Daniil Kharms was an early Soviet writer who died, with a little help from the Party’s security apparatus, in 1942. Before that, his work for children allowed him – for a time – not to starve to death. That we have his stories and poems for adults is thanks to the hard work of brave men and women who held onto his notebooks until a better age arrived. What follows is a short piece I stumbled upon recently by him which made me pause, and some suggestions as to its interpretation. The translation is my own.
[186]
Whenever I see someone, I want to hit them in the face. It’s so nice to get them in the mug.
I am sitting in my room and doing nothing.
Now here comes someone for a cup of tea, I hear them knocking at the door. “Come in!” I tell them. He comes in and says “Hello! So good that I caught you at home.” I give him one in the face then kick him in the crotch with my boot. My guest falls on his back in terrible pain. Now I go for the eyes with my heel. Let me tell you, that ought to teach a man not to come by without being invited!
Here’s another way it happens: I offer the guest a cup of tea. The guest agrees, sits at the table, drinks his tea, and starts to tell some story. I act as if I’m listening really intently, nod my head, go “oh” and “ah”, look all surprised and laugh away. The guest, flattered by my attention, gets more and more into his story.
I calmly pour myself a full mug of boiling water and throw it in my guest’s face. He jumps to his feet and clutches at his skin. I just say to him: “My soul has run out of good deeds. Get out of here!” And I push him out of the door.
1939/1940. Russian original here.
Kharms’ work initially did nothing for me when I first encountered it at Cambridge. The stories are, on the surface and quite possibly also underneath it too, absurd and meaningless. But I was lucky enough to have a professor who was able to help me appreciate why these short little things – the one I have translated is somewhat representative in length, style, and content – can in fact be quite subversive and full of meanings for those who seek them.
In this story, we have a man who likes hitting people. “It’s so nice” to hit them, he tells us. He hits two people in the story, and not just in the face. That appears all there is to it.
What can we say about this? Let’s begin with the narrator. He seems an odd one. First, he enjoys this violence. He does not seem to have any idea of the pain he might be causing. At the same time, he is quite aware of social cues, as we see him “nod” and “look all surprised”, mimicking a normal person to achieve a particular goal – enticing his speaker to continue with their story. Beyond just his hitting people, he has a distorted idea of right and wrong, or even appropriate and inappropriate, as his ostensible reason for the violence is either annoyance at people arriving without arranging the meeting beforehand, or else the exhaustion of his goodwill.
The narrator is recognisably a human being, but not “like us”. His easy tolerance of violence and his strange ideas of propriety are probably the keys to unlocking the deeper meaning here. The Soviet government, as part of its attempts to radically reformulate society during its early years, imagined creating a new type of human being – the New Soviet Man. Strong, healthy, intelligent, and fiercely adherent to Communist ideals, they/he would be responsible for ensuring the USSR’s success along with the spread of revolution around the world.
By the time Kharms wrote this piece in 1940, the experiment had failed, and over a million people were living in the Gulag. We can read the narrator as the monstrous creation that results when we try to change a human being from what is “natural”.
We can also, of course, think of the narrator as the kind of creature that war produces. Kharms was arrested because of alleged anti-war sentiments, expressing the desire to punch in the face any mobilisation officer that tried to recruit him. (We see a certain similarity in gesture here to the story). War, too, makes us less human, and more easily violent, while bringing a strange set of norms whose infraction leads to disproportionate violence. Either way, what we see is a situation in which violence is normal, funny even (you should,at the very least, have chuckled while you read the piece). This is not, we must reflect, a particularly healthy situation. Something must have gone wrong to produce it.
Here’s another thought. Perhaps the narrator is a civil servant, not a private individual. He is part of a big, frightening, Soviet bureaucracy. People come to the state, which Stalinist propaganda imagined as a big family, trusting that it will protect them and “listen” to their stories and problems. But instead, in many cases, the state reacted with inexplicable violence against those people who had trusted it, arresting, beating, and exiling them. The phrase I translated as “without being invited” could be written more literally as “being called”, which to me suggests a waiting room at a miserable municipal office, a thing of which I have had more than enough experience in the Former Soviet Union. In this reading, the guests have assumed they have rights that the authorities, in actual fact, do not grant them.
And what to make of the narrator’s words about the soul – “My soul has run out of good deeds”, or perhaps alternatively out of “virtues”? It’s startling to see goodness reduced to a transaction that you do until you run out of energy. This may be so in real life, but we like to hope that it is not true and that, instead, we are always capable of doing good. As noted above, we can read this phrase as indicating the narrator’s monstrous loss of humanity caused by the state or war. But can we not also read it as something unnerving – as a statement that understands human nature all too well?
See, the narrator knows how to manipulate his audience to get them to tell a story. Perhaps the problem here is that he knows also that we are only good so long as we have the strength for it. In this, he seems rather more honest than the rest of us. Don’t we all, from time to time, get annoyed at an unexpected guest? And maybe occasionally we may think to ourselves that a slap or a mug of tea in the face may hasten their departure and get us a bit of peace and quiet. We are restraining ourselves, pretending to be good, while just getting frustrated inside. Our narrator meanwhile just lets it all out and speaks his truth. Well, it’s not good, but perhaps the narrator’s blatant disregard for social norms, as can so often happen, makes us consider our own unthinking adherence to them?
Anyway, there is no obvious answer to the question of what this story means. I found it shocking and funny when I stumbled upon it. But there is plenty to think about, even though it is short. I’d be interested to hear any interpretations I may have missed in the comments.