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From Prutkov to Kharms: tracing nonsense in the Russian literary tradition

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From Prutkov to Kharms: tracing nonsense in the Russian literary tradition

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Content From Prutkov to Kharms:
Tracing Nonsense in the Russian Literary Tradition
By
Caitlin Giustininao
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 Caitlin Giustiniano

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Sarah Pratt, and to my committee
members, Thomas Seifrid and Aimee Bender, who met with me and offered me guidance,
feedback and support throughout my research and writing, as well as more generally during my
graduate program. I sincerely appreciate their advice, insights, and feedback during this
dissertation.
I am grateful to the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at USC and the USC
graduate school for the funding that made my research possible. A heartfelt thanks goes out to
USC library staff and the special collections department, who repeatedly went out of their way to
help me find the materials I needed for my research and were always prompt, reliable, and
friendly.
I wish to thank all of my colleagues and peers in USC’s Slavic Languages and Literatures
department for their encouragement, especially our former department administrator
Susan Kechekian , without whom I don’t know how I would have survived. Susan, your help
and friendship have been invaluable to me. Additionally, I want to thank Deborah Russo , our
new department administrator who helped me through many technical and administrative
hiccups. I want to acknowledge Sarah Matthews, Erica Camisa Morale, and Dmitrii Kuznetsov
, for their collaboration with me on many projects and their friendship over my graduate career.
They helped make my journey a truly rewarding journey. I wish to thank Martha Kelly at the
University of Missouri and Masha Gorshkova at Stanford for their continued support, advice,
and collaboration.
I am incredibly grateful to my friends, especially Kali Williams and my apartment mates
Andrew Stewart and Andrew Barton for their unwavering patience, support, and willingness to
listen to me talk ‘nonsense.’ A special thanks to My mother, Linda Giustiniano, my father,
Joseph Giustiniano, and my step mother, Jasmin Giustiniano, for their understanding and for
always being there for me.
ii

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………. ii
List of Figures..………………………………………………………………………………….. iv
Introduction...…………………………………………………………………………………….. 1
Chapter I. “The Land Where the Jumblies Live:” The Nonsense Tradition in Literature.……..15
1. An Introduction to Nonsense
2. The Qualities and Devices of Nonsense
3. Nonsense in Children’s literature
Chapter II. History of Nonsense in the Russian Canon…………….…………………………. 59
1. Imported Nonsense
2. Russian and Soviet Nonsense Works
3. Nonsense for Children In Russian Literature
Chapter III. “Only That Which Has No Practical Sense:” Daniil Kharms and the Metaphysical
Meaning of Nonsense...……………………………………………………………………….. 100
1. Daniil Kharms: An Introduction
2. Nonsense as a Path to a Higher Reality
3. Daniil Kharms and the Unifying Features of Nonsense: Listing and Emotional
Detachment
Chapter IV. How Carroll’s Caterpillar Becomes Nabokov’s Butterfly...…………………….. 146
1. Vladimir Nabokov’s engagement with Lewis Carroll
2. Alice, Cincinnatus, and Lolita: The Alice theme explored
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….. 172
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………... 178

iii

List of Figures
Figure 1. Kharmsian Line of Universal Truth………………………………………………131
Figure 2. Original Illustration of Alice playing Croquet by Sir John Tenniel…………..162
iv

Nonsense explores the interactions of pattern and freedom, as a theme about bothe life and art.
Wendy Steiner, 1982
I like nonsense: it wakes up the brain cells.
-Dr. Seuss
Introduction
There is a small crop of nonsense – the work of Kuzma Prutkov, Futurist experimentation
with Zaum, the works of the Soviet avant-gardist group OBERIU - that time and again find
fertile ground in the fields of the Russian literary tradition. These works are nestled snugly in the
conventional texts of the Russian literary canon of both classic literature and children’s literature;
they are taught in schools, they are studied by scholars in both Russia and abroad, and like most
classic Russian literature, these authors read and reference each other. The charm of these works
has delighted scholars, readers and children again and again. Yet, so often they have been
haphazardly labeled and mislabeled as works of the absurd, parody, fantasy, or the grotesque. I
argue that these texts should be considered as works of nonsense literature. I am not talking here
of the term “nonsense” used loosely in everyday speech, but rather as a genre of literature with
its own specific qualities that align with the devices and interests of a specific set of authors.
The study of nonsense literature has made leaps and bounds in the last century. Scholars have
begun to investigate its borders, detangle its web of crisscrossing devices, and bring into focus a
clearer definition of nonsense literature. However, with the exception of theories of nonsense in
children’s literature, this scholarship has almost exclusively covered western literature, leaving
out the rich works of nonsense by Russian and Soviet authors. In this dissertation, my aim is
1

twofold: I will work towards my own definition of nonsense literature, exploring its tendencies
and devices to understand how a nonsense work is constructed, and I will argue for the inclusion
of Russian and Soviet works under the umbrella of nonsense, while closely examining in these
texts their themes, qualities, and devices.
Let us briefly consider a Russian example of nonsense to become more acquainted with the
genre. Below is “О явлениях и существованиях № 2” “On phenomena and existences № 2”
written by Soviet author Daniil Kharms under the pen name Daniil Dandan, who will appear
more substantially in chapter 3:
Вот бутылка с водкой, так называемый спиртуоз. А рядом вы видите Николая
Ивановича Серпухова. Вот из бутылки поднимаются спиртуозные пары. Поглядите,
как дышит носом Николай Иванович Серпухов. Поглядите, как он облизывается и
как он щурится. Видно, ему это очень приятно, и главным образом потому, что
спиртуоз. Но обратите внимание на то, что за спиной Николая Ивановича нет
ничего. Не то чтобы там не стоял шкап, или комод, или вообще что-нибудь такое, а
совсем ничего нет, даже воздуха нет. Хотите верьте, хотите не верьте, но за спиной
Николая Ивановича нет даже безвоздушного пространства или, как говорится,
мирового эфира. Откровенно говоря, ничего нет. Этого, конечно, и вообразить себе
невозможно. Но на это нам плевать, нас интересует только спиртуоз и Николай
Иванович Серпухов. Вот Николай Иванович берет рукой бутылку со спиртуозом и
подносит ее к своему носу. Николай Иванович нюхает и двигает ртом, как кролик.
Теперь пришло время сказать, что не только за спиной Николая Ивановича, но
впереди, так сказать, перед грудью и вообще кругом нет ничего. Полное отсутствие
всякого существования, или, как острили когда-то: отсутствие всякого присутствия.
2

Однако давайте интересоваться только спиртуозом и Николаем Ивановичем.
Представьте себе, Николай Иванович заглядывает вовнутрь бутылки со спиртуозом,
потом подносит ее к губам, запрокидывает бутылку донышком вверх и выпивает,
представьте себе, весь спиртуоз. Вот ловко! Николай Иванович выпил спиртуоз и
похлопал глазами. Вот ловко! Как это он! А мы теперь должны сказать вот что:
собственно говоря, не только за спиной Николая Ивановича или спереди и вокруг
только, а также и внутри Николая Ивановича ничего не было, ничего не
существовало. Оно, конечно, могло быть так, как мы только что сказали, а сам
Николай Иванович мог при этом восхитительно существовать. Это, конечно, верно.
Но, откровенно говоря, вся штука в том, что Николай Иванович не существовал и
не существует. Вот в чем штука-то. Вы спросите: а как же бутылка со спиртуозом?
Особенно куда вот делся спиртуоз, если его выпил несуществующий Николай
Иванович? Бутылка, скажем, осталась. А где же спиртуоз? Только что был, а вдруг
его и нет. Ведь Николай-то Иванович не существует, говорите вы. Вот как же это
так? Тут мы и сами теряемся в догадках. А впрочем, что же это мы говорим? Ведь
мы сказали, что как внутри, так и снаружи Николая Ивановича ничего не
существует. А раз ни внутри, ни снаружи ничего не существует, то, значит, и
бутылки не существует. Так ведь? Но, с другой стороны, обратите внимание на
следующее: если мы говорим, что ничего не существует ни изнутри, ни снаружи, то
является вопрос: изнутри и снаружи чего? Что-то, видно, все же существует? А
может, и не существует. Тогда для чего же мы говорили изнутри и снаружи? Нет,
тут явно тупик. И мы сами не знаем, что сказать. До свидания. Всё.
Даниил Дандан (O iaveniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh, 59-60).
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Here’s a bottle of vodka, so called spirits. And next to it you see Nikolai Ivanovich
Serpukhov. Now, from the bottle rise the vapors of the spirits. See how Nikolai Ivanovich
Serpukhov breathes through his nose. Have a look at how he squints, licking his lips. You
can see how very pleasant this is for him and mainly because it’s spirits. But direct your
attention to the fact that behind Nikolai Ivanovich’s back there’s nothing. It’s not that
there isn’t a wardrobe standing there, or a dresser, or anything like that, but that there’s
nothing there at all, not even any air. You can believe it or not, but behind Nikolai
Ivanovich’s back there isn’t even any air-less space or, as they say, universal ether.
Frankly speaking, there’s nothing there. Of course, it’s impossible to even imagine it. But
we couldn’t give a shit. We’re only interested in the spirits and Nikolai Ivanovich
Serpukhov. Now Nikolai Ivanovich takes the bottle of spirits and brings it close to his
nose. Nikolai Ivanovich sniffs and moves his mouth around like a rabbit. And now the
time has come to say that not only behind the back of Nikolai Ivanovich but in
front—that is to say, in front of his chest—and all around him there is nothing. The
complete lack of any sort of being, or, as they used to joke: the absence of any presence.
However, let us interest ourselves only with the spirits and Nikolai Ivanovich. Let’s
imagine Nikolai Ivanovich peers into the bottle of spirits, then brings it to his lips,
overturns the bottle bottoms up and drinks, if you can imagine it, all the spirits. How
clever! Nikolai Ivanovich drank the spirits and blinked several times. How clever! How’d
he do that? And now we must say this: Plainly speaking, not only was there nothing
behind the back of Nikolai Ivanovich or in front and around only but also inside Nikolai
Ivanovich nothing existed. It, of course, could have been as we just said and Nikolai
4

Ivanovich himself could still exist quite splendidly. This is, of course, true enough. But,
frankly speaking, the crux of the matter is that Nikolai Ivanovich did not and does not
exist. Now that’s the crux of it.You may ask: And what about the bottle of spirits? And
particularly, where the heck did the spirits go if it was drunk by the non-existent Nikolai
Ivanovich. The bottle, for instance, is left. But where’s the spirits? Just here and suddenly
it’s gone. And you say Nikolai Ivanovich doesn’t exist, you say. So how’s that possible?
At this point we ourselves get lost in these guessing games. And yet, what’s this we’re
saying? Haven’t we already said that just as nothing exists inside Nikolai Ivanovich, so
nothing exists on the outside. And since nothing exists neither inside nor outside then that
means the bottle doesn’t exist either. Isn’t that so? But, on the other hand, direct your
attention to the following: If we’re saying that nothing exists neither inside nor outside
then the question comes up: inside or outside what? Something exists then, doesn’t it?
But maybe it doesn’t. Then why are we saying “inside” and “outside.” No, this is clearly
a dead end. And we don’t know what to say. Goodbye. THAT’S ALL
Daniil Dandan (Today I Wrote Nothing, 226-227).
What can we say about the plot or the meaning of such a story? At first glance one could say that
the story is that of a man drinking vodka, however, the narrator continually interrupts his own
story to direct the reader’s attention to the “nothingness” that surrounds Nikolai Ivanovich. There
are many common qualities of nonsense in this text such as the playful construction of the text
and the skaz-style narration. The construction is that of an unsuccessful attempt to write a story,
which is emphasized by the narrator’s remarks about what we do or do not care about, for
example, “Но на это нам плевать,” meaning “but we don’t care about that” but using a
colloquial expression translate above as “ but we couldn't give a shit.” The verb “Плевать”
5

literally means “to spit.” If we consider the text to have two stories, that of Nikolai Ivanovich
(the original subject of the intended story) and that of the nothingness, then neither makes any
progress. Neither comes to anything at the end, there is no result much like in a game where at
the end the board will be reset. There is no progress that drives either story, and the secondary
(which is undoubtedly the more interesting) eats into the first. Both stories end without a result.
The narrator’s attempts at logic fail and his attempts to “say” something also fail, “Нет, тут явно
тупик. И мы сами не знаем, что сказать. До свидания. Всё.” “No, this is clearly a dead end.
And we don’t know what to say. Goodbye. That's all.” So the story ends.
The more the narrator addresses the nothingness, the more of the story it seems to consume,
until all parts of the story become negated, their existence denied. This type of negation is
common in nonsense works. In particular to Kharms, this type of negation is connected to
negative theology or the apophatic path to God. In contrast to the absurd, in which we would find
this negation to disconnect us from meaning, Kharms uses it to gesture at something beyond our
comprehension. The idea is not that no connections exist or that we are doomed to a godless
existence where nothing matters, but rather that there exist concepts beyond human
comprehension, something other realm of understanding that we are simply unable to reach. The
narrator acknowledges this, saying, “Этого, конечно, и вообразить себе невозможно” “Of
course, it’s impossible to even imagine it.” It seems counterintuitive, but the way he suggests that
there is “something” is through the concept of “nothing.”
We can see that the text uses and subverts logic just as it uses and subverts meaning. The
narrator, anticipating the reader’s questions, which are born from common sense, asks “если мы
говорим, что ничего не существует ни изнутри, ни снаружи, то является вопрос: изнутри и
снаружи чего? Что-то, видно, все же существует?” “If we’re saying that nothing exists neither
6

inside nor outside then the question comes up: inside or outside what? Something exists then,
doesn’t it?” Yet ultimately, the answer that is provided is “maybe not.” The narrator does not
expand on this answer or offer some reasoning. In fact, we are told, “Хотите верьте, хотите не
верьте, но за спиной Николая Ивановича нет даже безвоздушного пространства или, как
говорится, мирового эфира. Откровенно говоря, ничего нет” “You can believe it or not, but
behind Nikolai Ivanovich’s back there isn’t even any air-less space or, as they say, universal
ether. Frankly speaking, there’s nothing there.” The situation is presented as simply a fact or a
phenomenon of this reality, that whether you believe in it or not, exists nonetheless.
The story leads nowhere, it offers no explanations but on the contrary insists on a confusing
reality, and it challenges the notions and expectations of what a “story” should be. So why are we
drawn to nonsense, such as this? What does it offer us? I believe that there are two key values
that draw us over and over again to nonsense.
The first is freedom. Nonsense gives virtually limitless freedom to the nonsense writer and, to
a lesser extent, the nonsense reader. The nonsense writer is afforded extreme artistic freedom
from literary, linguistic, and social norms and expectations. We can see from Kharms’s story
above how the expectations of a conventional plot and ending are subverted, while notions about
etiquette and socially acceptable speech are also challenged. The nonsense reader on the other
hand is also afforded linguistic and societal freedoms. Nonsense that makes frequent use of
neologisms and puns invites the reader to play with the limits of their native language. Both the
nonsense reader and writer are afforded a freedom from the grind of everyday logic. While on
the surface this freedom might seem to be a form of chaos, there is actually a hidden order
behind nonsense, albeit an alternative, topsy-turvy order. For anything to be overturned, there
first needs to be something established to overturn, and in overturning, a new pattern or order is
7

then created in opposition to the old. Therefore, this freedom is not totally chaotic and therefore
subconsciously unnerving to us.
This brings me to the next value, which is reassurance. In many ways, nonsense is reassuring.
Even though there may be violent and unpleasant content in nonsense, the emotional detachment
with which that content is treated brings us reassuring laughter. Nonsense seems to demand of
the reader an acceptance of the many illogical and unexplainable ideas and situations. Life is not
itself totally logical. There are many things that we will never comprehend but will have to
accept. Nonsense encourages not just an acceptance of these things but for the reader to embrace
them. There is a reassuring quality to be able to accept the things that don’t make sense in the
world. Part of this acceptance and the subsequent reassurance comes from the ability of nonsense
to make metaphysical, spiritual, or otherworldly connections. The idea that there might be
another reality or realm beyond our understanding in which we nonetheless are part of relieves
some of the tension and fears that we might have about the world. These are ideas which will be
explored more thoroughly throughout this dissertation.
I will dedicate my first chapter to understanding nonsense more generally. I will look briefly
at the history of nonsense literature before moving on to current scholarship on it. I will define
nonsense literature and disencumber it from the absurd, with which it has been closely linked for
a very long time. The main qualities which make up a nonsense work and will be elaborated on
are play and games - often linguistic play and play with extremes-, simultaneity and a
multiplicity of meanings held in tension with no meaning, and a lack of emotional attachment.
We might already be able to see many of these in the Kharms’s “Phenomena and existences №
2.” This work defines some key differences between nonsense and the absurd and demonstrates
that the terms should not be used interchangeably and carelessly, as they have previously been
8

used in both the English and Russian tradition.The absurd man, quite distinctly, is a man who is
isolated and cut off from God. There are no metaphysical connections for the absurd man.
Nonsense however leaves space for such metaphysical connections. God, religion, the
otherworldly, the occult, can all find a place in nonsense or not. The point here though, is that
nonsense does not preclude any of these connections. Additionally, there is a sense of dread and
horror attached to the absurd. In the absurd, life is pointless and that pointlessness looms over
everything with a weightiness. While in nonsense readers may find a number of “unpleasant”
things- death, violence, cruelty, etc.- there is no horror attached to these things, there is no
weight. In fact, one of the main elements of nonsense is emotional detachment. There are no
consequences and there is no horror, unlike with the absurd. I will also look at theories of
nonsense as it specifically applies to children’s literature. I will answer the question of why
nonsense so often appears in children’s literature and how its appearance in children’s literature
helps separate nonsense from the absurd. We can take for example the work of the American
writer and illustrator, Edward Gorey, who was known for what some scholars call dark nonsense.
“The Utter Zoo Alphabet” and The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Gorey are both children’s style
alphabet books, however, both are filled undeniably with unpleasantness, the latter of which is an
alphabet of dead children and how they died, and yet both undeniably are nonsense. The first is a
rhymed alphabet filled with made-up monstars to match the letter of the alphabet. For example,
“The Epitwee’s inclined to fits/ until at last it falls to bits./ The Fidknop is devoid of feeling;/ it
drifts about beneath the ceiling./ The Gawdge is understood to save/ all sorts of objects in its
cave./ The humglum crawls along the ground/ and never makes the slightest sound” (The
Everyman Book of Nonsense, 130-131). The nonsense monsters of the alphabet are accompanied
by sketchy black and white illustrations of these strange beasts. The use of rhyme and of the
9

neologisms made up for the names of the monsters is highly typical of nonsense verse for
children. The illustrations of the monsters might be scary for children but the emotional
detachment with which they are presented, coupled with the rhyme and the funny-sounding made
up names, no doubt delights the child. We would hardly expect the child to develop the sort of
existential dread associated with the absurd from this nonsense poem.
Yet, these theories on nonsense and child development complicate the definition of
nonsense, problematizing the “goal” aspect of nonsense. Nonsense literature’s association with
children’s literature raises tough questions such as: Can we really argue that nonsense literature
lacks a purpose, that it has no function or meaning? To what degree is nonsense a radical or
dangerous subversion of established rules and logic, and to what degree does it in the end
reinforce these rules? Perhaps it is possible for nonsense to be, at once, both radical and
conservative, thus creating its nonsense out of this very contradiction.
What makes the Russian tradition such a good environment for nonsense to grow? While
nonsense literature is predominantly thought of as a British phenomenon, the Russian canon has
its own organic examples of nonsense literature, both prose and verse, in addition to the British
influences. In chapter 2, I will answer this question and demonstrate that not only does nonsense
exist in Russian literature but that there is indeed a rich tradition and I argue for their inclusion
into the genre of nonsense.
One example of home grown nonsense sprouts up in the work of Kuz’ma Prutkov. Prutkov
was the literary creation of Aleksei K. Tolstoy and the three Zhemchuzhnikov brothers from
1853 to 1863 (Zhukov, 134).1 Through this literary persona they published many humorous
1 Brothers Aleksei, Vladimir, and Aleksandr Zhemchuzhnikov. Aleksei Mikhailovich Zhemchuzhnikov
was a well-known poet and academic, who created much of Prutkov’s poetry with A.K. Tolstoy. Vladimir
Mikhailovich Zhemchuzhnikov (the youngest of the three) worked as the editor of Prutkov’s poetry and
put together much of his biography. Aleksandr Mikhailovich Zhemchuzhnikov is credited with writing the
10

aphorisms, parodies, and nonsense verse in one of the main literary journals of the time,
Sovremennik. Mirsky claims that as Prutkov they created, “...plays and anecdotes that are a
mixture of excellent parody of old styles with sheer absurdity and nonsense” and that, “Kozma
Prutkov became the founder of a whole school of nonsense poetry” (Mirsky, 234). Later,
Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) would follow in Prutkov’s footsteps, writing nonsense verse in
the Shakespeare Society, a collection of writers who composed nonsense verse and humorous
plays.2 Though Mirsky notes that, “the most brilliant of this set was Count Fedor L. Sollogub (d.
1890), the best Russian nonsense poet since ‘Kozma Prutkov’” (Mirsky, 363). Count Fedor L.
Sollogub - not to be confused with Fedor Sologub, the symbolist poet - worked mainly as a
theatre designer of decorations and costumes. Despite this claim by Misky, Sollogub’s nonsense
works are not widely known.
Nikolai Gogol resides somewhere on the borders of nonsense literature and the grotesque
and, occasionally, realism. Gogol is, as Neil Cornwell puts it, “an exponent par excellence of
stylistic absurdism, with Sternean quirks, digressions, inflated similes, snatches of zany dialogue,
hyperbole, narrative and syntactic non sequiturs, superfluous detail and irrelevancies,
non-appearing characters and other forms of redundancy” (Cornwell, 45). For this reason,
Gogol’s narrative style plays an important role in the conversation about Russian nonsense
literature, and introduces questions about nonsense in prose versus nonsense in verse. Both
2 Soloviev was most well known as a philosopher interested in the mystical and metaphysical. Here we
can see the beginnings of a link between writers interested in religion and the practice of nonsense
writing. This is a link that continually reappears throughout this dissertation.
first piece and laying the poetic foundations for Prutkov. He later became a government official (Zhukov,
134-135).
11

