, of course. Just at the moment when our curiosityis
triggeredabout the possible ramificationsof this narrativeopeninggambit,
the storyis cut short. Fromhis exposition, the narratorswitchesabruptlyto
a closing formula.This unexpectedending forces us to reconsiderwhat we
have just read. It turnsout that what we have been consideringwas not the
beginningof a story after all, it was the story. The encounterpromisedin
the title did indeed happen, and, as it turnsout, there is nothingelse left to
say. Although all the outwardtrappingsof a conventionalstory, such as a
title, an opening, and a conclusion, are present in the text, these elements
seem to fulfill merely a structural,but not a functional role. As Jean-
PhilippeJaccardhas noted in his discussionof Kharmsmini-stories,"every
element is in place (subject, title, plot, characters,etc.), but the participa-
tion of each of them in the narrationfrequentlyamounts to zero [.. .],
similarto a car in which the steeringwheel is in the correctplace, but not
connectedto the wheels" (268).
The matter-of-facttone of the narratorprecludesspeculationsthat the
456 Slavic and East European Journal
reported event is anything else than what it appears to be: two men cross-
ing paths in the street, each going about his own business. To be sure, the
fleeting anonymous encounter between strangers in the metropolis is a
favorite topos of literary modernism, expressed perhaps most poignantly in
Baudelaire's famous sonnet "A une passante." But there is no sense at all
of portentous fatefulness and tragically missed opportunity in Kharms's
deadpan narrative. What Kharms seems to be presenting is a simple, un-
adorned "slice of life" of utter banality, akin to the stack of bricks or
plywood boxes of minimalist sculpture. The only shocking aspect of this
story is the fact that it is told at all, since, after all, there seems to be
nothing worth telling. The reader is left with the same frustration that
might befall an art lover who visits a museum or gallery in search of
aesthetic illumination and encounters only piles of bricks and stacks of
plywood.
If "Vstrecha" leaves the reader's desire for narrative gratification unful-
filled, alternative approaches of reading prove equally unproductive. The
text lacks the polished form or aesthetic appeal that we would associate with
poetry, the pithily stated wisdom of a philosophical aphorism, or the witti-
cism of an anecdote. Neither does it invite symbolic or allegoric interpreta-
tion. Even the notion of the fragment, so central to both romantic and
modernist aesthetics, proves less than helpful in this case. "Vstrecha" is not
presented as the broken splinter of a shattered whole, longing for a lost state
of completeness. It seems in fact quite complete in itself. Just like a piece of
minimalist sculpture, it is simply "there," a stubborn irritant to hermeneutic
deciphering.
We can conclude then that the point of this story is hardly its "content,"
which is truly minimal. Rather, the focus of interest becomes the act of
storytelling itself. Although there seems to be no content worth telling, the
narrator nevertheless engages in an (aborted) act of narration. The reader's
frustrated search for narrative gratification foregrounds the situation of
literary consumption. The "encounter" thematized in the title of the story
also relates to the relationship between reader and text.9 In his study of
French minimalist fiction, Motte has pointed out that "minimalists invest
very heavily indeed in the encounter, relying on the carefully constructed
immediacy of their work and wagering boldly on the notion of presence"
(16). As Jaccard has shown, Kharms's narrator focuses his lens on a specific
"point zero" in space and time. The characters of the story only exist for
the brief moment in which they linger in the narrator's field of vision. Once
they walk out of it, they disappear from the narration as well, and the story
grinds to a halt (273). This situation leads to a host of interrelated ques-
tions, which, mutatis mutandis, relate to any work of minimalist art: What
do we expect from a story? What makes a story worth telling? Is a story in
which nothing particular happens still a story?
RussianMinimalistProse 457
the End"), the final piece in the collection Smert' iskusstvu (Death to Art,
1913) writtenby the futuristpoet VasiliskGnedov (1890-1978). The poem
consists of a page that, except for the title, number,and publisher'sseal at
the bottom, is left blank. Gnedov thus anticipatedcomparablephenomena
in the realms of twentieth-centuryvisual art and music, such as Yves
Klein's notorious exhibition in the Iris Clert Gallery,Paris, in April 1958,
which consistedof empty,white-washedwalls, or JohnCage'scomposition
4'33" (1952).