Prutkov and Gogol were highly influential for Daniil Kharms (to whom Chapter III will be
dedicated).3
The Futurists and their experiments in language, sound, performance, and boundary pushing
also play a part in the development of nonsense literature in the Russian tradition. Especially of
interest are their ideas on самовитое слово (the self-made word) and заумь (trans-rational
language). Neologisms, made-up words, are one of the common devices of nonsense and there
are typically two categories of neologism, we find both in Futurist zaum. For example,
Khlebnikov’s “Заклятие смехом” “Incantation with laughter” and Kruchenykh’s infamous “дыр
бул щыл” “Dyr bul shchyl,” both experiment with language in a way that breaks rules and move
beyond any type of regular sense.4
In the first, we can see neologisms of the first category, which
use a known root to develop new words from which we can apprehend the meaning. in the
second example, the meaning of the neologisms is much harder to understand. Additionally,
“They also pioneered experimentation with performance art (before it was defined as such),
frequently to the point of scandal” which would later influence the Oberiuty (Kahn, 612).
Perhaps the clearest example of Russian nonsense is in the works of Daniil Kharms, one of
the three leading members of OBERIU. I look in depth at Kharms’s works, his ideas about art
and life, and even his very personality to evaluate how they fit into and contribute to the
nonsense genre. I, therefore, dedicate chapter 3 to the special case of Daniil Kharms and his
works. I will study his prose and poetry for adults- more specifically his Случаи (Incidents)
4 Also interesting to note Khlebnikov’s interest in mathematics and numbers, which seems to be a
recurring interest in nonsense writers (i.e. Lewis Carroll and Daniil Kharms). Khlebnikov’s number
theory mixes mathematics with mysticism, positing that through numerical patterns he could predict the
future. Additionally, Tynyanov once referred to him as the “Lobachevsky of the word” connecting him to
non-euclidean geometry.
3
In The Sabre, Kharms lists Gogol, Prutkov, and Khlebnikov among the writers he admires and later, in a
diary entry of 1937, he again notes Gogol and Prutkov among his favorite authors, this time in the
company of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll (Cornwell, 162).
12

collection and his longer prose story Старуха (The Old Woman)- and for children, in addition to
his journals and letters. This chapter will also look at Kharms’s collective work with OBERIU,
such as Три левых часа (Three Left Hours). Kharms’s works prominently feature many of the
hallmarks of nonsense. His works leave space for meaning and for miracle while retaining the
signature emotional detachment of nonsense. He makes extensive use of the listing device, play
with logic and words, play with infinity and circularity and much like other nonsense writers
before him has interests in mathematics and noneuclidean geometry. Kharms, himself, is part of
his nonsense art. He supposedly kept a useless machine in his apartment and with his eccentric
and raucous behavior he often caused spectacles around St. Petersburg (Cornwell, Daniil Kharms
and the Poetics of the Absurd : Essays and Materials, 7). Additionally, Kharms propensity for
nonsense even influenced the naming of the now famous OBERIU, in the Russian ОБЭРИУ. The
acronym stands for “объединение реального искусства,” (“the association of real art”) but
Kharms replaced what should be the “e” with a “э” to create the more interesting sounding
nonsense word (Oberiu: an Anthology, xvi).
In my fourth and final chapter, in what may seem like a strange move, I will look at the
special case of Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov presents us with an interesting case of an author
creating works that appear to be completely outside of the nonsense genre, but using many of the
nonsense devices and engaging with nonsense works, Carroll’s Alice novels in particular.
Nabokov was a fan of Lewis Carroll’s works from an early age and his first major work would be
a translation of Alice in Wonderland into Russian. In many of Nabokov’s subsequent works, in
English but also, interestingly, in Russian, readers can catch glimpses of Alice and references to
wonderland. I look at Nabokov’s connection to Carroll through his translation, his own fiction,
and his interviews. I argue the Alice is ever present in his novels, with the heaviest presence in
13

Приглашение на казнь (Invitation to a Beheading) and Lolita. Nabokov plays linguistic games
with his readers, he makes excessive puns, he uses acrostics, he plays “word golf” in the
appendix to Pale Fire etc. Nabokov favors so many of the devices of nonsense that even he felt it
necessary to address in an interview whether he writes the same kind of nonsense as Lewis
Carroll. However, most reasonable people would agree: Nabokov is not nonsense. By examining
how Nabokov uses these devices and what differences there are between Nabokov’s fiction and
other nonsense writers we can illuminate the borderline between nonsense and other genres like
fantasy. We can come one step closer to seeing the sense in that which has no sense.
14

Chapter I:
“The Land Where the Jumblies Live:” The Nonsense Tradition in Literature
If all the world were paper,
And all the Sea were Inke;
If all the Trees were bread and cheese,
How should we do for drink?5
1. An Introduction to Nonsense
There is something categorically irrational in endeavoring to make sense of that which has, as
the name seems to imply, no sense. That which gives nonsense its whimsy and charm is the very
thing that also stubbornly refuses to confine itself to any neat little box we would try to fit it in.
To define and understand nonsense is indeed a tricky business, though not altogether impossible.
In literature, the genre of nonsense, for most people, calls to mind the fictional works of
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) and the poems of Edward Lear (1812-1888).6
In fact, early studies of
nonsense often cite the beginnings of the nonsense genre with these two authors. Perhaps, it is
this association, which leads us to think of nonsense as not only a Victorian phenomenon, but as
primarily connected with children’s literature. As it happens, only the latter of these two
assumptions can be argued as valid and while the second makes matters altogether more
complicated. While the nonsense genre as we understand it today was certainly popularized by
these two figures, the tradition itself is much older.
As many scholars have noted, nonsense has existed in children’s rhymes, songs, and folklore
for as long as people have been telling stories. Early nonsense devices are often found scattered
6 When I write about nonsense as a “genre,” I am using a simple dictionary definition of genre and any
elaboration of this definition or quibbling over its exact nature is beyond the scope of this dissertation at
this time.
5 Stanza from the Anonymous nonsense poem “Interrogativa Cantilena” originally from Wits recreations
Augmented, London 1641.
15

throughout traditions, mixed with parody, satire, and humorous and light verse. This makes it
difficult to define clear beginnings of the genre. For example, Martin Esslin, investigating
nonsense as a predecessor to the Theater of the Absurd, claims the oldest preserved nonsense
verse are those of a French writer from the 13th century, though adding that, “we can be sure that
nonsense rhymes have been sung to children and chanted by adults since the earliest times”
(Esslin, 241). Still others have found evidence of older nonsense in the Greek tradition ranging
from classical plays to Greek philosophy (Anderson, 9-10). Anderson and Apseloff, in their work
on nonsense in children’s literature, offer up verses in translation form 200 A.D. by Nicarchus
that feature hallmark logical reversals one would not find out of place coming from the mouth of
any of the residents in wonderland.
I boiled hot water in an urn
Till it was cold as ice;
I blew the fire to make it burn,
Which froze it in a trice.
(qtd. in Anderson, 10)
In The Origins of English Nonsense, Noel Malcolm traces the genre in English literature back
to the 17th century, when nonsense in high literature really begins to flourish, mostly in verse
(Malcolm, 52). While this is the most stable start of English nonsense, Malcolm suggests it is
likely that earlier German nonsense verses of the 13th century influenced both the English and
the French tradition (Malcolm, 58). These verses feature a listing of logic reversals much the
same as the Greek example above.
Blatt und krone wellent muot willik sin,
So waenent topfknaben wislichen tuon,
16

So jaget unbilde mit hasen eber swin,
So ervliuget einen valken ein unmehtik huon,
Wirt dan(ne) der wagen vür diu rinder gende,
Treit dan(ne) der sak den esel zuo der müln,
Wirt danne ein eltiu gurre zeinem vülm:
So siht manz in der werlte twerhes stende
Breastplate and crown want to be volunteer soldiers,
Boys playing with a top think they are acting wisely,
The boar hunts with hares, setting a poor example,
A feeble hen flies up and catches a falcon.
Then the cart goes in front of the oxen,
The sack drags the donkey to the mill
An old nag turns into a filly:
This is what one sees in the world turned upside down.7
The theme of an upside down world, or the topsy-turvy, as it is often called, and the reversal of
the mirror are often explicitly given as a reason for the logical reversals of nonsense, as in this
example. In Italy, nonsense was made fashionable in the early 15th century by Florentine
Domenico di Giovanni, “il Burchiello,” whose, “nonsense poetry, and that of his many followers,
7 As quoted and translated in Malcolm, p. 53. Originally from F. Von der Hagen, Minnesänger: deutche
Liederdichter des zwölften, dreizehnten und vierzehten Jahrhunderts, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1838), p.197 (no.
53).
17

is neither single-mindedly parodic nor directly satirical. It seems to pursue nonsense for
nonsense’s sake” (Malcolm, 72).
But what makes nonsense literature “nonsense” and not simply an element of fantasy, parody,
satire, the grotesque, dadaism, surrealism, or the absurd? Is it possible to untangle nonsense from
these other genres and provide a clear definition? Can we even consider nonsense as its own
genre?8 Many conflicting and overlapping definitions exist for “nonsense” and, relatedly, “The
Absurd.”9 All one has to do is look up “nonsense” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary to find,
“words or language having no meaning or conveying no intelligible ideas” and “language,
conduct, or an idea that is absurd or contrary to good sense” (italics mine). Even scholars of the
absurd and of nonsense develop differing definitions for each term. The two terms are closely
related and often used interchangeably, especially in the Russian tradition. For example, the term
“Absurdism” is often applied by scholars to Daniil Kharms’s works when what is meant is
something akin to бессмыслица, which aligns more smoothly with the term nonsense. Sarah
Pratt, in her book Nikolai Zabolotsky: Enigma and Cultural Paradigm, translates and defines
bessmyslitsa as nonsense (Pratt, 67). The Russian root “смысл” means “sense,” while the prefix
“без” means “without, ” so literally, without sense. Kharms, himself, often used the word
“Чушь,” which is nonsense in a derogatory and colloquial sense, what we might call “hogwash”
or “BS”.10 To complicate the matter, Kornei Chukovsky often uses the words “нелепица” and
10 Kharms’s own words were: “Меня интересует только “чушь”; только то, что не имеет никакого
практического смысла” (“I’m interested in only nonsense, only that, which has no practical sense”) D.
Kharms 31 oct. 1937.
9 For a very complete summary of all the different definitions of nonsense in English, Dutch and German
from the Victorian era until 1988 See Wim Tigges An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense. “Ch. 1: Towards a
definition” Pg.6-46.
8 Stephen Prickett, in his book Victorian Fantasy, for example, views nonsense not as its own cohesive
genre, but as a shade of fantasy. Or rather, Pricket reads the nonsense of Carroll and Lear as part of the
escapism of Fantasy.
18

“нелепость” (both translated in this dissertation simply as “nonsense”) but when one looks them
up in a dictionary, one will find both “абсурд” “absurd” and “бессмыслица” “nonsense” listed
as the first two synonyms. “Чепуха,” which appears in Gogol’s “The Nose” is also translated as
nonsense. However, this too, is nonsense in a negative colloquial sense, something like “rubbish”
is appropriate here.
The boundaries of nonsense literature may always remain a bit hazy. However, I believe that
nonsense is a genre in its own right and that a division between nonsense and these other genres
can be sketched out.11
In working at ascribing a definition, nonsense’s specific connections to
children’s literature acts as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, theories of the usefulness of
nonsense in child development complicate the definition, for reasons which I will address later in
this chapter. On the other hand, the distinction between the genres becomes more evident when
we look at them in the context of children’s literature, where we would expect to find nonsense
-which features a lack of emotional attachment and does not preclude metaphysical connectionsbut not, for example, the absurd -to which existential dread is attached and where God is either
dead or never existed.
One division between nonsense and the absurd is that the absurd excludes the possibility for a
person to make a metaphysical or religious connection, while nonsense leaves space for these
connections by simply having fewer philosophical limitations. Additionally, definitions for the
absurd are most often connected to the Theatre of the Absurd and to philosophical concepts such
as Existentialism, Nihilism, and anti-meanings. Neil Cornwell explains that the “absurd is born
of Nihilism, out of Existentialism, fuelled by the certainty of death” (Cornwell, 5). In the section
11 We should keep in mind that no definition will be all encompassing nor completely satisfying.In an
attempt heed the warnings from other nonsense scholars that “The essence of nonsense will not be
captured by a purely scientific reading: in fact, the science of nonsense can easily turn into nonsense(ical)
science,” I propose that a little leeway for ambiguity is required (Tarantino, 2).
19

“Absurd creation” in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes that “creating or not creating changes
nothing. The absurd creator does not prize his work” (Camus, 72). The absurd is devoid of
meaning and of purpose. For Ionesco, the absurd man is, “that which is devoid of purpose… Cut
off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots” (as quoted in Cornwell, 3). In
nonsense this is often not the case. Nonsense does not cut off the nonsense writer from his
religious or metaphysical roots. In fact, many scholars of nonsense works have noted the
connection between nonsense and the metaphysical such as with the Oberiuty, whose bessmyslita
delighted in “verbal play and quest for metaphysical truth” (Pratt, 67).
The anxiety of the inevitability of death and “sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity
of the human condition,” which, according to theater historian Martin Esslin, marks the absurd,
notably is lacking in nonsense (Esslin, xix). Again this becomes evident when we look at
nonsense in children’s literature. Nonsense treats death, violence, and all around bad behavior,
which appear in high frequency, without horror. Many recent definitions of nonsense tend to
include this lack of emotional attachment as a main component of what makes nonsense stand
out against other genres. In children’s literature, this particular quality reassures the child through
its levity and laughter at otherwise grim situations (Anderson, 106). This stands in stark contrast
to the way other, closely related genres, such as the absurd, satire, or the grotesque treat these
topics. While both the absurd and nonsense certainly indulge to a certain degree in
meaninglessness, “the basic difference may be that pointlessness as the point of nonsense is
essentially non-serious; pointlessness as the point of the absurd, however, is (potentially, at least)
altogether more serious” (Cornwell, 22). I think the main distinction here is the emphasis on the
levity behind the nonsense text that clearly is not retained in the absurdist text. However, there
appears to be a conflict here that makes defining nonsense particularly tricky. On the one hand
20

there is undoubtedly a “pointlessness” in nonsense which sets it apart from other genres.
Nonsense does not ridicule like parody or satire and there is no moral offered to the reader by the
end. The emotional detachment to the characters and their situations coupled by the disconnect
between logical cause and effect so often featured in nonsense works creates a work without a
point. However, as already stated, there is room for metaphysical and religious connections in
nonsense. It seems to be that while there is a space open to something otherworldly, a
metaphysical experience for the nonsense writer and reader, there is, simultaneously, no point
that is being made in the text. Interestingly, when we view nonsense specifically in children's
literature, we might be inclined to disagree that there is no “point” or function to the nonsense
text as nonsense is a useful helper in the child’s linguistic development and ability to perceive
reality.
Additionally, while nonsense does tolerate meaninglessness, it is often held in balance or
tension with meaning simultaneously. This simultaneity and room for meaning is often a sticking
point in foundational texts on nonsense as a literary genre, such as those by Cammaerts, Stewart,
Sewell, Tigges, and Lecercle. As Anderson and Apseloff explain, “Nonsense is not the absence
of sense but a clever subversion of it that heightens rather than destroys meaning”(Anderson, 5).
To understand something as “nonsense” we need to first understand what is “sense,” so nonsense
actually draws our attention to the original orders, systems, and realities which it subverts. In her
article “Nonsense and the Language of Poetry” Susan Viguers comments, “Well, from that
perspective nonsense encourages and is even a component of an ordered perception of the world.
The explicit association of nonsense with dream in the Alice books pushes the connection
between nonsense and meaning even further. If the chaos of nonsense can be seen as the
meaningful disorder of a dream. Nonsense and meaning are on the same continuum. Nonsense
21

can even be said to shade gradually into meaning” (Viguers, 146). Wim Tigges’s definition,
which has the benefit of being neither too narrow nor too wide - a common problem defining
nonsense, proposes nonsense as a “genre of narrative literature which balances a multiplicity of
meanings with a simultaneous absence of meaning. This balance is affected by playing with the
rules of language, logic, prosody, and representation or a combination of these” (Tigges, L 435).
Tigges defines nonsense by four major characteristics, the first of which is the unresolved tension
between “presence and absence of meaning” (Anatomy of Nonsense, 51).12 Tigges explains that
nonsense creates a “tension between extremes” such as “illusion and reality, order and disorder,
form and content and so on” (Tigges, L 424).13 Stewart also emphasizes the quality of
simultaneity as an important device for nonsense, “Simultaneity is a nonsense phenomenon, a
phenomenon estranged from common sense” (Stewart, 147). Another way one might term this
“multiplicity of meanings” or “simultaneity” is through the language of Oberiu as a “collision of
verbal meanings.” It may be particularly productive to use Oberiu’s terminology as the
simultaneity of meaning and no meaning appears even on the level of linguistic games within the
nonsense text in the form of puns, portmanteaus, zaum or neologisms and other such word games
addressed later in this chapter. This simultaneity and multiple meanings provide both the
nonsense writer and reader with a great amount of freedom. In particular, there is freedom of
content and language.
Another distinguishing characteristic of nonsense is that nonsense does in fact concern itself
with both reality and transcendence. According to Cornwell
13 Tigges goes on to explain that nonsense is able to explore such a wide variety of experiences through
these tensions of extremes and, “the greater the distance or tension between what is presented, the
expectations, the more nonsensical the effect will be” (Tigges, 426).
12 The other three characteristics Tigges find essential to nonsense are its emotional detachment, the game
and play-like structures, which in turn reinforce emotional detachment, and the intense emphasis on the
verbal nature of the work (Anatomy of Nonsense, 55).
22