In all these cases, a zero-degreework of literature,art or music, like the
zero value in mathematics, cannot be simply equated with nothing.13A
frame provides temporal and spatial parameterswhich confine and define
the reception of the piece as a specimen of music or art. In the case of
Gnedov, the text has a title and appears as an item in a book of poems,
where it occupies the last page. Cage's compositioncan be and is meant to
be performed, witl musiciansgatheringon stage in front of an audience,
and emitting no sound for the prescribedtime interval. The same per-
formabilityapplies to Gnedov's poem as well. Read by the author,the text
was in fact a popularand much-demandeditem in publiclectures. Gnedov
wouldraisehis armand then quicklylet it fall in a dramaticgesture,eliciting
stormyapplausefrom the audience.14The fact that Gnedov labeled his text
a poema ratherthan a stikhotvorenieunderlinesa potentialnarrativeor epic
content, which is presented, as it were, as a pure virtuality.
Many of Gnedov's other poems are only slightlyless minimalist.Two of
the fifteen poems in the collection Smert'iskusstvuconsist of one letter
each ("u-," "iu"),15two others consist of one neologisticword. Nine texts
are one-line poems. One of them simply repeats the word "Buba"three
times. The one-line poem in itself, of course, was not Gnedov's invention.
The most notorious example of this genre in Russian literatureis Valery
Briusov's"0, zakroisvoi blednye nogi" ("O, cover your pale legs"), which
created a succes de scandale when it appeared in the 1895 collection
Russkie simvolisty. The youthful bravado and desire to "epaterles bour-
geois" of the leadingdecadentof the 1890shad more than a passingresem-
blance to the iconoclasm and aggressive anti-philistinismof his futurist
successorstwenty years later (althoughboth Briusovand the futuristswere
loath to acknowledge that parentage).16In this sense, Kharms'sminimal-
ism of the 1930s can also be read as a provocation against the officially
enforced "middlebrow"taste of Stalinist culture. In their extreme la-
conicity, Kharms'smini-storiesprovide a counterpointto the publiclyen-
couragedmonumentalismof Soviet literaryproduction.
One could argue that Gnedov's and Briusov's texts do not qualify as
direct generic antecedents of Kharms'smini-stories,since they constitute
examples of minimalistpoetry ratherthan minimalistprose.17It is true, of
course, that in extremely short texts the opposition between poetry and
Russian Minimalist Prose 459
prose becomes neutralized. Nevertheless, given its title and the fact that it
appears in a volume of poems, Gnedov's zero-text needs to be classified as
poetry. An analogous example of attaching a "poetry" label to something
that does not seem to warrant such a designation can be found in Kharms's
story "Sonet" ("A Sonnet," PSS 2:331-32), which, in spite of its generic
title, is written in prose.
The paradoxical genre of the poeme en prose, developed by Charles
Baudelaire and introduced into Russian literature with Ivan Turgenev's
Stikhotvoreniia v proze, provides a model for this type of cross-generic
labeling. Located in the no-man's land between poetry and prose, the
prose poem raises a host of theoretical questions about the nature of
poetry and prose as well as general problems of generic classification. The
notion of "lessening," which we have introduced as a key term of minimal-
ist aesthetics, is crucial for the definition of the prose poem. In the context
of prose literature, it is "less than a story," given its brevity; as a work of
poetry, given its lack of meter, rhyme, and lineation, it is "less than a
poem." Essentially, the nature of the genre consists in a cluster of minus-
functions, defining itself primarily by what it is not rather than by what it
is. As in the case of a minimalist work of art, the prose poem establishes its
"poeticity" not through any inherent formal quality, but simply by being
labeled as such.18
One of the earliest critics in Russia to notice this radical feature of the
prose poem was Nikolai Chernyshevsky. In a letter to his son, who had sent
him from Paris a few of his own prose poems inspired by Turgenev's
Stikhotvoreniia v proze, Chernyshevsky condemned the new genre in un-
equivocal terms. He alleged that such texts cannot claim a literary status at
all. At best they are "themes" or "rough drafts" (chernovye nabroski)
which require an act of painstaking labor to be transformed into a work of
art. As Chernyshevsky put it: "Peasant huts are built with rough-hewn logs.