This would seem to indicate a major potential point of division from our understanding of
the absurd. For Leonid Geller, however, ‘“nonsense” least of all signifies the absence of
sense’, its task (analogous to that of the ‘trans-sense’, or zaum´ , language of the Russian
Futurists) consisting in ‘the generation of [a presumably new] sense’ (Geller, 110). Far
from always being completely divorced from any semblance of surrounding reality, as
may be commonly thought, nonsense does tend to interact with society or civilisation,
whether as an expression of cultural or political alienation, or of other forms of oblique
comment. (Cornwell, 19)
When we think about nonsense works, we can easily admit that they are not written in a vacuum
and that they engage with the world in which they were written. For example, Lewis Carroll’s
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat” is of course a reference to the children’s poem “Twinkle twinkle,
Little Star.” Additionally, in order for a nonsense work to create a topsy-turvy world or a
mirror-image world full of logical reversals, we must first have the non-topsy-turvy world as a
reference point. The same is true of the Russian version, bessmyslitsa. For example, Tokarev, in
his work on Daniil Kharms, Kurs na khudshee, explains that “...бессмыслица является
абсолютной реальностью, логосом, ставшим плотью”(“...nonsense appears in absolute
reality, in logic, made flesh”) (Tokarev, 28).14 Note here the religious lexicon that Tokarev uses
and the parallel to Christ as the word made flesh in John 1:14. This is a defense of both meaning
and reality in nonsense as well as transcendence. In nonsense this transcendence is the apophatic
path to God. This engagement with the real, the metaphysical, and in some cases a specific
societal context emphasizes connection as an unavoidable part of nonsense. While an
engagement with the spiritual or metaphysical seems counterintuitive on the surface, scholars
like Lecercle make it a point to emphasize that “...accounts of nonsense in religious, social or
14 My translation
23

philosophical terms have existed” (Tarantino, 360). Martin Esslin takes it a step farther, arguing
that “Verbal nonsense is in the truest sense a metaphysical endeavor, a striving to enlarge and to
transcend the limits of the material universe and its logic” (Esslin, 241-242). Much like the
religious miracle, nonsense defies the natural laws of reality.
15 Perhaps it is unsurprising that
nonsense writers are often religious, spiritual, or dabble in the occult.16
Interestingly, nonsense
often resembles biblical and religious texts, borrowing many techniques. And the many repeated
chants, often unintelligible babble, that are found in nonsense verse can imitate prayer or
incantations.17 Stewart aptly notes that in nonsense,“... words and play together fringe out into
liturgy and magic…” (Sewell, 184). Connections between real and unreal, between man and
society, between man and spirituality and, often, between writer and reader are integral parts of
nonsense literature.
Furthermore, while the absurd is most associated with philosophical thought, nonsense tends
to be a highly linguistic affair. According to Esslin, the absurd must be differentiated from these
highly linguistic art forms based on the tendency of the absurd “toward a radical devaluation of
language”(Esslin, xxi).18 Conversely, nonsense poetry and prose delights in a play with language
18 He argues here specifically against associating the absurd tradition with “the poetic avant-garde”
movement in French theater.
17 For a clear example see the Russian Futurist poem “Incantation by Laughter” by Velimir Khlebnikov
16 Nota bene: Lewis Carroll was an ordained clergyman (Carroll, xviii).
15 Additionally, there may exist an interesting connection between nonsense literature and mathematics,
specifically non euclidean geometry. Nonsense writers certainly take an interest in the subject of
mathematics. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was himself a mathematician and
published a book called Euclid and His Modern Rivals in 1879. The Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov,
who helped develop and popularize the Zaum tradition, was interested in mathematics and created a
number theory in which he believed he could predict the year major societal shifts would occur. Formalist
Yury Tynyanov deemed Khlebnikov “The Lobachevsky of the word” (D’Ambrosio). Daniil Kharms also
takes an interest in mathematics and the strange ways that numbers can sometimes behave, making it the
subject of both his prose, poetry, and articles such as in “Null and Nil.”(For more on this see the article
“‘Numbers Are Not Bound By Order’: The Mathematical Play of Daniil Kharms and His Associates” by
Eugene Ostashevsky. Daniil Kharms claimed he wanted to be to life what Lobachevsky, who proved the
validity of non Euclidean Geometry, was to Geometry (Brooks, 128).
24

to help achieve its trademark simultaneity. The nonsense work relies heavily on puns and
portmanteaus to create this simultaneity of meaning on a smaller scale within the text.19 The
nonsense writer will engage in play with words, sounds, and often poetic and prosaic structures
such as with acrostics in addition to actual game play such as Carroll’s doublets. Bettina
Hurlimann, in her discussion of Alice in Wonderland, emphasizes, “... what gives the book its
wisdom and its charm, but at the same time makes it to a great extent incomprehensible to
non-English children, is its many conversations and monologues” (Hurlimann, 67). Nonsense
engages heavily with verbal art through sound, rhythm, rhyme, puns, idioms and syntax.
In trying to define nonsense, we find that nonsense resists limitations. Nonsense bursts the
boundaries of sense, creating paradoxes. Through emotional detachment, nonsense makes no
“point,” no logical argument, no moral, and the humor it produces is not the corrective humor of
satire but a by-product of the topsy-turvy logic of the nonsense world. Nonsense leaves space for
nothingness, for meaninglessness, while simultaneously creating space for multiple meanings
and for metaphysical possibilities. It seems self contained and yet it is connected to larger outside
structures, systems, and reality. It crosses and pushes the boundaries of language and logic
through its game and play-like qualities, which all the while increase the emotional detachment.

2. The Qualities and Devices of Nonsense
There are several common qualities, in content and form, that are found in nonsense works,
often in combination with each other. Most of these themes and devices contribute to one of
three major elements of nonsense, sometimes contributing to more than one. The three major
19 Portmanteau, which was coined by Lewis Carroll, is a word that is created by combining the sounds
and meanings of two already existing words. While the pun is a single word that can carry several
meanings itself or because of its similar sound.
25

elements of nonsense are: logical reversals, which are often referred to as topsy-turvies, a tension
between multiple meanings and, simultaneously, no meaning, a sense of emotional detachment
and a foregrounded element of play and game.20 While all or some of these devices exist in
nonsense, as well as other genres, there is a point at which we obtain a critical mass and can,
with some confidence, categorize a text as a work of nonsense.
The logical reversals and topsy-turvies, which stand out as perhaps the most observable
hallmarks of nonsense, play an integral part in nonsense’s ability to to transgress boundaries
while remaining connected to outside systems. The nonsense writer needs to know and
understand the laws and conventions- such as the laws of the natural world, of mathematics, of
language systems and the conventions of literature, art, religion and social norms - in order to
turn them upside down. Additionally, the humor resulting from topsy- turvies relies on the
nonsense reader’s ability to identify and understand these laws and conventions. This brings us
back to Anderson and Apseloff’s point that nonsense literature actually highlights sense rather
than obscuring or obliterating it. In fact, Soviet children’s writer and scholar Kornei Chukovsky
(1882 - 1969) makes this very point in his defense of nonsense in children’s literature, stating,
“Ведь ребенок – и в этом вся суть – забавляется обратной координацией вещей лишь тогда,
когда правильная координация стало для него вполне очевидной”(Ot dvukh do piati, 238)
“We know that the child - and this is the main point - is amused by the reverse juxtaposition of
things only when the real juxtaposition has become completely obvious to him” (From Two to
Five, 101). In this aspect, nonsense is quite similar to carnival. For Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival
functions as ritual inversion of social and political hierarchies, it operates not only outside
official culture and conventions but against it (Bakhtin, 5-8). However, there are plenty of
20 Each of these elements can be thought of as part of a venn diagram, which overlap and share common
devices and themes.
26

scholars like Boris Groys who read carnival as a nightmarish submission to totalitarian culture
and terror. For them the inversion only serves to reinforce the original hierarchies. Where
carnival differs from nonsense is in carnival's engagement with grotesque realism and specific
religious rituals in medieval and renaissance europe.21 There are parallels too with Likhachev’s
and Panchenko’s “русский смех” (“Russian laughter”). In Смеховой мир (The Laughing
World), they find, similar to Bakhtinian carnival, that laughter creates a world of “антикультура”
(anticulture) in opposition to the specific “real” culture, which it ridicules. However, for them,
this laughter and “мир антикультуры” (a world of anticulture) serve a corrective function.
Instead of reinforcing old hierarchies, they produce a new, more fair culture through the laughter
(Likhachev, 4). These ideas raise interesting questions about the topsy-turvy of nonsense and
whether it is subversive, serves to reinforce existing structures, or indeed endeavors to do
anything at all.
The nonsense writer can create the topsy-turvy on several levels - from logic at large down to
the form of the text itself and on a linguistic level. The nonsense writer may create a situational
reversal, such as depicting a visual reversal through the use of a mirror, as Carroll does in
Through the Looking-Glass, in which all that should be on the right is now on the left.22 When
Alice finds a book with the “Jabberwocky” poem, she is initially unable to read the text until she
realizes it is backwards and she must hold it up to the mirror. This reversal is even represented on
a formal level in the text. The first stanza of the poem is reproduced backward so that the reader,
like Alice, will also struggle to read it. It is only after holding it to the mirror that both Alice and
22 In fact, nonsense writers even reproduce mirror images on the level of sentences and words with use of
the palindromes. Stewart refers to the palindrome as “the most perfect linguistic reversal” (Stewart, 70).
21 For more on various interpretations of carnival see Caryl Emerson’s The First Hundred Years of
Mikhail Bakhtin. Ch.4 “Carnival: Open-ended Bodies and Anachronistic Histories.” Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997. 162-206
27

the reader can view the poem, though as Alice notes even this does not provide much clarity as
to what the poem is about. Another example of situational reversals can be seen in the German
nonsense verse which was mentioned earlier. We can see this reversal in the lines, “Wirt dan(ne)
der wagen vür diu rinder gende/Treit dan(ne) der sak den esel zuo der müln.” “Then the cart goes
in front of the oxen/The sack drags the donkey to the mill.” The situation is one in which the
wagon goes in front of the oxen and the sack pulls the donkey, two logically impossible
situations created by inverting two very real situations.
As mentioned earlier, violence, death and bad behavior abound in nonsense literature. Some
nonsense scholars view these themes as belonging to a much larger category of unpleasantness,
with death and violence inhabiting the extreme end. Wim Tiggese for example claims,
If we consider the themes and motifs of nonsense…we see that indeed nearly all those
themes are to do with unpleasantness: the disorder of mathematics, language and logic,
the labyrinth and the uncanny house, time reversing, stopping or flying by, changes and
uncertainty of identity, including malformations of the body and death, violence,
ill-matched couples, personification of animals and objects and reification of human
beings, unlikely foodstuffs ("Put cats in the coffee and mice in the tea"), eccentricity and
queer dancing-all these are very often covered by humour as well” (Anatomy of
Nonsense, 97-98)
However, there is typically little horror or consequence attached to these topics. Often, because
of the emotional detachment and nonchalance with which these topics are presented, they
produce laughter. Laughter where there would normally be tears and a total lack of consequences
contribute to the overall world of the topsy turvies. Many of Edward Lear’s limericks are well
28

known examples of this. His limericks are filled with people who are brutalized or end up dead,
yet we are not horrified. One such example is “The Old Man with the Gong,”
There was an Old Man
with a gong,
Who bumped at it
All the day long;
But they called out,
‘O law!
You’re a horrid old bore!”
So they smashed that Old Man with a gong (Lear, 47).
Regardless of whether we as readers find these lines humorous - and most nonsense scholars will
note that humor is a by-product of nonsense but not a requirement of it - we are surely not
horrified at the violent treatment of the old man. Part of the charm of the limerick comes in the
vagueness of English syntax. Did they use the gong to smash the Old Man or is “with a gong”
used to signal which old man they smashed? These are the questions that the reader is interested
in and not the cruel treatment of the Old Man. The limerick does not build any emotional
attachments between the reader and the Old Man or indeed the “they” who smash the Old Man.
Another example that demonstrated even more brutality can be seen below:
There was an Old Person
Of Buda,
Whose conduct grew
29

Ruder and ruder;
Till at last,
With a hammer,
They silenced his clamour,
By smashing that
Person of Buda (Lear, 63).
In this example, not only does a mob “smash” an elder like with the first example, but we are
given the clear detail that they do it with a hammer. Again, the jaunty structure and rhythm of the
limerick sets the tone, in contrast and perhaps in spite of the content of the limerick. In nonsense,
the structure and form are important while the content is often secondary. In “Nonsense and the
Language of Poetry,” this particular quality is used to distinguish nonsense verse from other
types of poetry, “Rhyme/metre in poetry must have its rationale in the content of poetry. But
nonsense writers obviously favour a kind of rhyme/metre that calls attention to itself and
functions independently of the content - and that is the primary mark of the sing-song pattern”
(Viguers, 141). Additionally, the permanence of death is often overturned in nonsense. People
who are dead are able to do things only the living can do, such as in Daniil Kharms’s The Old
Woman, in which an old woman who has pushed her way into the narrator’s apartment promptly
dies. After leaving her there, he comes home hoping she is no longer there only to open the door
and see her crawling across the floor:
“Я подошел к своей комнате. «Вдруг, — подумал я, — старуха исчезла. Я войду в
комнату, а старухи-то и нет. Боже мой! Неужели чудес не бывает?!» Я отпер дверь и
начал ее медленно открывать. Может быть, это только показалось, но мне в лицо
30

пахнул приторный запах начавшегося разложения. Я заглянул в приотворенную
дверь и, на мгновение, застыл на месте. Старуха на четвереньках медленно ползла
ко мне навстречу.”(O yavleniyakh i sushchestvovaniyakh, 198-199).
“I went to my room. ‘And what if, - I thought, - the old woman’s vanished? I’ll walk into
the room and the old woman’s gone. My God! Are there really no miracles?’ I unlocked
the door and slowly pushed it ajar. Maybe I only imagined it, but the sickeningly sweet
smell of decay wafted in my face. I peeked around the slightly opened door and for a
moment was frozen to the spot. The old woman was on all fours slowly crawling towards
me” (Today I Wrote Nothing, 111).
Both what the narrator wishfully imagines and what the narrator sees are equally impossible.
Additionally, the text does not present the movement of the old woman or even her death in the
fashion of a ghost story or horror. While the narrator is unsettled by such events the reader is not.
Quite frequently, there is an overlap between the topsy-turvy world of nonsense and the
paradox of simultaneity. This is created when the laws of a system are broken or flipped on their
head by simultaneously existing as two contradictory ideas. Consider for example Tyler Rager’s
poem, “Two Dead Boys:”
Ladies and gentlemen skinny and stout
I'll tell you a tale I know nothing about
The admission is free so pay at the door
Now pull out a chair and sit on the floor
On one bright day in the middle of the night
31

Two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back they faced each other
Drew their swords and shot each other
The blind man came to see fair play
The mute man came to shout hooray
The deaf policeman heard the noise
And came to stop those two dead boys
He lived on the corner in the middle of the block
In a two story house on a vacant lot
A man with no legs came walking by
And kicked the lawman in his thigh
He crashed through a wall without making a sound
Into a dry creek bed and suddenly drowned
A long black hearse came to cart him away
But he ran for his life and is still gone today
I watched from the corner of the table
The only eyewitness to facts of my fable
If you doubt my lies are true
32

Just ask the blind man, he saw it too23
Here we can observe everything from reversals of social and literary conventions (“admission is
free so pay at the door,” “The only eyewitness to facts of my fable”) to reversals of the laws of
nature (“Two dead boys got up to fight,” “a man with no legs came walking by,” “into a dry
creek bed and suddenly drowned” etc.). These reversals are created by the writer through
simultaneously representing two exclusive conditions that cannot logically coexist. It cannot be a
bright day and the middle of the night. The writer also utilizes a narrator who continually
contradicts and negates himself thus playing with the reader’s expectations. For example, the
narrator tells the readers “I'll tell you a tale I know nothing about,” “pull up a chair and sit on the
floor,” “if you doubt my lies are true.” The narrator is effectively making each of his own
statements null. For Stewart, this device in nonsense is a split narrator. She explains, “the
narrator splits into two contradictory narrators, each denying the other’s discourse. The paired
oppositions that the narrative presents are states that cannot tolerate each other, yet that in the
frame of the discourse are allowed to be and not to be at the same time.”(Stewart, 73). This is a
favorite device of nonsense writers as it can draw attention to the “reversibility of fictive status”
while overturning readerly expectations of the narrator as an agent that has “responsibilities” or a
need to function as a conveyer of sensible discourse (Stewart, 73).
The simultaneity paradox of nonsense literature functions in much the same way as the
topsy-turvy or logical reversals do. It also seemingly breaks the rules. It is both whole and split,
it is two contradictory phenomena that exist at the same time and/or the same space. This
paradox is vital to nonsense literature and its flexibility. As mentioned earlier, this is one way
that nonsense can hold meaning and no meaning at the same time. Tigges asserts, “In order to be
23 Several versions of this poem can be found. They are no doubt directly influenced by the older
anonymous children’s poem “Ladies and Jellyspoons.”
33

successful, nonsense must at the same time invite the reader to interpretation and avoid the
suggestion that there is a deeper meaning which can be obtained by considering connotations or
associations, because these lead to nothing” (Tigges, L 435). By splitting ideas, phenomena,
things, and even words into two conflicting parts simultaneously, the text provides the reader
with multiple paths of interpretation which all inevitably lead back to nothing.
One of the main devices that can help create this simultaneity is listing or serializing. This
device when paired with other nonsense techniques such as neologisms, puns, and word games
creates a conflict between the form of the text and the content.24
In her book The Field of
Nonsense, Elizabeth Sewell, writing on the English nonsense of Lear and Carroll, claims that
both the series and, “enumeration or lists of things form an essential part of Nonsense” for the
structure they provide (Sewell, 74). Essentially, they provide a scaffolding that looks sturdy, yet
on closer inspection is only an illusion. Lists and sequences are incredibly pliable allowing the
user to manipulate the list and its items. The listmaker can play with the arrangement of the
items, for instance using numbering, alphabetical order, size, color or countless other categorical
approaches. The listmaker may choose to use no arrangement in particular, but simply place one
item after the other. The list maker can adjust the amount of information for each item and can
choose any length. Theoretically, a list or sequence could be infinite or could have only two
items. They can be complete or incomplete, formal or informal, trivial or important. In addition
to their extreme versatility, lists and sequences impose an order to the material presented on them
as well as both implying an existing connection and, by their very nature, producing a
connection. As noted by Valentina Izmirlieva in her work on the function and importance of
listing the names of God in religious tradition, particularly in Eastern Orthodoxy, “An affinity
24 In some ways, listing and serializing may also contribute to the topsy-turvy because there is often an
expectation or natural order that they imply which is then overturned by the content.
34

for order is inherent in listmaking,” as the list organizes information into a specific sequence,
which the reader will view (Izmirlieva, 55). When we read lists, we naturally assume that a
connection exists between the items on the list. Izmirlieva points out that one of the aspects that
makes lists so interesting, and why I suggest they are so well suited to nonsense, is that, “While a
list creates solidarities, it never really loses sight of its members’ individual identities. Lists both
separate and connect, being delicately poised between continuity and fragmentation…”
(Izmirlieva, 54). It is exactly this contradictory quality of lists – individual yet collective,
continuous yet fragmentary- coupled with their ability to give a simple structure in endless
combinations and possibilities, which makes them an ideal device for nonsense. A famous
example of this device is Edward Lear’s The Nonsense Botany, in which Lear provides a list of
silly and made up plants with latinized names accompanied by sketches as one might find in a
real book on botany. For example, one entry reads “Washtubbia Circularis” with a sketch of a
flower stem which blooms atop of a wooden wash tub. This type of list implies classification and
systematization which in turn implies an orderly, sensible world, but on closer inspection of the
content, this premise falls apart.25
Both Stewart and Tigges connect the nonsense author’s play with infinity and circularity of
and within the text with listing. These are two common elements of nonsense that help create the
simultaneity paradox much in the same way that lists do. While both see lists as a part of play
with infinity and circularity because of its serial nature, I view lists and seriality as its own
separate device, not subjugated to circularity and infinity, though admittedly the two often appear
together. Stewart explains how in nonsense an “infinite action, not an infinite progress” is set off
25 Like so many devices of nonsense, this kind of incongruity makes us laugh. It is not just nonsense
writing which utilizes this technique. Many other genres may employ this technique for humor. For
example, the catalogue aria (of women) in Don Giovanni produces a similar effect, that is laughter, as
Lear’s The Nonsense Botany. However, it manages not to be nonsense because it can still lead to a viable
interpretation or meaning, whereas in Lear’s work this is not the case.
35

and this action will never get to a destination (Stewart, 119). This type of technique is evident in
something like Kharm’s “Вываливающиеся старухи” (“Plummeting old women”), which I will
address in more detail in chapter III. The essential plot of the short text consists of a presumably
infinite number of old women falling from a window and smashing to the ground below. There is
no end, no consequences, and no progress. Circularity is similar to infinity. Instead of a
progression from beginning to end, the reader ends in the same place they started. This can occur
on the level of the plot and the level of form. The caterpillar and life cycle seems to be
commonly used by nonsense writers as both a theme and symbol for circularity. For example, in
the Alice novel, Alice and the caterpillar talk about many things including its life cycle but the
caterpillar always circles back to its original question of identity “who are you.” The caterpillar
is particularly apt for this question because as Alice notes the caterpillar will feel strange when it
changes its form, and therefore become a different creature. However, the caterpillar disagrees,
because it will still be itself, it will remain the same though it takes different forms. Kharms too
makes use of the caterpillar in his longest prose text The Old Woman.
Linguistic play has an important role in nonsense. Wordplay, puzzles, puns, portmanteaus,
and more, all abound in nonsense, giving it its signature sense of playfulness and focus on
language. Devices like the pun and the portmanteau can create additional simultaneity of
meaning in the text on a smaller scale. With the pun, there is one word that holds two meanings,
creating or alluding to an additional meaning.26 Or a word, which sounds similar to another word,
suggesting dual meanings. Additionally, there are homophones, which are words that are spelled
differently but sound the same. For example, in Alice in Wonderland Alice says, “You see the
earth takes twenty-four hours to turn on its axis” and the Duchess replies, “Talking of
26 While not a nonsense writer himself, Vladimir Nabokov is well acquainted with the tradition. His texts
are filled with puns, a particularly “Alice-like” pun can be found in Lolita when Lolita’s mother calls out
to her “Lo!” and she responds “And behold” (Lolita, 50).
36

Axes…chop off her head!” (Alice, 44). All of these variations can be and often are used high
frequency in nonsense for wordplay. Take for example, Carroll’s rocking-horse-fly or
Snap-dragon-fly in Through the Looking-Glass. The creatures are composed of two dissimilar
things that are glued together by the word in the middle. We have two different objects; the
“rocking horse” and the “horse fly.” They are different in size, their association, and in their
nature - one is a child’s toy and the other an irritating living creature. The combination is stitched
together by the shared word “horse,” which comes in as the second word in “rocking horse” and
as the first in “horse fly,” therefore, in the combination, the order of the words is technically still
in the correct position. However, this results in a completely new object that is a combination of
these two, a small rocking horse that buzzes around as a horsefly does. The strangeness and
dissimilarity between the parts as well as the play with words creates its humor. Additionally, the
newly created combination now holds dual meaning but is at once understandable based on the
single meanings of its two parts. According to Stewart, “when a narrative tolerates extensive
punning, when it is saturated with puns, the effect is a text that splits itself into simultaneous
texts with every step” (Stewart, 162). This split created by the pun is one way to achieve
simultaneity in the text. Two meanings occupy one space, often in one word. Here we can see
one way the author of nonsense can use the pun to create Tigges’s “multiplicity of meanings.”
The portmanteau functions in a similar way. In this case, the nonsense writer melds two words
into one word to create a new word with a combined meaning.
Another device of nonsense is the neologism. Neologisms, which are nonsense or made-up
words, function as an overturning of basic linguistic laws. They often have the appearance of
children's babble because of the sonorous quality and lack of previously prescribed meaning.
Tigges notes that, “The neologism has the advantage that no connotations or associations are
37

attached to it; it could combine all meanings - and none” (An anatomy of Nonsense, 67). Again
this ambiguity of meaning, the combination of many possible meanings with the possibility of no
meaning plays a part down to the smallest unit of the text. Nonsense writers may choose to
present these words with other real words of a language and fit them into the syntactic structure
of that language or they may appear accompanied only by other neologisms creating the effect of
babble. The first case would be something like Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky.” Consider the first
two stanzas of the poem:
“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!
…”
Here there is a combination of neologisms with accepted English words. Additionally, many of
the neologisms resemble parts of speech and are in the correct order for respective parts of
speech. While the words themselves have no meaning, the reader may feel that they can
decipher the poem based on an intrinsic knowledge of English sentence structure. In “...the slithy
toves” we might feel confident assuming that “toves” is a plural noun based on its placement in
the sentence and because it ends in an “s.” “Slithy,” then, is an adjective based on its placement
38

before the “noun” and based on the fact that it ends in a “y” as many English adjectives do. From
there, we may develop theories as to what the words actually mean based on our associations
with certain sounds and letter combinations. We can do the same with the warning, “Beware the
Jabberwock, my son!” In this line, only “Jabberwock” is a neologism and based on the next
lines, which describe the action of the jaws and claws of the Jabberwock, we might infer that this
is some sort of beast. The second case of neologisms, which I have called babble, occurs when
they occur in such a high concentration that no inferences about parts of speech are able to be
inferred. A great example of this is the Russian Futurist Zaum poem “Dyr Bul Shchyl” by
Kruchenykh:
Дыр бул щыл
убеш щур
скум
вы со бу
р л эз
1923
Dyr bul shchyl
Ubesh shscur
Skum
Vy so bu
r l ėz
The neologisms or Zaum, to use the Futurist word, appear in such high frequency that any
attempt at interpretation on the level of sentence structure is thwarted. What the reader is left
39

with is the sounds of individual units and the overall structure, that is to say the more neologisms
are arranged in the common form of a poem.
An element of play and an emphasis on games/puzzles help contribute to the non serious
nature of nonsense.27 Game structures permeate nonsense literature, like chess, cards, or word
games played. In Susan Stewart’s view of play and game structures in nonsense, play and games
fall under the category of topsy-turvies because of their reversibility and ability to upset a
hierarchy. According to this opinion, players start on equal footing but this balance is upset when
the player either becomes the winner or loser. Furthermore, the game, once played to the end,
results in nothing tangible and is reset to be played again (Stewart, 65).
In nonsense, these games are often linguistic. In addition to punning and neologisms, the
author might utilize palindromes, rhythm and rhyme,and more complex games such as acrostics.
Carroll, in particular, was quite fond of these types of word games, even inventing a game called
“doublets,” for Vanity Fair in 1879, in which a player is given a starting word and ending word.
By changing one letter of the starting word and each successive word, the player attempts to
reach the ending word by creating new words. For example; [Flour -> Bread] Flour, floor, flood,
blood, brood, broad, bread. There is an important connection between nonsense and intellectual
games. There is some amount of thinking that nonsense requires of the reader, but this thinking
notably goes nowhere. This aligns with Tigges’s impression that, “Nonsense is an intellectual
divertissement rather than an easily accessible form of entertainment” (Anatomy of Nonsense,
239).
Something needs to be said here about the connection between nonsense and humor.
Immanuel Kant has claimed, “In everything that is to provoke lively, uproarious laughter, there
27 Elizabeth Sewell in chapter four of her book, The Field of Nonsense, does much for the elaboration of
game and play in nonsense literature.
40

must be something nonsensical (in which, therefore, the understanding in itself can take no
satisfaction)” (Kant, 209). Any reader of nonsense has undoubtedly come to expect that the
nonsense works they read will be humorous. While these works may not always produce
belly-shaking laughter from a reader, at the very least, they will incite a smile or two. It is indeed
the case that humor and nonsense are closely linked. Humor and nonsense share many of the
same themes and subjects, with the typical exception of sexual themes, which are often not
present in nonsense. On sexual themes in nonsense, Tigges explains that, “Apparently this is a
topic nonsense refuses to set up as a game, and which it is in any case difficult to sustain in
unreleased tension” (Anatomy of Nonsense, 98).28
Humor is very often a byproduct of nonsense.
That is, nonsense devices and its core qualities also produce a humorous effect. However, humor
is not a requirement for something to be considered nonsense. There are several theories on
humor, which attempt to describe what makes us laugh and why we laugh. Four of these major
theories are benign violation theory, superiority theory, incongruity theory and relief theory.
The first of these theories, BVT, suggests that humor is produced by a non-threatening
violation (Oring, 57). Some cultural, logical, or natural law is broken but in such a small way
that we are not offended, instead finding it humorous. In BVT, the broken expectations that
produce the humorous joke or event operate on an emotional level, namely a negative one.
Therefore, a subject we have an emotional investment in or elicits a negative emotion should be
funnier to us than a subject, in which we do not have an emotional investment. I am disinclined
to agree that this is always the case with humor and especially nonsense humor. As Elliot Oring
points out in Joking Asides: the Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor,
28 I want to emphasize here that I agree with Tigges that this is typical of nonsense, though one can find
certain instances of humorous sexual implications in nonsense, once one leaves the realm of Lear and
Carroll and into that nonsense written without the child in mind.
41

It seems harder to demonstrate that any violation of expectations about how the world
operates would necessarily arouse an emotional reaction beyond great or mild surprise.
Furthermore, it would have to be shown that an individual who responded to an ethnic,
sexual, or linguistic joke with the same level of amusement had equal levels of negative
emotion aroused in each case. The case would be even harder for BVT should a linguistic
joke elicit more humor than an ethnic or sexual one (Oring, 60).
As I have already noted several times, and will continue to do, one of the main qualities of
nonsense is that it requires emotional detachment.
Superiority theory posits that we laugh when we feel superior in some way (Meyer, J. 314).
We feel something is humorous when we feel we have triumphed over someone or something.
This theory seems most applicable in the cases of parody and satire or even aggressive jokes, in
which someone is made the butt. This theory is used to explain why adults may laugh at a child
who makes a mistake about how the world works or about a socially learned subject. The
laughter stems from what the child hasn’t learned yet but the adult has and the adult, therefore,
feels superior. Additionally, laughter at this incorrect behavior can serve to reinforce the correct
behavior and foster unity in the group (Meyer, J. 315). In this theory, humor has the potential to
both divide and unite at the same time (Meyer, J. 324).
Incongruity theory is similar to BVT, in that there is a violation of a pattern, a surprise, or
something unexpected that is essentially non-threatening. According to this theory, Kant tells us
that “Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of heightened expectation
into nothing” (Kant, 209). This subverting of expectations in a surprising way creates the humor.
However, as John Meyer explains in “Humor as a Double-edged Sword,” “Rather than focusing
on physiological or emotional effects of humor, the incongruity theory emphasizes cognition”
42

(Meyer, J. 313). The humor stems in this case from social or cultural violations, but essentially, is
not attached to emotions. This emphasis on a lack of emotional attachment is akin to Henri
Bergson’s views on laughter, for whom, an absence of feeling “usually accompanies laughter”
(Bergson, 465). He even goes so far as to state, “The comic demands something like a
momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple”( Bergson, 466).
The comic is then detached from emotion and closely linked to cognition and mental process.
For this theory, we must first understand the patterns before the violations will stand out to us.
Once the pattern is understood and the subsequent violation or difference is identified, only then
will humor be produced. This understanding of humor is also similar to the way Kornei
Chukovsky describes the child’s understanding and laughter at works of nonsense, on which
more will be said in the last section of this chapter.
In relief theory, humor functions as a release. Tensions are created and then removed, causing
a relief to be experienced, and this is experienced as humor or laughter (Meyer, J. 312). For
Sigmond Freud, jokes - which he distinguishes from the comic on the basis that jokes require a
minimum of two people for enjoyment, while the comic requires only one - are a type of relief at
the frustration of the rational and can serve an emotional detachment (Freud, 143). In this way
the joke or humor itself demands emotional detachment but the laughter comes as relief to the
frustration or tension one feels living in a so-called rational world. This suggests that there is a
quality of escapism in laughter. Freud notes that, “standards of joking sink as spirits rise” (Freud,
127). In this statement we can hear echoes of Mark Twain’s oft quoted line, “The secret source of
humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” Nonsense itself, especially that
of the Victorian period, has been viewed through a similar lens, that is, that it provides the
43

child-reader with an escape from the didactic and moral-centric literature of the period (Anatomy
of Nonsense, 237).
I have found that all theories on humor leave something to be desired and no one theory has
adequately convinced me of its correctness or universality. However, as they apply to nonsense,
some combination of incongruity theory and relief theory seem the most immediately relevant to
our discussion of nonsense. Incongruity theory, which places emphasis on emotional detachment
and cognition, seems to me especially useful in how we understand nonsense humor. Nonsense,
as we have already seen, has a habit of violating expectations on social, cultural, linguistic, and
literary, and rational planes. Additionally, many of the devices rely on the incongruity between
its parts. Puns and wordplay deal with incongruity between meaning and sound, content and
form are often mismatched, and lists provide - treated extensively in chapter III- provide ample
room to play with and create similarities and differences. The topsy-turvy is itself fully based on
discrepancies between our reality and that of the text, it is literally an overturning of any and all
expectations. As nonsense humor is highly tied to verbal art and play, much of the pleasure and
humor comes from our own puzzling out of the technique used to put together the joke. A joke
for a joke's sake, so to speak. In regards to relief theory, it may be useful for us to look at it with
Freud’s help.
For Freud, there are two types of jokes, those that serve no purpose beyond being a joke and
those that serve a purpose. The first of these he terms “innocent” jokes and the second
“tendentious” jokes (Freud, 90). The “innocent” joke is closest to the type of humor produced by
nonsense and is for him, a joke in its “purest form” (Freud, 94). These are jokes which “put
words or thoughts together without regard to the condition that they ought to also make sense”
(Freud, 125) He explains that “the technique of the jokes are themselves sources of pleasure,”
44

examples would be a play on words or a joke that relies on differences between sound and
meaning, so puns (Freud, 119). Because nonsense places such an emphasis on the technical form
and the verbal material in the text, a theory that includes these features for humor also is the most
likely. Additionally, Freud notes that there is a “liberation” in nonsense (Freud, 131). I want to
emphasize this idea that nonsense humor carries with it a type of liberation that provides relief
from the frustration of the rational. The frustration at the rational world would not only seem to
explain nonsense humor but also the interest nonsense writers have in noneuclidean geometry,
mysticism, and religion and metaphysics. Not only is liberation related to the limitations of the
rational world but also and just as importantly, it is related to ideas about play. These types of
jokes can start as play and as learning games in childhood but the older child eventually “gives
himself up to them with the consciousness that they are nonsensical, and that he finds enjoyment
in the attraction of what is forbidden by reason. He now uses the games to withdraw from the
pressure of critical reason” and they become a “rebellion against the compulsion of logic” in the
older child (Freud, 126).29
Humor is easily and often connected with play, which is so important also to nonsense. Freud,
for example, describes joking and the comic as the “playful” aesthetic attitude “in contrast to
work” (Freud, 11). According to Jerry Farber in “Toward a Theoretical Framework for the Study
of Humor in Literature and the Other Arts,” “Nonsense humor, then suggests a need for freedom
and autonomy of thought at the deepest level. And it may even be that such a need will be
strongest in those who are still early in the process of surrendering freedom” (Farber, 82). An
idea that will resurface in chapter IV of this dissertation in regards to Nabokov’s engagement
with Carroll’s nonsense works. The idea that this need is most present in people “still early in the
29 Freud even notes that the university student too does not “cease these demonstrations against the
compulsion of logic and reality, the dominance of which, however, he feels growing ever more intolerant
and unrestricted” and thus student papers are often full of the humorous and nonsensical (Freud, 126).
45

process of surrendering freedom” provides an initial, intuitive link between nonsense and
children’s literature and indeed why we would waste our time with nonsense at all.
Why do we so enjoy reading nonsense, reading something that takes us nowhere, gives us no
answers and bends our logic? There are two reasons; freedom and reassurance. Nonsense
provides freedom from the everyday restrictions. Nonsense is not subject to the restrictions of
grammar and language, literary conventions, artistic traditions, societal norms, the laws of nature
or basic logic. Not only is nonsense not limited by these things, but it invites the writer and the
reader to play outside these limitations. The chains of everyday logic are cast off and the writer
and reader attain a great amount of autonomy. Because this freedom and autonomy come in the
form of play, the stakes are very low. The consequences for participation are relatively risk free
and come without penalties or ostracization.
This leads to the second value, reassurance. Nonsense is reassuring, a point that will be made
especially clear in connection to children’s literature. The violent and unpleasant content in
nonsense is undercut by its inherent emotional detachment.the laughter that nonsense humor
brings is reassuring laughter. To participate in nonsense, the reader must accept the alogical in
both nonsense and in life. Both nonsense, the writer, and the reader must embrace the
topsy-turvy and this offers us some reassurance when we leave the topsy-turvy and return to our
own reality, in which we will inevitably be faced with trivial, annoying, and illogical situations.
It invites us to think to ourselves, “curiouser and curiouser,” before moving on, instead of
dwelling. For many, the gestures at metaphysical, spiritual, or otherworldly connections that are
sometimes present in nonsense are especially reassuring.