But giving the public a wood chip [shchepku] betrays a lack of respect for
one's gift. The chip has to be transformed through thoughtful carving into a
very beautiful little thing of regular outlines; only then will it be a suitable
gift."'9 With this example of the wood chip as a work of art, Chernyshevsky
provided an unwitting anticipation of the twentieth-century concept of the
"ready-made." Thirty years before Marcel Duchamp scandalized the New
York art world with his urinal, Chernyshevsky had already furnished the
standard arguments that would later be raised against minimal or concep-
tual forms of art: How can something be called art if it displays no evidence
of craft and technique? If anybody can do it, how can it be special?
At first sight, Turgenev's prose poems seem to have little in common
with Kharms's mini-stories, aside from purely external features such as a
short prosaic form interspersed with occasional dialogues. Interestingly
enough, a text more akin to Kharms's mini-stories can be found not in
460 Slavic and East European Journal
There were about eleven of us in the room and we all talked an awful lot.
It was a warm May evening ...
Suddenly we all grew silent.
-"Gentlemen, it is time to go!" said one of us.
We all stood up and left ...
TpH nIIeBKa
IlIei ienosBeK, H nnjOHynTpIDKlbI.
OH yIlmeJ,nJIeBKH ocTanHCb.
1 cKa3ajiOH,HrmeBOK:
- MbI 3secb, a HejoBeKa HeT.
H Apyrofl cKa3aan:
- OH ymeJi.
H1 TpeTHfi:
- OH TOJIbKO3aTeM H npHxoaHJI, Hac nOCaAHTb3gecb.
TOO6bI
MbI- IeJIb )KH3HH
IeJIoBeKa.OH yineii, a MbIocranHcb. (SS 64)
The Three Spittles
A man came and spat three times.
He went away; the spittles remained.
And one spittle said:
- We are here, and the man is gone.
And the other said:
-He has left.
And the third:
-He only came to put us here. We are the goal of man's life. He went away, and we have
remained.
The distortion of the generic title word (making it rhyme, incidentally, with
Kafka!) is motivated by a rhyme constraint. Unlike the word "Skasska,"
which, although misspelled, is at least phonetically correct, "Skavka" consti-
tutes a neologism. Jaccard has pointed to the important transitional nature
of this poem in Kharms's oeuvre (281). Written in 1930, it combines the
deformative avant-garde poetics of his earlier style with the laconic minimal-
ism of the later prose narratives. Significantly, Kharms uses the material of
the folktale to demonstrate the impossibility of traditional narration.
In at least one instance, Kharms borrowed a technique of communicative
disturbance directly from Sologub's fairy tales. Sologub's story "Tik" fea-
tures a boy who has the annoying habit of interrupting all his sentences with
the word "tik!" (SS 12). In Kharms's "Sluchai" cycle, the same motif ap-
pears in a vaguely Chekhovian dramatic scene with the title "Tiuk!" (PSS
2:346-47). The little boy has turned into an elderly man who drives his
female companion crazy by constantly uttering the word "tiuk!" when she
hits on a log of firewood with her axe. The shift from child to adult is
significant. While the young age of the character in Sologub's text provides a
natural explanation for a behavior which, although annoying, constitutes a
form of essentially harmless play, the adult character in Kharms's scene
seems positively deranged.