46

3. Nonsense in Children’s Literature
“The world is linked not only by causal connections. Things which have arisen separately and
have found themselves side by side appear logical. But children and poets see them otherwise.”
(Shklovsky)30
.
Why is nonsense literature linked so strongly to children’s literature? Bettina Hurlimann in
her book Three Centuries of Children’s Books in Europe, states that “The great contribution of
the British to children’s literature is ‘nonsense’” (Hurliman, 64). While Seth Lerer in his work
Children’s Literature, writes, “This idea of linguistic nonsense takes hold as a force in children’s
literature in the mid-nineteenth century and never seems to let go” (Lerer, 191). It is clear that a
contributing factor to the connection between nonsense and children’s literature is in nonsense
literature’s popularization during the Victorian period by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of
whom wrote specifically for children. But this initial association can not solely explain the
sustained success that nonsense has had in children’s literature in so many different traditions
right up to the present.
Let us first consider children’s literature more generally. Roger Sale wrote, “Everyone knows
what children’s literature is until asked to define it” (Sale, 1). Indeed, defining children’s
literature is quite a task and could/ has been a book on its own. Sale chooses not to define
children’s literature because the definition would be necessarily imprecise and “cumbersome”
(Sale, 1). In fact many scholars chose not to burden themselves with the headache of defining
what exactly is children’s literature. Perry Nodelman explains that, “For these writers the
indefinability of children’s literature represents its accurate mirroring of childhood. Childhood
cannot be defined because definition is an act of logic and reason, and childhood is presumably
30 As quoted in Jean-Philippe Jaccard’s Daniil Kharms in the Context of Russian and European Literature
of the Absurd
47

the antithesis of logic and reason - a time of innocence, the glory of which is exactly its
irrationality that presumably offers insight into greater wisdom” (Nodelman, 147). I quite like
this explanation and therefore offer it as the reason I will not develop my own definition of what
children’s literature is in conjunction with that any long digression to craft a definition would
derail the main purpose of this section.31
Children’s literature is often seen as unserious or less well-crafted than literature for adults.
Perhaps because of this notion, Nodelman recounts that working as an academic editor many
scholars would send in work on children’s literature, assuming they were the first, “Often these
scholars were blithely unconscious of the fact that other serious scholars had come before
them”(Nodelman,134). Children’s writers are in a unique position when one considers the
audience they must engage. They have a hurdle most other authors do not: a split audience. Most
authors must consider a cohesive audience and possibly censors. Children’s authors must
consider their target audience of children and the adults who exercise discretion over what the
child reads, and in the case of younger children must purchase, provide, and read the book to the
child. Thus children’s literature must appeal first to the adult and then to the child.
Nonsense literature appeals to children because it is simple, it invites play, and it is
humorous. Nonsense literature lacks a moralizing lesson, which so many other types of
children’s tales incorporate, while retaining a possible pedagogic function hidden from the
scrutinizing view of the child. This is the view of most theories on nonsense in children’s
literature and this is also how children’s literature creates a problem for the defining qualities of
nonsense, which I have worked out above. I made a point of the pointlessness of nonsense,
31 For a thorough inspection of the differing definitions that have been given for children’s literature see
Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008.
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explaining that nonsense does not try to tell the reader anything or try to do anything. It holds no
meaning while simultaneously holding many, playfully resisting interpretations. But nonsense in
children’s literature problematizes this quality. We will see that in children’s literature nonsense
does have a function, it, in fact, has quite a few functions that are hard to dismiss. The question
then becomes, do we lose these functions when the intended readers are only adults? First, one
ought to look at these functions as they relate to children’s literature.
Despite the common notion that nonsense literature is resistant to sense or understanding,
children are able to understand it quite well on both a linguistic level and on the level of
differentiation between the logical and the illogical. As Louise Guinness notes in the
introduction to The Everyman book of Nonsense Verse,
It is the particular genius of the writer of successful nonsense to be able to tell a story,
conjure up a vivid image or evoke an atmosphere using the rhythm, the cadence and the
sound of words - some of which may never have made any previous appearance in any
known language. ‘Jabberwocky’, for example, can be read and understood by quite small
children who will readily grasp the menacing quality of the jabberwocky with eyes of
flame, whiffling through the tulgey wood.
A child, having never heard these words before, is still able to follow the general syntactic and
grammatical sense behind the words and derive a (even if only superficial) understanding from
the words. The humor of nonsense, one of its prominent by-products, also retains a simplicity
stemming from basic incongruities, situations, and puns. All of these are accessible to children.
As Anderson and Apseloff explain, “There are nonsensical satires and parodies that require
special knowledge, but nonsense humor usually homes in on very basic traits and conditions, one
more reason why children appreciate nonsense” (Anderson, 7). In the case of situational
49

nonsense, the silliness often stems from very general situations that require no special knowledge
from the child-reader. This could be something as simple as a character falling down or a
character with an unbelievably unproportionate trait, such as in Lear’s limerick “There was a
Young Lady Whose Nose,” in which a young lady has such a large nose it requires a second
person to help carry it.
Children’s nonsense often, though, of course, not always, comes in the form of verse. The
rhythm and rhyme attract the child for their song-like quality and easy memorization.
Meanwhile, the small child, learning how to read, benefits from the added help provided by the
rhyme words. Take for example Dr. Suess’s The Cat in the Hat, the child, learning to sound out
words, already has a sense of how the word “hat” will sound, instinctively knowing it will rhyme
with “cat.” This admittedly is a benefit of all children’s verse, not just nonsense verse. Children
are already attracted to play with rhyming, sound, and word creation at this early stage in their
development. Freud notes, “During the period in which the child is learning how to handle the
vocabulary of his mother-tongue, it gives him obvious pleasure to ‘experiment with it in
play’...and he puts words together without regard to the condition that they should make sense, in
order to obtain from them the pleasurable effect of rhythm and rhyme. Little by little he is
forbidden this enjoyment, till all that remains permitted to him are significant combinations of
words” (Freud, 125). Nonsense verse not only engages the small child in a type of play he is
already interested in, but also provides the older child with a permissible place to continue this
play outside the limitations defined by his education.
Additionally, the child is not confused by nonsense. Children are able to differentiate between
the logic of their reality and the illogic of the nonsense world, this is in part what attracts them.
In his defense of nonsense literature in Ot dvukh do piati, Soviet scholar and children’s author
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Kornei Chukovsky argues that “Это нужно с самого начало понять и запомнить: все
подобные нелепицы ощущаются ребенком именно как нелепицы. Он ни на минуту не
верит в них подлинность. Навязывание предметам несвойственных им функций и
признаков увлекает его как забава” (Ot dvukh do piati, 227) “It is important first of all to
understand and to remember this: all such nonsense verses are regarded by children precisely as
nonsense. They do not believe for one moment in their authenticity. the ascribing incongruous
functions to objects attracts them as a diversion” (From Two to Five, 95). 32 The child sees
nonsense for what it is.
Nonsense literature’s indulgence in play holds a special educational value for the child. This
exceptionally effective play stimulates the child’s mental growth, allowing the child to
experiment with both the limits of language as well as the limits of reality. Chukovsky explains
that the child’s, “…главная его цель, как и во всякой игре, - упражнение
новоприобретённых сил, своеобразная проверка новых знаний.” (Ot dvukh do piati, 238).
“...his main purpose, as in all play, is to exercise his newly acquired skills” (From Two to Five,
101). Nonsense can only be for the child “nonsense” or a game of overturning laws of reality if
the child understands the correct order. If the child does not understand then nonsense ceases to
be that for the child and is no longer funny. Nonsense provides a way for the child to exercise his
knowledge of reality. Not only are children drawn to nonsense literature but many have argued
that nonsense may benefit a child’s development. In fact, Chukovsky defending nonsense in
32 Kornei Chukovsky defends nonsense in children’s literature after it and his poem “Крокодил”
(“Crocodile”) came under attack by Nadezhda Krupskaya and others. His children’s poem “Путаница”
(“Confusion”) is quoted back to Chukovsky in an angry letter he supposedly received: “Стыдно, т.
Чуковский” the letter writer chides, “забивать головы наших ребят всякими путаницами…” “Shame
on you, Comrade Chukovsky…for filling the heads of our children with all kinds of nonsense..” (From
Two to Five, 89). After quoting this letter, he mounts a fierce pedagogical defense of nonsense in
children’s literature in 1962 in От двух до пяти which appeared earlier as Маленькие дети (221)
51

children’s literature argues that what to the critic, “…кажутся ему такими зловредными, не
только не мешают ребенку ориентироваться в окружающем мире, но, напротив, укрепляют
в нем чувство реальности…” (Ot dvukh do piati, 222). “...seemed to him so harmful not only
does not interfere with the child’s orientation to the world that surrounds him, but, on the
contrary, strengthens in his mind a sense of the real…” (From Two to Five, 90). Nonsense helps
children understand what is logical and illogical.
Chukovsky is by no means alone in the assertion that there is a pedagogical relevance to
nonsense literature for children and the connection between children’s literature and nonsense
has been explored in the West as well. In particular, nonsense builds the child’s linguistic
competence. As already mentioned, nonsense in verse form can help small children learn to read
and sound out words. But furthermore, nonsense literature invites the child to play with language
and rules and limits, building precision and a stronger command of the language overall. Seth
Lerer argues, “nonsense is more than play: it takes us to the limits of expression” (Lerer, 208).
Because nonsense is a mainly linguistic phenomenon, as discussed earlier, the child who engages
with nonsense, engages directly with the rules and sounds of their language.33 According to
Anderson and Apseloff, “A profound relationship exists between the nonsense tradition and
children’s progress in speaking, reading and writing” (Anderson, 60). They go on to write,
“nonsense, by its very nature, gives permission to children to experiment, to break linguistic
33 “Children can learn a number of language strategies through nonsense constructions: the double (or
multiple) meanings of certain sound combinations, the nonliteral nature of idioms, the presence of nonce
words (and therefore the need to learn the definitions of accepted words), the need for syntactical clarity,
and, especially in English, the peculiar, often nonphonetic relationship between letter and sound”
(Anderson, 65).
52

rules, to babble nonce words…” (Anderson, 61).34
In this way, nonsense allows the child to
explore the limits of their language in a permissible and fun environment.
Nonsense literature encourages flexibility and problem solving skills in children, as they need
to adapt to its strangeness and figure out its puzzles (Anderson, 99-100). In addition to this, it
encourages children to adapt through humor and can help children cope with their fears and
anxieties. The humor associated with nonsense attracts and benefits the child. The child will
learn that when life becomes confusing or people become frustrating, an appropriate reaction is
to laugh. Chukovsky notes the ability of nonsense “…воспитать в ребенке юмор –
драгоценное качество, которое, когда ребенок подрастет, увеличит его сопротивление
всякой неблагоприятной среде и поставит его высоко над мелочами и дрязгами” (Ot dvukh
do piati, 246). “ …to develop in children a sense of humor: it is a precious quality which will
increase the child’s sense of perspective and his tolerance, as he grows up, of unpleasant
situations, and it will enable him to rise about pettiness and wrangling” (From Two to Five,
104-105). For Chukovsky, not only does nonsense literature develop the child’s mental abilities
but also his emotional stability. He sums up his stance by asserting, “Я отнюдь не хочу сказать,
что детей следует воспитывать только такими «бессмыслицы» выброшены, не отвечает
многим плодотворным потребностям трёхлетнего-четырехлетнего ребенка и лишает его
полезнейшей умственной пищи.”(Ot dvukh do piati, 247). “Although I by no means insist that
one has to bring up children exclusively on such nonsense rhymes, I am nevertheless convinced
that children’s literature from which all ‘nonsense’ is expunged will fail to meet certain inherent
needs of the three- to four-year-old child, and will deprive him of wholesome mental
34 “Nonsense language gives children a nonthreatening medium for practicing the subtle variations in
sound patterns of their language and allows for what could be called a second babbling stage” (Anderson,
44).
53

nourishment” (From Two to Five, 105). Nonsense is incredibly useful for the young child to
develop proper mental and emotional capabilities.
Unpleasantness and violence, while hallmarks of nonsense literature, are present in
children’s literature at large. Often, we find such unpleasant themes in folk and fairy tales meant
for children. Maria tatar reminds us that, “In fairy tales, nearly every character- from the most
hardened criminal to the virgin Mary - is capable of cruel behavior” (Tatar, 5). We need only
think back to the original Grimm tales to see that this is true. While many parents are sure to
scrutinize the amount of violence that their children are exposed to out of fear that the child will
be traumatized or scared, often this is not the case. Tatar tells us that, “Professional raconteurs
report that children are rarely squeamish when they hear about decapitation or other forms of
mutilation. Grisly episodes often strike them as amusing rather than horrifying” (Tatar,20).
Violence and mutilation in fairytales and other forms of children’s literature is often presented as
a repercussion for wickedness. Naughty children and villains get punished for their misdeeds in
the end. The use of violence is often used to teach a moral and because children are not unnerved
by this violence it may produce laughter at the release of tensions. However, Tatar also notes that
this laughter, “...indicates that the depiction of physical violence in fairytales has a special appeal
for children and not only in connection with the punishment of villains” (Tatar, 21).
So, for those who prescribe to relief theory of humor then, another benefit of nonsense is that
it addresses and neutralizes the fears and anxieties of children.35 But violence in nonsense also
serves as a type of entertainment for the child, especially because of the emotional detachment
that accompanies it. Take Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which functions as a rhymed
35 Relief theory posits that we use humor as a way to reduce tension and stress. For more on the various
theories of humor’s functions and creation, see Meyer, John C. “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four
Functions of Humor in Communication.” Communication Theory, vol. 10, no. 3, Blackwell Publishing
Ltd, 2000, pp. 310–31.
54

alphabet book of grisly deaths of/for children. It begins, “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/
B is for Basil assaulted by bears/ C is for Clara who wasted away/ D is for Desmond thrown out
of a sleigh…” (Gorey, 1-4). The text is accompanied with Gorey’s particular illustrations of
somber ghostly children meeting their end. However, both the illustrations and the text are quite
funny, especially when taken in conjunction with one another. For example, “P is for Prue
trampled flat in a brawl” depicts little Prue, barely able to reach the doorknob, about to enter an
establishment labeled “Saloon -Bar” (Gorey, 16). The matter-of-fact delivery with the sing-songy
rhyme of the verse creates the necessary emotional detachment. The conflict between the content
and the expectation of a children’s alphabet book adds an extra layer of humor.
While nonsense violence does not punish the villains in the same moralistic way that it does
in the fairy tale, much of the humor in nonsense violence is at the expense of adults, essentially
bringing adults down to the child’s level and releasing the tension a child feels living in an adult
world (Anderson, 106). Additionally, nonsense humor, which engages in violence without
consequences or horror, serves to reassure the child through its levity and laughter at otherwise
grim situations (Anderson, 106). Henri Bergson’s views on laughter align well with ideas on the
humor produced by nonsense. Bergson’s thoughts on life and art were highly influential for the
Russian modernists and many of his ideas can be seen in the work of the Russian Futurists and
OBERIU. Bergson asserts that a main quality of laughter is an emotional detachment,
“Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion” (Bergson,
465). This indifferent laughter when paired with violence, harm, death, etc. in nonsense is able to
calm the child’s anxieties, but if we follow Bergson’s views on laughter further, it has another
function.
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For Bergson laughter above all has a social function (Bergson,467). The comic represents a
rigidity that society wants to do away with and laughter is the means by which it is corrected
(Bergson, 473). This stance, as well as Chukovsky’s, bear a striking resemblance to the “Russkii
smekh” of Likhachev and Panchenko, for whom laughter removes psychological trauma but also
serves a socially corrective function (Likhachev, 3-4). In this view, the child laughs at the bad or
strange behavior of the characters of nonsense because they know and understand that such
behavior is unacceptable in their society. This laughter therefore reinforces for the child the
proper way to behave, thus serving a social function.
Another function in children’s nonsense is in ordering, listing, and counting principles.
Counting, ordering, and classifying in children’s nonsense have a clear pedagogical function.
Such is the case with the classic children’s nonsense book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill
Martin Jr. and John Archambault, which features all the letters of the English alphabet in the
traditional order racing up a coconut tree, paired with the sing-song rhythm of babble words,
harm without consequence, and a circular ending. It is clearly nonsense and also clearly
purposefully constructed to teach young children their ABCs. The same is true of Kharms’s
Веселые чижи (Happy siskins), which is nonsense for the purpose of teaching children to count.
There are forty-four happy siskins, all doing different silly things, again written in verse and with
babble. While ordering and classifying in children’s nonsense might not seem to us quite as clear
as these two cases, they have a similar important function for small children. As Chukovsky puts
it,
На ребенка ежедневна обрушивается такое количество путаных, отрывочных
знаний, что не будь у него этой благодатной тяги к преодолению хаоса, он еще до
пятилетнего возраста непременно сошел бы с ума. Поневоле ему приходится
56

производить неустанную систематизацию всех явлений своего духовного мира, и
нельзя не поражаться тому необычайному искусству, с которым совершается им эта
труднейшая работа, а также той радости, с которой связана каждая его победа над
хаосом… Являясь таким непризнанным гением систематизации, классификации и
координации вещей, ребенок, естественно, проявляет повышенный интерес к тем
умственным играм и опытам, где эти процессы выдвинуты на первое место.
Отсюда та популярность, которой в течение многих столетий пользовались в
детской среде всевозможные стихи-перевертыши (Ot dvukh do piati, 243-244)
So much confusing and fragmentary knowledge is heaped upon the young child daily that
if he did not have this fortunate desire to resolve chaos, he would surely lose his mind by
the age of five. necessity compels him to conduct a tireless classification of all
phenomena; it is impossible not to be amazed at the extraordinary skill with which this
most difficult task is accomplished and at the delight the child feels at his victory over
chaos…being an unacknowledged genius of classification, systematization, and
coordination of things, the child naturally reveals a heightened interest in those mental
games and experiments where these processes are most in use. Hence the popularity of
every variety of rhymed topsy-turvies among children down through the centuries. (From
Two to Five, 104)
The child has a need to process and classify all of the new and confusing information that they
receive everyday and so in this respect the ordering and classifying aspects of nonsense are
helpful for the child.
57

While perhaps one can ignore one or two of these benefits and functions of nonsense in
children’s literature, it is difficult to dismiss all of them. This is especially the case when we
consider nonsense connected to counting and the alphabet. The problem arises when we compare
theories on nonsense for adults vs for children. If in children's literature nonsense serves a
function, that is to say, there is a point, then does this point carry over when the intended
audience is exclusively adults? Certainly adults don’t need help learning their ABCs, but perhaps
there is still something corrective in the laughter that nonsense produces. The problem in this
idea is rooted in the focus on laughter and humor in nonsense. Humor is not a necessity of
nonsense or even a main building block, but rather a byproduct of nonsense and its devices.
Thus, if it is part of the “point” it is, at least for me, secondary or ancillary, and the primary
“point” is the space within the text for metaphysical contemplation, the suggestion that the
nonsensical can still be the truth. That some aspects of the topsy-turvy do exist in a rational space
beyond our understanding.
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Chapter II:
History of Nonsense in the Russian Canon
“Чепуха совершенная делается на свете. Иногда вовсе нет никакого правдоподобия.”
“Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility for it at all”
-Nikolai Gogol, “Нос”
In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order
-Novalis
1. Imported Nonsense
Why does nonsense flourish in Russian literature? And what might it tell us about Russian
culture? One idea I would like to suggest is that nonsense requires its reader to assess the
situation, accept the situation, and readjust and it is all done with humor present to help reassure
the reader. In many ways, Russian life and bureaucracy, especially local and rural bureaucracy,
demands these same parameters of its officials and subjects, though they do not necessarily have
to find humor in it. Whether or not this claim is true is besides the point, but rather the point is
that this idea persists in the Russian cultural imagination. And this idea has helped to create
many jokes and legends of silly, nonsensical situations that were simply accepted. For example,
there is a story about Verebinsky bypass in the railroad. The bypass is a curve in an otherwise
straight railway line that runs between St. Petersburg and Moscow. According to the legend, the
origin of the curve came about when Tsar Nicholas I used a ruler to draw a straight line
indicating where the line should be built, however, the Tsar was not careful and his finger got in
the way causing a curve in part of the line. The officials, afraid to or unable to question the Tsar's
59

actions, built the line with the curve where his finger was placed (O’Flynn, “Tsar’s Finger”). Of
course, this is not actually why the curve exists, yet the story persists.
Another example of nonsense in the Russian cultural imagination at the behest of a monarch
can be found in Alexander Pushkin’s attempt at an historical account of the Pugachev rebellion.
In The History of Pugachev, Pushkin tells us that,
“Послано в Черкасск повеление сжечь дом и имущество Пугачева, а семейство его,
безо всякого оскорбления, отправить в Казань, для уличения самозванца в случае
поимки его. Донское начальство в точности исполнило слова высочайшего указа:
дом Пугачева, находившийся в Зимовейской станице, был за год пред сим продан
его женою, пришедшею в крайнюю бедность, и уже сломан и перенесен на чужой
двор. Его перевезли на прежнее место и в присутствии духовенства и всей станицы
сожгли.” (Pushkin, 48)
“Instructions were sent to Cherkassk to burn Pugachov’s house and belongings, but to
convey his family, without insult or injury, to Kazan, in order to identify the pretender if
he was caught. The local authorities carried out Her Majesty’s command to the letter.
Pugachov’s house in Zimoveyskaya had been sold by his impoverished wife a year
before, dismantled and conveyed to another homestead; it was now transported back to its
previous location and burnt in the presence of the clergy and the whole Cossack
township” (The Captain's Daughter and The History of Pugachov, 207)
Finding that Pugachev’s house sold and dismantled, the officials had the materials brought back,
reconstructed it on the place it originally stood, so that it could be burnt down per the empress’s
order. Both of these examples might remind a reader of the citizens of Wonderland scrambling
around to follow the Queen of Hearts’s nonsensical orders lest they lose their heads.
60