The self-stylization of the author as an infantile character, as evidenced
in the matter-of-fact-like and disturbingly unemotional reporting of ab-
surd, cruel, and shocking events, is a technique that can also be observed in
the dreams of Aleksei Remizov.29 In their absurdist laconicity, as well as in
their at times violent content, many of Remizov's dreams anticipate
Kharms's mini-stories. In some instances, Remizov, just like Kharms, en-
gages in metafictional comments on his own narrative minimalism. In one
of Remizov's dreams, the narrator is confronted with "paper from the
fourth dimension" on which it is impossible to write with either pencil or
pen. The whole secret, he is told by someone, consists in "making some-
thing from nothing" (31). In another dream, the narrator is hauling a cart
loaded with sand to a mountain village. When he arrives, the women of the
village inform him that the sand will be used to weave cloth (68). The
paradox of a woven structure - a text! - made of sand points to the prob-
lem of creating a coherent narrative out of autonomous minimal units.
In conclusion, we note that the principle of minimalism provides an
overarching theoretical rubric for the various examples of Russian prose
miniatures that we have identified as possible antecedents of Kharms's mini-
RussianMinimalistProse 467
Bbin O;HH pbicbIebI eOBeK, y KOTOporOHe 6bIno rna3 H ymefi. Y Hero He 6bino H BOIOC,
TaK YTOpbIxCHMero Ha3bIsanIHyCIOBHO.
FOBOpHTbOH He MOr, TaK KaK y Hero He 6bIJio pTa. Hoca ToaKe y Hero He 6bino.
468 Slavic and East European Journal
Y Hero He 6bIJIo gaxce pyK H HOr. 14 KHBOTa y Hero He 6bino, H CIHHbI y Hero He 6bInO, H
xpe6Ta y Hero He 6bIno, H HHKaKHX y Hero He 6biio. HHqero He 6bino! TaK
BHyTpeHHOCTefi
xTO HenOHITHO, O KOMHieT peIb.
Yxa JiyqImeMbIO HeM He 6yAeM6ojibme roBOpHTb.(PSS 2:330)
Blue NotebookNo. 10
There was once a red-haired man who had no eyes and no ears. He also had no hair, so he
was calledred-hairedonly in a mannerof speaking.
He wasn'table to talk, becausehe didn'thave a mouth. He had no nose, either.
He didn'teven have any armsor legs. He also didn'thave a stomach,and he didn'thave a
back, and he didn't have a spine, and he also didn'thave any other insides. He didn'thave
anything.[Or:There was nothing].So it's hardto understandwhomwe're talkingabout.
So we'd better not talk about him any more. (Gibian63)
NOTES
1 Chances,186. ContemporaryKharmsscholarssuch as Jean-PhilippeJaccardor Mikhail
Iampolsky would probably react to such a statement with consternation or scorn. Never-
theless, in juxtaposition to Jaccard's and Iampolsky's formidable attempts to interpret
Kharms's texts as serious philosophy, Chances's genuine bewilderment at the strangeness
of Kharms's stories is rather refreshing.
2 Kharms'spublisheddiariesand notebookscontainno referenceto Chekhov.
3 For a discussionof American minimalistfiction of the 1980s, see the special issue of
Mississippi Review (vols. 40-41, 1985), with an introduction by Kim Herzinger.
4 See Colpitt, 3, and Baker, 17-18. In his 1937 tract "Systemand Dialectics of Art,"
publishedin Paris,Grahamofferedthe followingdefinitionof minimalism:"Minimalism
is the reducingof paintingto the minimumingredientsfor the sake of discoveringthe
ultimate, logical destination of painting in the process of abstracting. Painting starts with
a virgin,uniformcanvasand if one worksad infinitumit revertsagainto a plainuniform
surface (dark in color), but enriched by process and experiences lived through. Founder:
Graham"(115-16). The term "minimalism"
had been used a few yearsbefore by David
Russian Minimalist Prose 469
WORKS CITED
Graham, John. John Graham's "System and Dialectics of Art." Ed. Marcia Epstein Allentuck.
Baltimore:JohnsHopkinsUP, 1971.