Additionally, to find representations of petty bureaucrats involved in silly and outlandish
premises in Russian literature, we need to look no further than the works of Nikolai Gogol.
Works such as the short story “The Overcoat,” the play The Inspector General and his novel
Dead Souls extensively parody Russian governmental systems, especially in regards to rural and
petty bureaucrats. While Dead Souls is more aligned with the grotesque than nonsense, it does
have moments where the landowners that Chichikov visits engage in nonsense. Nonsense
continually redefines borders and boundaries -through play with infinity, seriality, circularity, and
nesting. One relevant example in Dead Souls which plays with boundaries in this way comes in
chapter 4 when Nozdrev explains to Chichikov, “Вот граница! — сказал Ноздрев. — Все, что
ни видишь по эту сторону, все это мое, и даже по ту сторону, весь этот лес, которым вон
синеет, и все, что за лесом, все мое.” “Here is the border!- said Nozdrev. - everything, that you
see on this side, all that is mine, and even on the other side, that whole forrest, which is turning
blue over there, what's beyond the forest, is all mine” (Mertvye dushi, Location 1728). If we
consider the Russian cultural and political landscape, especially around times of upheaval or new
regimes - particularly in the late 1800s and early 1900s when nonsense literature seems to be
most popular - we find that those borders are continually shifting and hold as much sense at any
given time as the border on Nozdrev’s land. Least we think these types of nonsense
inconveniences existed only under Tsarist Russia, I would direct my readers to the satirical and
humorous works of Mikhail Zoshchenko. A large number of Zoshchenko’s short stories are
dedicated to poking fun at the flaws in the Soviet systems and culture. Of particular interest
might be “The Golash” and “Adventures of a Monkey.” While I have briefly given some of these
examples to suggest that within the Russian cultural imagination Russians are closely familiar
61