Green, Eleanor.John Graham,ArtistandAvatar.Washington,D.C.: The PhillipsCollection,
1987.
Grob, Thomas. Daniil Charms' unkindliche Kindlichkeit: Ein literarisches Paradigma der
Spatavantgarde im Kontext der russischen Moderne. Slavica Helvetica, vol. 45. Bern:
PeterLang, 1994.
Hart, Pierre. "Functionsof the Fairy Tale in Sologub'sProse." Studiesin Honor of Xenia
Gasiorowska.Ed. LaurenG. Leighton.Columbus,OH: Slavica,1983.71-80.
Herzinger, Kim. "Introduction:On the New Fiction." MississippiReview 40-41 (1985):
689-98.
Iampol'skii, Mikhail. Bespamiatstvo kak istok (chitaia Kharmsa). Moscow: Novoe litera-
turnoeobozrenie,1998.
Jaccard, Jean-Philippe. Daniil Harms et la fin de l'avant-garde russe. Slavica Helvetica, vol.
39. Bern:PeterLang, 1991.
Janecek,Gerald J. "Minimalismin ContemporaryRussianPoetry:Vsevolod Nekrasovand
Others." Slavonic and East European Review 70.3 (July 1992): 401-419.
Kharms, Daniil. "Dnevnikovyezapisi Daniila Kharmsa."Publ. A. Ustinova i A. Kob-
rinskogo.Minuvshee11 (1991):417-583.
. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1: Stikhotvoreniia. Vol. 2: Proza i stsenki. Dra-
maticheskieproizvedeniia.St. Petersburg:"AkademicheskiiProekt,"1997. (Referredto
as "PSS"in the text).
. TsirkShardam.Ed. V. N. Sazhin.St. Petersburg:Kristall,1999.
Kobrinskii, A. Poetika "OBERIU" v kontekste russkogo literaturnogo avangarda. 2 vols.
Moscow:IzdanieMoskovskogoKul'turologicheskogo Litseiia,1999.
Korolenko,V. G. O literature.Moscow:Gos. izd-vokhudozh.lit-ry,1957.
Markov,Vladimir.RussianFuturism:A History.Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1968.
Metzidakis,Stamos. "The Prose Poem's Deconstructionof Literariness."Difference Un-
bound: The Rise of Pluralism in Literature and Criticism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. 71-
95.
Motte, Warren. Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature. Lincoln: U of
NebraskaP, 1999.
Nilsson,Nils Ake. "VasiliskGnedov'sOne-LetterPoems."GorskiVijenats:A Garlandof Es-
says Offered to Professor Elizabeth Mary Hill. Publications of the Modern Humanities Re-
searchAssociation,2. Cambridge:ModernHumanitiesResearchAssoc., 1970. 220-23.
Popkin, Cathy. The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol. Stanford:
StanfordUP, 1993.
Prince,Gerald.A Dictionaryof Narratology.Lincoln:U of NebraskaP, 1987.
Propp, Vladimir.Morphologyof the Folktale.Trans.LaurenceScott. Austin: U of TexasP,
1968.
Rabinowitz, Stanley J. Sologub's Literary Children: Keys to Symbolist's Prose. Columbus,
OH: Slavica,1980.
Remizov,Aleksei. MartynZadeka:Sonnik.Paris:Opleshnik,1954.
Roberts, Graham. The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU--Fact, Fiction, Metafiction. Cam-
bridge:CambridgeUP, 1997.
Rose, Barbara."A B C Art."MinimalArt:A CriticalAnthology.Ed. GregoryBattcock.New
York:Dutton, 1968.274-97.
Shemshurin,Andrei. Futurizmv stikhakhV Briusova. Moscow:Tip. Russkogo Tovarish-
chestva, 1913.
Shishman, S. S. Neskol'ko veselykh i grustnykh istorii o Daniile Kharmse i ego druz'iakh.
Leningrad:[S. Shishman],1991.
472 Slavic and East European Journal