with nonsensical situations in their own structures, there are also many literary and artistic
nonsense influences from abroad that are taken in and adjusted to the Russian cultural landscape.
The influences of nonsense from abroad in Russian literature come mainly from England, out
of the Victorian classics of Lear and Carroll, but the modernist interest in Italian Commedia
dell’arte, while not properly nonsense, also contributed to the overall atmosphere in which
foreign and organic nonsense began to flourish.36
In this section I will therefore outline the
various translations and reworkings of different English and Italian works, which imported
important elements of nonsense into Russia. Most of these importations take place during the fin
de siecle into the early 20th century. It should be noted, that there are at least some children’s
works coming into the Russian tradition from Germany, such as Struwwelpeter and Max and
Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks, which feature some of the violence, dark humor, and
silliness of nonsense, yet nevertheless remain moralistic in a way that nonsense typically does
not. Struwwelpeter is so comically violent that Bettina Hurlimann is compelled to tell readers of
her Three Centuries of Children’s Books in Europe, the story “Little Suck-a-Thumb'' within the
Struwwelpeter collection “is indeed truly horrific and still gives me the shivers when I think of
the picture of the prancing tailor and his huge shears with the blood dripping down” (Hurlimann,
56). The shivers one feels in response to Struwwelpeter, is yet another way the story differs from
nonsense, where most readers feel no horror in reaction to nonsense violence, and horror does
not serve as the goal of the text. While the impact of these works is certainly not as significant as
the English and Italian works, it would be careless not to mention their existence in the Russian
literary sphere.
36 Neil Cornwell notes that though Commedia dell’arte is not properly absurd or nonsense, “they indulge
too in the multifarious forms of incongruous semantic speculation and verbal misunderstanding”
(Cornwell, 37).
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Throughout the 1920s and 30s, English nonsense experienced a boom in Russian translations,
mainly and perhaps unsurprisingly in the context of children’s literature. These translations
appeared alongside original Russian poetic experiments with nonsense, such as those of the
Oberiu poets. While there seems to be a general artistic and pedagogical interest in nonsense,
children’s literature, and the child-like aesthetic at the time, part of this boom in translated
nonsense is due to the modicum of freedom that writers and translators experienced at the
beginning of the twenties. Additionally, a number of private publishers, including for example
Raduga, developed out of the NEP era policies leading to more translations of popular works.37
Elena Goodwin, in her book Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children’s
Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia, explains, “Considering that the foremost goal
of these publishing houses was profit, it is obvious that they would choose titles that were
popular among readers and would easily be sold…As NEP brought about a degree of relaxation
in the attitude of the state authorities towards translated literature, pre-revolutionary titles were
reprinted and the politically neutral books were translated in the early 1920s” (Goodwin, 59-60).
Numerous translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice works appeared in 1920, 1923 and 1924 by
different authors. The first translation of Alice into Russian appeared in Moscow in 1879, and the
1920’s saw Vladimir Nabokov’s famous translation titled Аня в стране чудес, though it was not
available in the Soviet union at the time of publication (Demurova, 11). The Alice stories found a
successful home in Russian and Soviet children’s literature, and were often reprinted and
repeatedly translated. In 1940 Olenich-Gnenenko’s successful translation of Alice in Wonderland
37 Raduga publishing house was a private children’s publisher active in the 1920s and edited by Samuil
Marshak.
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was published at the same time as V. and L. Uspensky’s translations of selections from the Alice
novels and new translations were published in the 60s and 70s as well (Demurova, 14-16).38
The children’s poet and translator Samuil Marshak (1887-1964), in particular, contributed
many translations of English works in the 1920s such as the poems of Lewis Carroll, Edward
Lear, A. Milne, and various English nursery rhymes. Goodwin details the list:
…the appearance of Soviet translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in 1923 and 1924 published by L.D.
Frenkel’ private publisher; Edward Lear’s nonsense poem The Table and the Chair
translated by Samuil Marshak and published by private companies Brokguas-Efron and
Raduga in 1924 and 1928; and Samuil Marshak’s versions of English nursery rhymes
published by state companies Gosizdat and Vsemirnaia literatura between 1923 and 1928.
(Goodwin, 60)
Marshak, together with fellow children’s author Kornei Chukovsky, was responsible for
bringing many English works into the Russian language, not just nonsense and children’s works.
But the English nonsense and humorous children’s works which they translated jive so well with
their own tendencies toward nonsense that Goodwin claims these translations left a lasting mark
on their own nonsense poetry on the level of “humour, word play, and rhythmic patterns”
(Goodwin, 16).
As mentioned above, Russia imported the Commedia dell'arte tradition from Italy starting in
the early 1900s. The Commedia dell’arte tradition itself has certain qualities in common with
nonsense. While the tradition often involves parody to a larger extent, Cornwell tells us that,
“...they indulged too in the multifarious forms of incongruous semantic speculation and verbal
38 For an astute analysis on the differences between these translations and the problems translators
encounter with Carroll please see Nina Demurova’s Alice Speaks Russian: The Russian Translations of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
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misunderstanding” (Cornwell, 37). In the Russian context, the tradition was first taken up by the
Symbolists and later by other avant-garde artists and composers. I would like to look briefly at
the specific case of The Love for Three Oranges, which swings wildly from nonsense to folklore
to parody. This play was not simply translated into Russian, rather it was adapted to suit the
context and movements of the time.
The Love for Three Oranges, originally called L’amore delle tre Melarance, was an Italian
play created by Carlo Gozzi, who stitched together various Italian folk tales. The play was first
staged in 1671 at the carnival of Venice as Gozzi’s attack in an ongoing philosophical war with
his rivals Carlo Goldoni and Petro Chiari, who wanted to reform the theater. Goldoni and Chiari
favored more “realistic” styles of performance on stage, in place of the commedia dell’arte
tradition, which featured masked actors, stock characters and Lazzi or stock, mime-like gestures.
Tatiana Korneeva explains that these theatrical polemics are at the very heart of Gozzi’s piece,
writing,
The polemic against Goldoni’s and Chiari’s psychologically realistic character
comedies and their abandonment of commedia dell’arte undeniably occupies a
central place in L’Amore delle tre melarance. In fact, it was with this very play
that Gozzi brought what had already been a vicious assault against his opponents
to a new level of intensity and visibly shifting his attack from pamphlet writings
circulating mostly in manuscript form to the highly public stage of the playhouse
(Korneeva, 142-143).
The performance makes very pointed use of the commedia dell’arte tradition by bringing the
audience’s attention to the fictitiousness of theater and acting. Gozzi’s original piece employed a
play-within-the-play, characters breaking the fourth wall, and characters intended as caricatures
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of known figures.39 Additionally, the play utilized speaking names or names which indicate the
main trait, quality, or destiny of a particular character. For example Truffaldino, the court jester,
comes from the Italian root “to cheat” or “to swindle.”
In the early 20th century, the Russian Symbolists’ take an interest in The Love for Three
Oranges. Through the Russian importation, the play becomes merrier than Gozzi’s harsh polemic
and both Meyerhold and Prokoviev change not just the form, in Prokofiev’s case, but entire
sections of the play. The Symbolists were cultivating a commedia dell’arte revival in the context
of their objections to the Russian romantics and realists who came before them. They favored
many of the same techniques as Gozzi, often mocking theatricality, using speaking names, and
nesting plays within plays. There is a similar tilt in Blok’s Балаганчик, performed 1906, which
demonstrates an urge to mock theatricality. The play emphasizes the author as a character to
remind the audience that they are watching a created, artistic performance and not reality.
Another example is Stravinsky’s Петрушка, which premiered 1911. Петрушка, derived at least
in part from Балапанчик, utilized the commedia dell’arte stock characters, with Petrushka as the
Russian version of Pulcinella, and ended with an ultimate break down of the performance as the
ghost of the Petrushka puppet menacingly mocks its puppet master from above.
As part of this trend, Vsevolod Meyerhold translated Gozzi’s The Love for Three
Oranges into Russian, with a few new additions, in 1914. Meyerhold changed parts of Gozzi’s
original text, adjusting the plot, refining the parody and adding a parade of characters across the
stage. The prologue, the parade, and the direct addresses to the audience, were championed by
Meyerhold as devices that would force the audience to remember that they were watching pure
play-acting. In addition to this, Meyerhold created competing choruses, which argued during the
39 With this last device, Gozzi struck hard at his opponents by inserting, “…two melancholy
poets…whom the author intended (and his audience understood) to be Carlo Goldoni and Pietro Chiari.
At war with each other…” (Korneeva, 145).
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play over whether tragedy or comedy were better genres for the play and “fools” who constantly
commented on the play from towers on either side of the forestage. Like Gozzi, Meyerhold wrote
characters who were meant to reflect real people as a parody of Realism. At this point the play
becomes linked to the Modernist movement though admittedly not outright to nonsense.
Later in 1921 Prokofiev would stage his own version of Love for Three Oranges in Chicago.40
Prokofiev wrote the libretto for the opera aboard a ship sailing to America, basing it on
Meyerhold’s uncredited translation.41 Prokofiev retained many of the elements of the Meyerhold
source material in his opera. The changes that Prokofiev made to Meyerhold’s script worked to
streamline the action of the plot. Prokofiev pruned back Meyerhold’s lengthy interludes, divided
the opera into a prologue and four acts, and most notably, replaced the four guardians of the
oranges with one – the grotesquely over-the-top cook. One of the more important changes, which
Prokofiev made, was that he expanded the role of the commentators in the opera. This expansion
maximized the emphasis placed on the theatricality of the already overly theatrical composition..
Reviews for the performance were varied. Indeed some critics fell in love with The Love for
Three Oranges, while others were appalled by its grotesque elements and characters. While the
nonsense-like qualities of The Love for Three Oranges was typical of the Russian avant-garde or
even the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, in the American context, it was
shocking. Michael Pisani writes, “Arguably, the whole aesthetic climate in Russia and Europe
that brought The Love for Three Oranges into being was a foreign one to most Americans in
41 Meyerhold and Prokofiev met each other in 1916, and Meyerhold suggested that Prokofiev turn The
Love for Three Oranges into an opera.
40 When Prokofiev arrived in America, the director of the Auditorium Theater in Chicago, Cleofonte
Campanini, contacted him in hopes that he would agree to perform The Gambler in 1919. Prokofiev,
however, suggested that they perform Love for Three Oranges instead and Campanini agreed. There were,
however, snags along the way. Firstly, American audiences would not pay to attend an opera that was in
Russian, thus Prokofiev had to translate the libretto into French. Despite the rewriting, as well as money
issues and Campanini’s untimely death, the opera was eventually performed in Chicago in 1921.
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1921…if reviews are to be believed, the opera was played broadly for laughs. This style of
acting, perfectly acceptable in other contexts, was generally viewed as tasteless and intolerable in
an American grand opera house.” (Pisani, 493). It seems that the praise of the performance came
from Chicago, while the critics from New York bemoaned the piece. American screenwriter Ben
Hecht wrote a glowing review of the music from the opera, which also resonated with Boris
Anisfeld –the artist of the set and costumes for the opera (Bolt, 7). However, Herbert Peyser
wrote in the Musical Observer, “The work is intended, one learns, to poke fun at something. So
far as I am able to discern, it pokes fun chiefly at those who paid money for it.” In response to
the negative criticism, such as this comment by Peyser, Prokofiev responded, “Some reviewers…
wanted to know whom I was laughing at: the audience, Gozzi, the operatic form, or those who
had no sense of humor. They found in Oranges mockery, defiance, and the grotesque and what
not; all I had been trying to do was write an amusing opera ” (Prokofiev, 280).
What makes this play and opera of significant importance to nonsense in the Russian tradition
is its patchwork of genres combined with its frequent devolution into both nonsense and the
absurd. Although the opera is generally described as a lampoon, through its many evolutions, the
specific nature of that lampoon is harder to nail down. It could be argued that the opera is a
collage, or pastiche. Oranges resonates with the zeitgeist of the early 20th century Russian
avant-garde. Prokofiev, ahead of the trend as he was in America, anticipated the return to the
Italian commedia dell’arte tradition and art of the absurd. Michael Pisani observed, “Perhaps the
time for an absurdist opera was ripe ,” and gestures to works like Shostakovich’s The Nose,
which came about in the later 1920s (Pisani, 507). Indeed, we might even look further ahead to
the Theatre of the Absurd in the 1950s.
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2. Russian and Soviet Nonsense Works
In the Russian and Soviet literary tradition, nonsense seems to reach its peak in both
production and popularity in the 1920’s and 30s with avant-garde writers, such as those in
Oberiu. However, the roots of nonsense can be traced much farther back. As one moves closer to
the 1930s, the literary nonsense being produced solidifies and becomes more easily definable as
nonsense literature. While with earlier influences, nonsense is often not the work's defining
characteristic. Therefore, I am not suggesting that the following works or authors should be
considered nonsense literature, but rather, I seek to demonstrate that small streams of nonsense
wind their way through the Russian canon and eventually spill into the larger pool of nonsense
after the revolution. I will start by tracing nonsense through folktales, the works of Nikolai
Gogol, Koz’ma Prutkov, the Futurists and their experimentations with zaum, and finally the
group of writers associated with Oberiu.
In Russian literature, like with many literary traditions, folktales and early Russian humor can
exhibit elements of nonsense. Russian folktales, while often not pure nonsense, run parallel to
nonsense literature in many ways. I have explained in my first chapter that nonsense does not
preclude metaphysical connections, creates topsy-turvy worlds, and is highly engaged with the
verbal and linguistic aspects of the text in the form of word play. In the context of Russian
folktales and early Russian texts, Likhachev and Panchenko, in their work Смеховой Мир,
explain the many aspects of laughter in ancient Rus’. They explain the Russian folk tradition of
“Балагурство” or buffoonery as highly connected to linguistic games which render no meaning
in much the same way as nonsense does,
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Для древнерусского юмора очень характерно балагурство, служащее тому же
обнажению, но “обнажению” слова, по преимуществу его обессмысливающему.
Балагурство - один из национальных русских форм смеха, в которой значительная
доля принадлежит “лингвистической” его стороне. Балагурство разрушает значение
слов и коверкает их внешнюю форму. Балагур вскрывает нелепость в строении
слов, дает неверную этимологию или неуместно подчеркивает этимологическое
значение слова, связывает слова, внешне похожие по звучанию, и.т.д. (Likhachev,
26-27)
Buffoonery is very characteristic for ancient Russian humor, as it serves to bare the word
naked, but that “baring” mostly renders it senseless. Buffoonery is one of the national
Russian forms of laughter, in which a significant portion pertains to its “linguistic” side.
Buffoonery destroys the meaning of words and distorts their visual form. The jester
reveals nonsense in the structure of the words, gives the incorrect etymology or
improperly emphasizes the etymological meaning of the word, links words seemingly
similar in sound, etc.42
According to Likhachev and Panchenko, the “балагур” (jester) opens up nonsense in the
building of words with a heavy use of sound and rhythm in much the same way the nonsense
verse of Lear does (Likhachev, 27).
Likhachev and Panchenko even take a similar view of the function of ancient Russian
laughter that many of the theorists of children’s literature take on nonsense. That is, that it
provides both a coping mechanism and highlights a “real world,” or a more correct world
through its contrast against the topsy-turvy world. They contend that this kind of laughter has a
healing function, removing psychological trauma (Likhachev, 3-4). Meanwhile, the “anti-world”
42 My translation
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of Russian laughter, which is the topsy-turvy of nonsense, takes on a corrective function. The
idea that laughter in the folktale’s anti-culture serves a corrective function is closer to the
laughter of satire but reminds us of Chukovsky’s claim about the child’s laughter at nonsense
topsy-turvies reinforcing for them the natural order of their reality. The anti-culture world that is
created does not oppose every culture, but only that which it ridicules, leading to the creation of
a new, more fair culture (Likhachev, 4). Through the outlandish and nonsensical behavior of the
holy fool (юродивый) type, these early texts do not exclude or preclude religious or
metaphysical connections in addition to playing with the overturning of religious norms and
engaging in an apophatic path to God, which has later relevance to the nonsense works of Daniil
Kharms.
The early and mid 19th century are generally discussed in relation to Realism, represented by
the shift towards prose starting with Pushkin and the “large, loose and baggy monsters” of
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. However, two authors of this period emerged as important writers of
nonsense in the Russian tradition.
On the first of these authors, Nikolai Gogol, so much has been written, so many varying
interpretations, that Alexander Zholkovsky once cautioned a prospective graduate student with
the rhetorical question, “what can one say about Gogol that has not already been written?”43
Positioning Gogol as a nonsense writer is not a novel idea.44 However, Gogol’s influence on
Russian literature at large is so significant that his impact on the smaller tradition of nonsense is
44 Gogol has been read as grotesque, as political satire, and as a consequence of Soviet era criticism has
been labeled a representative of Realism. Many scholars have chafed at the last of these, with Gary Saul
Morson calling the “Absurd interpretation,” “A critical fate that can only be called Gogolian” (“Absolute
Nonsense,”).
43 This was during my campus visit to USC in 2018.
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profound. Gogol’s works heavily feature skaz narration, illogical events, actions, and dialogue, as
well as the type of dark humor often found in nonsense. As Neil Cornwell puts it:
The most important Gogolian feature for the present purposes lies in his being an
exponent Par Excellence of stylistic absurdism, with sternian quirks, digressions, inflated
similes, snatches of zany dialogue, hyperbole, narrative and syntactic non sequiturs,
superfluous detail and irrelevancies, non appearing characters and other forms of
redundancy (Cornwell, 45).
In fact, many scholars have noted that Gogol’s particular style seems more connected to the later
experiments of the avant-garde movements of the 1920’s than to that of his own time, while also
noting the direct influence that his works had on the Oberiu writers of the 1930s (Firtich, 48).45
Out of all of Gogol’s works, his short story “The Nose,” part of his Petersburg texts, is widely
regarded as his most purely nonsensical work. Simon Karlinsky has gone so far as to assert that
“The Nose” is, “The most logic-defying piece of writing in Russian literature to this day”
(Karlinsky, 129). The reader follows, to the best of their ability, the mysterious disappearance of
collegiate assessor Kovalev’s nose, his attempts to find his nose and convince it to return to his
face. The nose appears, baked into the bread Kovalev’s barber is eating. The barber later throws
it into the Neva, before Kovalev has even awoken to notice it is missing. Once Kovalev is aware
of the flat spot on his face where his nose once was, his search for the nose makes up the bulk of
the tale. He first seeks the help of the police, then decides to take out an advertisement, but he
finally spots the nose, which has become sentient, man-sized and is dressed according to a rank
that is several positions higher than Kovalev’s on the table of ranks. Kovalev attempts to
45 For more on this relationship see also Ksana Blank’s “The Nose:” A Stylistic and Critical Companion.
“Perfect Nonsense” p. 179.
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convince the nose to return itself to his face to no avail. Finally, after 13 days without a nose,
Kovalev awakes and the nose is back in its normal place on his face.
The story engages in nonsense premises and techniques at the level of plot, narration,
language and a lack of causality between events and even character dialogue (Blank, 179). The
comical and nonsensical effect of the loss of Kovalev’s nose and the questions associated are
compounded by the juxtapositions of the narrator’s inability to give an explanation for the events
of the story, and in some places to adequately narrate the events at all. In several places the
narration abruptly ends because the narrator is no longer able to relay relevant information to the
reader, saying for example, “...Но здесь происшествие совершенно закрывается туманом, и
что далее произошло, решительно ничего не известно” (Gogol, 6). “...But here the incident
becomes totally shrouded in mist, and of what happened further decidedly nothing is known”
(Collected Tales, 304). The narration is cut off without a resolution, not because the narrator
simply does not know what happened, but because the incident has closed itself off with fog.46
It
is as if the facts themselves are so incomprehensible that they bar even an attempt at explanation.
The narrator only offers, “Чепуха совершенная делается на свете. Иногда вовсе нет никакого
правдоподобия” (Gogol, 29). “Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no
plausibility for it at all” (Collected Tales, 323). And at the end of the story, when the narrator
sums up the inconsistencies, unanswered questions, and fantastic events, he offers, “А, однако
же, при всем том, хотя, конечно, можно допустить и то, и другое, и третье, может даже...
ну да и где ж не бывает несообразностей?.. А все, однако же, как поразмыслишь, во всем
этом, право, есть что-то. Кто что ни говори, а подобные происшествия бывают на свете, —
редко, но бывают” (Gogol, 33). “And yet, for all that, though it is certainly possible to allow for
46 A similar technique of abruptly ending narration and leaving the conclusion unresolved can be found in
Kharm’s “Вываливающиеся старухи,” in which the narrator suddenly becomes bored with the events
and leaves to go to the market.
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one thing, and another, and a third, perhaps even…And then, too, are there not incongruities
everywhere?...And yet, once you reflect on it, there really is something to all this. Say what you
like, but such incidents do happen in the world - rarely, but they do happen” (Collected Tales,
326). It is exactly this pure inexplicability coupled with the assertion that such things that,
without motivation, defy all logic and laws “бывают,” that situates “The Nose” in the realm of
nonsense. In fact, the difficulty to fit completely any one interpretation or satisfying explanation
to Gogol’s tale is a problem scholars find with nonsense literature often. Gary Saul Morson
asserts that, with “The Nose,” in particular, “Attempts to impose an interpretive grid on the story
- religious, political, and inevitably freudian - seem to be parodied in advance by a story
designed to resist all interpretations” (Absolute Nonsense, 65). The closer we look at sensical
interpretations to “The Nose,”the more quickly they begin to fall apart. Interestingly, Gogol
originally planned to use a dream to prompt the events of the story (Blank, 151). Remnants of
this plan are still sprinkled throughout the story. Each chapter includes characters waking up and
in Russian nose “нос” backwards becomes dream “сон,” bringing to mind an Alice-like
explanation of the events (Blank, 151). However, Gogol eventually decided against this premise
in his final version. Gary Saul Morson emphasizes Gogol’s decision not to include this
motivation and pushes back against a dream interpretation. He claims that in the end, “The
Nose” is not couched in a dream and that no full explanation is offered or attempted. He argues
that unlike other texts, such as “The Diary of a Madman,” this leaves “The Nose” without clear
motivation for the nonsense the reader is presented with, making it a unique case of nonsense
writing (Gogol’s Parables of Explanation, 226). Morson goes so far as to argue that, “the Nose”
may even be more nonsensical than the standard of nonsense because it does not seem to follow
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a “system of nonsense, as (for instance) Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll does” (Gogol’s Parables
of Explanation, 233).
Another major early influence in the Russian tradition of nonsense, was himself, entirely
made up. Koz’ma Prutkov, his biography, and works were the collective creation of the poet
A.K. Tolstoy and the four Zhemchuzhnikov brothers (Ingram, 1). The bulk of Prutkov’s work
was published in three main periods; 1854, the early 1860s and about 1876-84 (Berkov, 10).
While his works were published in different journals, most appeared in Современник
(Bukhshtab, 173). Koz’ma Prutkov’s works were a mix of different genres such as poems,
fables, epistles, and aphorisms. Prutkov’s aphorisms became the most popular, lasting, and
definitive genre of his work (Skvoznikov, Sochineniia Koz’my Prutkova, 13). When they were
originally published, his works lacked a coherent systematic arrangement but were later gathered
and arranged in books of his collected works (Ingram, 127). The number of readers of Prutkov
greatly expanded after the revolution (Skvoznikov, Sochineniia Koz’my Prutkova, 8). Prutkov’s
works came back in vogue during the late avant-garde period, with collected editions appearing
in 1927,1928, 1932, and 1933 (Ingram, 319-320). Of these editions, the 1933 Academia edition,
edited by Berkov, was the most complete with 637 pages and 15,000 copies printed (Ingram,
320).
Prutkov’s works often make use of puns, word play, skaz narration, and alogical humor. It
must be noted that Prutkov is first and foremost a parodist, often parodying the poetry of
Benediktov and Shcherbina (Berkov, 4).47 However, there are many works by Prutkov that seem
far too silly, alogical, and interested in punning to place in the category of parody. Take for
example Epigram #1:
47 For an extensive identification on the original works and specific writers, which Prutkov parodies see
Berkov, P.N. Koz’ma Prutkov direktor probirnoi palatki i poet. K ictorii russkoi parodii.
Leningrad-Moscow, 1933.
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“Вы любите ли сыр?” - спросили раз ханжу,
Люблю, - он ответил,- я вкус в нем нахожу.
“Do you like cheese?” - they once asked the hypocrite,
I like it, - he answered, - I find taste in it.
This short and humorous little verse relies on the end rhyme between “Ханжу” “hypocrite” and
“нахожу” “I find,” as well as play with the word taste. There is a play between the various
meanings of the word taste such as the surface-level physical taste of the cheese but also to have
a taste for something or for it to be tasteful. In “Эпиграмма № 2” Epigram # 2, Prutkov makes a
similar rhymed joke with a play on words:
Раз архитектор с птичницей спознался.
И что ж? – в их детище смешались две натуры:
Сын архитектора – он строить покушался,
Потомок птичницы – он строил только «куры».
Once an architect knew a poultry maid.
So what? - In their child were mixed two natures:
The architect’s son - He tried to build,
The offspring of the poultry maid - he built only “chickens”
This epigram, plays with the phrase “строить куры.” Taken in its literal sense, it means “to build
chickens,” but taken in its colloquial meaning, it means “to flirt.” Their son tried to build but
only managed to chase after women. This funny little epigram seems to lack a point, aside from
the punchline, and it's dubious as to whether another poet is directly parodied. The epigram is
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written in iambic pentameter, a meter that is traditionally associated with epigrams, the Russian
sonnet and Shakespere (ie. English poetry) (Wachtel, 33). Though here one feels that nothing nor
no one is being directly parodied. Additionally, these epigrams are in keeping with the tradition
of epigrams themselve, so Prutkov is not parodying the genre of epigrams so much as simply
following their rules.
Many scholars make a distinction between his parodies and a modge-podge of poems and
aphorisms, which are not parodies but sheer nonsense. For Berkov, “Характерные черты
Прутков - пародия и алогизм - отсутствуют почти во всех произведениях приписанных
раннему Пруткову” (Berkov, 4). “Prutkov’s characteristic qualities - parody and alogism - are
absent in almost all the works attributed to early Prutkov.” Berkov asserts that Prutkov’s works
actually fall under two categories; those that are socially motivated and engage in parody, and
those that are alogical and lacking a clear aim. While Bukhshtab explains, “Генезис Козьмы
Пруткова шел с одной стороны от сознательной пародии, с другой стороны - от
непритязательного развлечения комизмом нарочитой абсурдности” (187). “Koz’ma
Prutkov’s genesis was that of, on the one hand, conscious parody and, on the other hand,
unassuming amusement by a comic of deliberate absurdity.” Bukhshtab expands on Prutkov’s
works:
Использование комического алогизма - неотъемлемое и характерное свойство
творчества Козьмы Пруткова. Фантастическая тупость Пруткова дает широкую
возможность приписывать его перу разнообразные комические нелепости. Так,
вполне мотивированно входят в состав его творческого наследия шуточные басни и
эпиграммы. Правда, и в наиболее “алогическом” жанре басен Прутков потешает
иногда над помещиками, чиновниками, духовенством, над славянофильским
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национализмом и ханжеством, но все же здесь, как и в пьесах Пруткова,
преобладает стихия непритязательной шутки, комической бессмыслицы,
каламбура, связанная с мятлевской традицей салонной шутки (219-220).
The use of comical alogism is an integral and characteristic feature of Koz’ma Prutkov’s
creations. Prutkov’s fantastic obtuseness gives wide possibilities to attribute diverse
comic nonsense to his quill. So, quite motivated the composition of his creative legacy
includes comic fables and epigrams. True, that even in the most “alogical” genre of
fables, Prutkov sometimes makes fun of the landlords, officials, clergy, of
slavophile-nationalism and hypocrisy, but still here, as is in Prutkov’s plays, the element
of the unassuming thing, comic nonsense, puns, connected with the Myatlevsky tradition
of salon jokes dominates.48
Ingram too notes that Prutkov’s works are, “The ultimate coalescence of absurd humor with in
the framework of a parody” yet admits, “...there seems to be little point in lumping all of
Prutkov’s works together as parody, first and foremost” (Ingram, 133, 94). While all of these
scholars are using the term “absurd,” I want to, again, advocate for the term “nonsense” in its
place. It seems to me that in these descriptions there is little tying Prutkov’s play with illogicality
to the heavy dread and disconnectedness of the absurd, and that, on the contrary, its close
relationship with parody suggests the type of connection and lack of dread which nonsense
allows. It is Prutkov’s aphorisms, in particular, that most regularly fall into the category of
nonsense. Of course one could consider them as a parody of the entire genre of aphorisms
themselves, however, their use of alogical humor combined with a less concrete target sets them
apart from Prutkov’s other works. Consider the aphorisms, “Смерть для того поставлена в
48 My translation
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конце жизни: чтобы удобнее к ней приготовиться” (Prutkov, 85). “Death is placed at the end
of life: in order for one to more comfortably prepare for it.” Or “Где начало того конца,
которым оканчивается начало?” (Prutkov, 89). “Where is the beginning of the end, which ends
at the beginning?” With these aphorisms, there is no specific poet or figure parodied, nor does
there appear to be a social aim. Both aphorisms obtain their nonsensical effect through a cyclical
logic. Death is the end and therefore it will always be at the end. Many of the aphorisms initially
resemble sound nuggets of knowledge but have this same circular reasoning. Take for example
aphorism 51, “Если у тебя спрошено будет: что полезнее, солнце или месяц? - ответствуй:
месяц. Ибо солнце светит днем, когда и без того светло; а месяц - ночью” (Prutkov, 8) “If
you will be asked: what’s more useful; the sun or the moon? - answer: the moon. For the sun
shines during the day, when it’s already light: yet the moon shines during the night.” Here again
the reasoning is that the moon is more useful because it shines while it's dark and but the reason
it is dark, of course, is because the sun is not shining.
Many of Prutkov’s aphorisms use incongruous humor and are comparisons to unlike things
given without the explanation that would be needed to draw the two together. For example,
aphorism 24 claims, “усердный врач подобен пеликану” “A diligent doctor is like a pelican”
(Prutkov, 5). Meanwhile, number 25 claims, “эгоист подобен давно сидящему в колодце” “An
egoist is like someone who has been sitting for a longtime in a well.” In both examples, Prukov
draws comparisons between two dissimilar things, yet he does not explain the comparison
leaving the reader to try to work it out on their own. The comparisons are short, simple and
quippy, but ultimately hold little sense. Here we might be reminded of Carroll’s riddle “Why is a
raven like a writing desk?” for which there is no definitive answer.
49
49 Carroll later did compose an answer to the unanswerable riddle and many competitions have been held
since to establish the best answer.
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Another category of nonsense that the aphorisms dip into is a sort of noneuclidean logic.
What I mean by this is a type of existence that is hard for us to grasp, yet is not untrue. These
types of topics often deal with 0, the concept of nothing, and infinity. Take for example aphorism
4, in which we have a version of infinity, “Нет столь великой вещи, которую не превзошла бы
величиною еще большая. Нет вещи столь малой, в которую не вместилась бы еще
меньшая” “There is nothing so great, which could not be surpassed in magnitude by something
still bigger. There is nothing so small, in which something still smaller could not fit” (Prutkov,
3). Philosophically and metaphysically, both of these statements can be true, however, they lead
us to continually and immediately reconceptualize the biggest or smallest things we can think of
unendingly. Play with infinity, such as this, breaks boundaries, continually redetermining them.
According to Wim Tigges, “The same provisos that were applied to inversions and reversals, and
to boundaries, hold good here. In nonsense literature, the required tension between meaning and
non-meaning can be held unresolved by the arbitrariness of closure” (Tigges, 59). This example
is very similar to the one given at the beginning of this chapter in Dead Souls, where a boundary
is established but turns out not to function as a boundary is intended and we must then
redetermine what its purpose is and why Nozdrev mentions it in the first place.
At the turn of the century, art and literature experienced an explosion of experimental
techniques borrowing from each other. Poets, painters, composers and choreographers began to
work together to create multifaceted works and performances. As a result, avant-garde literature
was highly influenced by painting movements and techniques (Markov, 3). In particular, the
movements and works of Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, and her husband Mikhail
Larionov influenced the Russian Futurists. Nota bene, Kazimir Malevich was not just connected
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to the early avant-garde artists but would also become a mentor to Daniil Kharms of the later
OBERIU circle.50
The avant-garde artists of this period were especially receptive to nonsense because of a
newfound interest in children’s art in the Primitivist aspect of the avant-garde coupled with the
quick development of children’s literature as a serious category of Soviet literature, thanks
mostly to the work of Kornei Chukovsky and Samuel Marshak. This second point I will discuss
in more detail in the third section of this chapter. In painting, artists such as Mikhail Larionov
and Natalia Goncharova not only modeled their own Primitivist paintings after the works of
children but also were known to collect children’s paintings and to stage exhibitions of children’s
art (Weld, 32-33).
Nonsense literature’s focus on, and engagement with play makes it particularly enticing to
both children and avant-garde writers. When Sara Pankenier Weld in her book Voiceless
Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, defines the avant-garde as a
movement, she does so by going against the seriousness of Socialist realism by asserting that,
“the avant-garde must be distinguished on exactly the basis of its playful nature…” (Weld, 7). As
I have emphasized in chapter 1 of this dissertation, play is an important aspect of nonsense and is
expressed through logical reversals, experimentations with the limits of language, and game
structures. In addition to advocating for nonsense in children’s literature, Chukovsky identified
the similarities between the child’s use of language and that of both the earlier and later poets of
the avant-garde, such as those in the Futurist movement and those in Oberiu (Morse, 124). In
addressing the rhyming, sound, and punning that takes place in the linguistic play of children,
50 Kazimir Malevich, best known for his suprematist paintings, gave Daniil Kharms a copy of his book
God is Not Cast Down with the inscription “go and stop progress” (Fink, 96). When the members of
Radix (Kharms, Vvedensky, and Zabolotsky) extended an invitation to Malevich, he responded, “I’m an
old troublemaker, and you’re young troublemakers. Let’s see what happens” (Ostashevsky, xvi).
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Chukovsky paints an image of the child as a nonsense poet himself. In his book, Futuristy,
Chukovsky notes the positive reaction to a Futurist performance by none other than a four-year
old boy named “Yura B.” He notes that the boy, whom he also calls a futurist, would “be an
indispensable interlocutor” for the poet, as long as the poet acts quickly before the boy turns five
(Futuristy, part IX).51
Chukovsky’s recommendation is based on the boy’s linguistic games,
which resemble futurist experimentations with zaum. Chukovsky is not the only writer to notice
these similarities and take an interest in children’s artistic abilities. Prominent futurist
Kruchenykh began experimentations with children’s language and poetry in 1913. Kruchenykh
collaborated with children and even coauthored books of poetry with children, taking a specific
interest in their linguistic games. In 1913, he coauthored a book of poems, Поросята (Piglets),
with an 11 year-old girl called “Zina V,” illustrated by Malevich (Weld, 64-65). The book
features short works of nonsense with a heavy focus on zaum. For example the a poem “Весна
гусиная” (“Goosey Spring”) attributed to Kruchenych a reproduced below, is entirely
constructed of zaum:
Те ге не
Рю ри
Ле лю
Бе
Тльк
51 “Лишь один не испугался - Юра Б. Он и сам такой же футурист. Озерзамками его не удивишь.
"Отскорлупай мне яйцо", - просит он. "Лошадь меня лошаднула”. "Козлик рогается". "Елка
обсвечкана". И если вы его спросите, что же такое крол, он ответит: крол - это кролик, но не
маленький, а большой. Этому эгофутуристу в минувшем июле исполнилось уже четыре года, и я
уверен, что для Игоря Северянина он незаменимый собеседник. Пусть только поэт поторопится,
пока Юре не исполнилось пять; тогда в нем словотворчество иссякнет.” “but one was not afraid -
Yura B. He himself is a futurist even. You will not surprise him with lakecastles. ‘Shell an egg for me,’ he
asks. ‘The horse horsed me.’ ‘The goat horns’ ‘The yule tree was illuminated.’ And if you ask him, what
exactly is a rab, he answers: a rab is a rabbit, but not a small one, a big one. Last July, this ego-futurist
already turned four years old, and I am sure that for Igor Severianin he is an indispensable interlocutor.
Only let the poet hurry before Yura turns five; then word creation will have dried up in him.”
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Тлько
Хо мо ло
Ре к рюкпль
Крьд крюд
Нтпр
Иркью
Би пу
(Kruchenykh, 11)
Te ge ne
Riu ri
Le liu
Be
Tl’k
Tl’ko
Ho mo lo
Re k riukpl’
Kr’d kriud
Ntpr
Irk’iu
Bi pu
Meanwhile, the works attributed to Zina V. are closer to the works of Lear, Carroll, or even
Daniil Kharms. «Кто знает когда и где поджидает нас смерть» (“who knows when and where
death awaits us”) plays with the idea of death and its consequences, which the young author in
turn undercuts:
Один философ зашел в клазет и не запер двери. Але надо было войти туда.
Нашедши дверь незапертой он хотел войти, но заставши там философа смущенно
пробормотал извинение и прибавил: «Ах зачем вы не заперли дверь?» – Кто знает
когда и где поджидает нас смерть – ответил на это философ – если бы я запер дверь
и умер, то никто более не мог пользоваться клазетом (Zina V.,Porosiata, 4).
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One philosopher went into the closet and did not lock the door. Ala needed to go in there.
Having found the door unlocked he wanted to enter, but finding the philosopher there
confusedly muttered an apology and added: “Akh, why have you not locked the door?” -
who knows when and where death awaits us - answered the philosopher - if I had locked
the door and died, then no one else could use this closet.52
The text plays with death and its unpredictability as a philosophical idea by having the
philosopher apply this idea in a strictly practical context, causing an awkward situation when Ala
unexpectedly walks in on the philosopher. Two of Zina’s works feature dream elements and in
“Рос в поле медведь…”, (The bear grew up in a field…) the bear is able to thank his friend with
words, but when he attempts to thank his friend with actions he is unable because the author does
not feel like thinking up a way for him to do so. The narrator explains, “Но ему к сожалению не
удалось этого сделать, так как автор сегодня очень устал и ему было лень придумывать для
этого случай…” (Zina V. Porosiata, 8). “But unfortunately he couldn’t manage to do this, as
today the author was very tired and was too lazy to think up this situation for him…” We can see
that she is playing here with the form by acknowledging the authorial presence and agency in the
text. It is equally notable that the bear is only able to express his gratitude with words, as even if
the author allowed an action, it will still be expressed as words on the page. The abrupt ending of
an action or narration in a text motivated by the author’s disinclination to write it, is a favorite
device of Kharms and shows up in numerous short works in his “Случаи” collection.
Later avant-garde writers also took an interest in the childlike. Scholars such as Weld and
Morse have noted that the Oberiu poets engaged heavily in the childlike aesthetic in their
experimental nonsense writings for adults (Morse, The Dictionary as a Toy Collection, 128).
52My translation
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While the futurists were interested in the linguistic aspects related to nonsense, Oberiu poets
were interested in both linguistic and logical nonsense, as well as the violence and humor of its
content. In particular, Weld claims that, “Nowhere could such a bond between comic laughter
and the infantile, and against the rule of reason be more evident than in the absurdist literature
of…Daniil Kharms” (Weld, 156). Despite his professed hatred for children, Daniil Kharms
became quite a successful children’s author whose works endure still today. Scholars, recently,
have begun to consider Kharms’ children’s and adult works together based on the stylistic
consistency across both collections (Morse, Word Play, 67). Kharms himself, although quick to
set apart his children’s poems from his adult work, admitted in a 1933 arrest report that he
considered some of his nonsense poems for children to be on par with his adult works and of
“extraordinarily high quality” (Morse, Word Play, 53). Weld attributes this success to “a
fortuitous alignment of the artistic principles of OBERIU with those underlying children’s own
lore as well as their similarity to the logical and cognitive play of children” (Weld, 164). In
Kharms’ children’s works, as in his adult works, word play and logical reversals abound, while
violence and vile acts are not only not serious but outrageously funny.
Let us take a step back and more thoroughly examine the Futurists, their experiments with
Zaum and its impact for nonsense literature. The Futurist as James Rann so aptly put it, “...were
famous throughout Russia for their flamboyant disdain for convention and, to a lesser extent, for
their innovative verse, which sought to expand the boundaries of possibility in the literary
language” (Rann, 4). This is evidenced by their scandalous manifesto A Slap in the Face of
Public Taste, written in 1912 and signed by four out of seven of the contributors and Velimir
Khlebnikov, who did not participate in its writing but still signed it (Markov, 45). In it, they stake
their claim as something totally new and propose to “throw overboard” many of Russia’s beloved
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authors and their influence.53 Their behavior was just as provocative and performance-oriented.
They were known to dress in outrageous outfits and wear face paint. Their performances were
meant to shock as well. In performances, for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky would insult the
audience or in one instance, Alexei Kruchenykh purposefully spilled a glass of hot tea on the
orchestra (Markov, 133-134).54 One can perhaps see echoes of these spectacles in the later
Oberiu performance, Three Left Hours. Some of specific futurist works that have elements of
nonsense are Old-Fashioned Love of 1912 and A Game in Hell from 1912 which display “certain
parodistic features bordering on the absurd” (Janecek, 49). While the Zaum in the 1912
Мирсконца is constructed of “loosened logic and syntax. The striking disorder of this miscellany
would appear to be mostly Kruchenykh’s responsibility” (Janecek, 49).
Their main contribution to the field of nonsense poetry was with the development of zaum, an
experimental language of neologisms. Gerald Janecek describes zaum as, “Russian futurist
neologism used to describe words or language whose meaning is ‘indefinite’ or indeterminate”
and asserts that “Easily its [Futurisms] most provocative feature” (Janecek, 1). The Russian term
is often translated by scholars as “transrational language,” and Paul Schmidt cleverly translates it
as “beyonsense.”55 Zaum has connections to children’s babel and language learning, which one
can see in Kruchenykh’s collaborations with child-poets. Additionally, Zaum has connections to
spells and incantations, as well as to the “madness” of inspiration (Janecek, 21-26). Khlebnikov
55 For an extensive definition of Zaum, its coinage, linguistic connections and its history see Gerald
Janecek’s Zaum: The Transrational poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego State University Press, 1996.
54While arguably the most notorious of the Futurists, Mayakovsky, is less interesting in terms of literary
nonsense. According to Markov, his, “...is a poetry of metaphor and hyperbole, rather than of neologism
and employs urbanistic imagery or themes throughout.” (Markov,121 )
53 Despite this provocative goal to sever ties with the literary past, their connections to those authors who
came before them have been well documented in works such as James Rann’s The Unlikely Futurist:
Pushkin and the Invention of Originality in Russian Modernism. University of Wisconsin Press, 2020.
And Lada Panova’s Mnimoe sirotstvo : Khlebnikov i Kharms v kontekste russkogo i evropeĭskogo
modernizma. Izdatelʹskiĭ dom Vyssheĭ shkoly ėkonomiki, 2017.
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and Kruchenykh are largely responsible for the development of Zaum together, though often one
or the other is given the credit. Kruchenykh credits David Burliuk for Zaum’s creation, for giving
him the idea to write a poem with entirely made-up words in 1912 (Janecek, 49).
Zaum in futurism comes in seemingly two forms. In the first case, the meaning of the
neologism can be somewhat easily attained through context or the identification of the
combinatorial parts made of existing prefixes, roots, and/or suffixes. This method is closer to
existing nonsense practices, such as those of Carroll and Lear. Khlebnikov practiced this method
of Zaum of which a great example is his “Заклятия смехом.”56
In the second case, the word is
not made of identifiable linguistic components and there is little context so as to suggest a
meaning to the reader. The word in question may even violate existing spelling rules or
grammatical structure, whereas the first case tends to follow existing rules and structures of the
poet’s native language. This we can see in Kruchenykh’s “Дыр бул щыл,” which does not
suggest a meaning through context or existing word parts and, further, violates the Russian
spelling rule that hard “ы” should not follow “щ” (Janecek, 57).57
Janecek suggests that to the extent that there was a philosophy behind Zaum, it could partially
have been motivated by Uspensky’s The Fourth Dimension 1909 (Janecek, 37). Bergson, whose
influence on Russian modernism has been described by Hillary Fink, is possibly another source
of inspiration with his ideas on intuition and negation (Janecek, 40-41). For Khlebnikov at least,
the goal was to create a universal language of the future and he provided keys to decipher his
neologisms (Janecek, 135). Additionally, Khlebnikov saw something in Zaum that transcended
57 With the exception of “дыр,” which is close to and therefore could suggest the word “hole,” though this
does not bring the reader any closer to understanding the sentence. Note also that some scholars have tried
to connect the neologisms in “Дыр бул щыл” to roots in various existing languages (Janecek, 57).
56 Chukovsky would later mark the start of Futurism in Russian with Khlebnikov’s “Заклятие смехом”
(Markov, 8).
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contemporary understanding yet expressed a truth in the same way that non-Euclidean geometry
did for mathematics.58 He explains, as translated by Janecek,
And if the living language that exists in the mouths of the people may be likened to
Euclid’s geomesure, can the Russian people not therefore permit themselves a luxury
other peoples cannot attain, that of creating a language in the likeness of Lobachevsky’s
geomesure, of that shadow of other worlds? Do the Russian people not have a right to
this luxury? Russian wisdomry always thirsts after truth - will it refuse something the
very will of the people offers it, the right of word creation? any one familiar with life in
the Russian village is familiar with words made up for a mere occasion, words with the
lifespan of a butterfly. [1908]59
The general motivation behind zaum to some extent compels one to view its development as
something just outside nonsense literature’s jurisdiction. However, its development and
popularization by the Futurist contribute to its mainstream - to some degree, use in Russian
literature while connecting it to children’s speech and literature.
As we move into the 1920’s and 30’s, we come to an avant-garde group that made perhaps the
clearest and greatest contribution to nonsense in the Russian tradition. These are the writers
associated with the group oberiu. Oberiu, fourmed in 1926, was a group of avant-garde Soviet
writers living in Leningrad (Nakhimovsky, 1). The main writers of the group were Daniil
59 As quoted in Gerald Janecek’s Zaum: The Transrational poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego State
University Press, 1996 p. 138
58 Like many authors, who engage with some aspect of nonsense, Khlebnikov studied Mathematics. He
too was interested in non euclidean geometry, which perhaps prompted Tynyanov to declare,
“Хлебников-теоретик становится Лобачевским слова ” “Khlebnikov- the theorist is the Lobachevsky
of the word” (Tynyanov, “O Khlebnikove”, 25). Additionally, he developed his own mystic number
theory, whereby major historical events could be predicted. By way of this theory, in 1912, he claimed
that in 1917 Russians could expect the fall of their government (Rann, 93).
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Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Nikolai Zabolotsky. Leonid Lipavsky, Nikolai Oleininkov,
and Yakov Druskin, while not members of Oberiu, were important influences and associates of
the oberiuty (OBERIU, xiii). Note that these writers are associated with several other groups and
circles such as Radiks, an avant-garde theater group, and the Chinar circle which could be
applied to all of the writers mentioned, except Zabolotsky (Ostashevsky, OBERIU, xv-xvi).60
Zabolotsky is often regarded as something of an odd man out in the Oberiu circle, stemming
from his rocky relationship with the other oberiuty and artistic differences.61 He is the only of the
three to survive the 40s and his later poetry lost the radical style of his Oberiu days.
The members of Oberiu inherit and develop the nonsense tradition in verse, prose, and drama
and made separate nonsense works for adult audiences and child audiences. Additionally, they
were active in various philosophical circles in Leningrad at the time and thought extensively
about the interaction of their art and life. The Oberiuty come out of the modernist trends of the
turn of the century such as those popular with symbolists and futurists, with the futurists being of
particular importance. They were influenced by scandalizing performances, zaum, and ideas like
Zhiznetorchestvo, or the thoughts of Henri Bergson.62
Interestingly, the oberiuty attempted to
62
“OBERIU writers start off by regarding intuition as the tool for obtaining knowledge of
things-in-themselves, that is, of the ‘true reality’ inaccessible to perception and reason. Here OBERIU fits
perfectly with Russian modernist trends...The philosophers found relief by appealing to intuition: not the
Kantian intuitions of space and time but the Bergsonian insight bordering on the sixth sense. Art, as the
activity proper to such insight, was assigned the task of bridging the gap between the mental and the real.
Art, argued the philosophers, is the product of perception above the senses and reason above reason; it is
art that provides us a window upon the true structure of the world. This idea proved seminal for Russian
modernist schools from symbolism all the way to suprematism” (Ostashevsky, xxi).For more on
61 In 1926, Zabolotsky wrote a letter to Vvedensky titled, «Мои возражения А. И. Введенскому,
авторитету бессмыслицы,» in which he chides Vvedensky for poetry that is too abstract and “legless.”
The letter never made it to Vvedensky, as Kharms squirreled it away to prevent hurt feelings between the
two (Janecek, 335-336).
60 Chinar is a neologism created by Vvedensky out of a combination of the verb “to create” and the word
for rank, he then declared himself “Чинарь, авто-ритет бессмыслицы” “Chinar, authority on nonsense”
(OBERIU, xv).
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distance themselves from from Zaum in their manifesto claiming “ there is no school more
hostile to us than zaum,” although Gerald Janecek suspects that this claim was the result of an
attack on the Oberuity by D. Tolmachov (Janecek, 335). Despite this claim, Janecek observes
that, at least in the case of Daniil Kharms, “...Zaum not only did not disappear in Kharms’ work
after 1926, but became one of its most important components” (Janecek, 334).
The name Oberiu stands for the Association of Real Art (Объединение реального
искусства). Despite the term “real” in the name, Sarah Pratt explains,
…in fact, real'nyi is used here in contradistinction to the term realisticheskii affiliated
with the much-heralded school of Russian realism. With its devotion to extreme imagery,
“non-sense” (bessmyslitsa), and the “collision of verbal meanings” (stolknovenie
slovesnykh smyslov), the OBERIU was anything but “realistic.” The argument implicit in
the name “Ob''edinenie real'nogo iskusstvo” is that the art of other groups may be
“realistic,” but only OBERIU art is “real.” (“Beyond the Squabbles,” 8).
Daniil Kharms has become the most famous of the oberiuty. He and Vvedensky are often seen
as the driving force behind Oberiu and much of the nonsense works produced by the group. The
two of them develop in the 1930s two distinct types of nonsense but both engage with a
metaphysical beyond which stands without reason or explanation parallel to everyday life.
Everyday life is presented as the topsy-turvy in contrast to this beyond, they delight in the
disorder and the chaos of “reality” to reveal the illogicality. As Alice Nakhimovsky explains,
Beginning in the early thirties, the writings of Vvedenskii and Kharms take on a distinct
and individual character. Vvedenskii's poetry and his wildly unstageable plays focus on
the related themes of time, history, God, and death. The idea of absurdity
Bergson’s influence on Russian modernism and OBERIU see Hilary Fink’s Bergson and Russian
Modernism: 1900-1930
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(бессмысленность) becomes double-natured for him, connoting both the
meaninglessness of everyday life and a profundity beyond the reach of reason. At the
same time, Kharms’s poetry and prose turn to the question of meaning in the perverse and
often violent disorder of everyday life. If for the most part the perversity of life
overwhelms its meaning, the author of the black humor sketches called happenings was
also a believer in the possibility of a miracle, and in many of the poems and stories the
grotesque is replaced by or combined with a surprisingly traditional faith. The works of
this period must count as the finest things that Kharms and Vvedenskii wrote
(Nakhimovsky, 1-2).
Indeed many of Kharms’s most interesting nonsense stories incorporate an element of faith or
the miracle. One excellent example of this is his short story “Сундук” “The Trunk” found
below:
Человек с тонкой шеей забрался в сундук, закрыл за собой крышку и начал
задыхаться. — Вот, — говорил, задыхаясь, человек с тонкой шеей, — я задыхаюсь в
сундуке, потому что у меня тонкая шея. Крышка сундука закрыта и не пускает ко
мне воздуха. Я буду задыхаться, но крышку сундука все равно не открою.
Постепенно я буду умирать. Я увижу борьбу жизни и смерти. Бой произойдет
неестественный, при равных шансах, потому что естественно побеждает смерть, а
жизнь, обреченная на смерть, только тщетно борется с врагом, до последней
минуты не теряя напрасной надежды. В этой же борьбе, которая произойдет сейчас,
жизнь будет знать способ своей победы: для этого жизни надо заставить мои руки
открыть крышку сундука. Посмотрим: кто кого? Только вот ужасно пахнет
нафталином. Если победит жизнь, я буду вещи в сундуке пересыпать махоркой...
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Вот началось: я больше не могу дышать. Я погиб, это ясно! Мне уже нет спасения!
И ничего возвышенного нет в моей голове. Я задыхаюсь!.. Ой! Что же это такое?
Сейчас что-то произошло, но я не могу понять, что именно. Я что-то видел или
что-то слышал... Ой! Опять что-то произошло! Боже мой! Мне нечем дышать. Я,
кажется, умираю... А это еще что такое? Почему я пою? Кажется, у меня болит
шея... Но где же сундук? Почему я вижу все, что находится у меня в комнате? Да
никак я лежу на полу! А где же сундук? Человек с тонкой шеей поднялся с пола и
посмотрел кругом. Сундука нигде не было. На стульях и на кровати лежали вещи,
вынутые из сундука, а сундука нигде не было. Человек с тонкой шеей сказал: —
Значит, жизнь победила смерть неизвестным для меня способом. (O iavleniiakh i
sushchestvovaniiakh, 311).
A man with a long, skinny neck crawled into a trunk, closed the cover behind him and
began to suffocate. “Now,” said the man with the long, skinny neck, suffocating, “I’m
suffocating in this trunk because I have a long, skinny neck. The cover of the trunk is
closed and isn’t letting any air in here. I’ll continue suffocating, but I won’t open the
trunk anyway. Gradually, I’ll start dying. I will see the battle of life and death. The battle
that will occur will be unnatural, with even odds, because naturally death is victorious,
while life, doomed to die, vainly battles its enemy, not giving up its useless hope to the
very last minute. In this same battle, which will take place presently, life will know the
method of its victory—for that life would have to force me to open the cover of the trunk.
Let’s see who wins. Only it stinks of mothballs. If life wins out, I’ll sprinkle tobacco on
my clothes instead … Now it’s begun: I can no longer breathe. It’s clear, I’m done for!
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There’s no salvation for me now! And my head is devoid of any elevated thoughts. I’m
suffocating! … “Oh no! What’s this? Something just happened, but I can’t figure out
what exactly. I saw something, or heard something … “Oh no! Again something’s
happened. Oh my god! There’s nothing to breathe. I think I’m dying … “And what’s all
this supposed to be? Why am I singing? I think my neck hurts … But where’s the trunk?
Why do I see all the things in my room? Can it be that I’m lying on the floor?! But
where’s the trunk gone?” The man with the long, skinny neck got up off the floor and
looked around. The trunk was not around. Strung up on the chairs and on the bed were
the things that had been taken out of the trunk, but the trunk was nowhere to be seen. The
man with the long, skinny neck said: “That means that life defeated death by a method
unknown to me.” (Today I Wrote Nothing, 68).

Much of the humor of this story comes from the way that this man, in the midst of suffocating to
death, is put off by the smell of mothballs in the trunk. Additionally, the story is in some ways a
little travesty, because it takes the lofty philosophical ideas of life and death, their significance
and power, and brings it down to the level of a silly looking man crawling into a trunk.
In “The Trunk,” we as rational readers will find that there are several flaws with the man’s
reasoning. First he attributes his suffocation not to the lack of air but to the thinness of his own
neck. Secondly, he claims that in his experiment, we will be able to see the battle between life
and death “при равных шансах” “by equal chances.” But nothing about this experiment seems
equal to the reader. The man claims that for life to win, it will force him to open the trunk to
breathe again and here the reader will agree with him. However, much to the reader’s and the
man’s surprise the trunk disappears altogether and the man can breathe again, meaning life has
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won by an unexplained miracle. This unexplained miracle is emphasized by the man’s final line,
and the final line of the story, “ Значит, жизнь победила смерть неизвестным для меня
способом.” “That means that life defeated death by a method unknown to me.” I would like to
draw attention to the fact that the man accepts this explanation and does not require that the
method be made known to him. His experiment is not how life might triumph over death but if it
can and in contrast to rational laws, it does. There is no attempt at interpretation by the man or
suggested by the narrator and the story ends rather abruptly at its seemingly most interesting
moment.
The contributions of the Oberiuty and Daniil Kharms in particular to the Russian and Soviet
nonsense tradition is so significant that I can not cover it here and therefore have devoted all of
chapter three to the various works, both for children and adults, which exhibit the hallmarks of
nonsense.
3. Nonsense for Children in Russian Literature
Russian children’s literature is of a distinctly high quality due to the long tradition of
prominent authors putting pen to paper for children. While censors in Russia and the Soviet
Union did not immediately focus their attention on children’s literature until about the 1920s and
it was not until the early Soviet period that children’s publishing houses began to sprout up en
masse, many of Russia’s most brilliant writers did focus their attention on children’s literature.
Indeed as Miriam Morton explains, “In Russia, to a greater degree than perhaps in any other
country, literary masters have written deliberately for the older child reader. There has been a
coherent and purposeful effort since the 1860’s to enrich children’s reading with the works of
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great Russian writers (Morton, 5). Among the many children’s authors one can find Zhukovsky,
Pushkin, Tolstoy, Mayakovsky etc.
Antonia Babushkina places the start of conscious production of literature for children in the
16th and 17th centuries in the form of alphabet books and other learning materials (Babushkina,
5). Children’s literature suddenly expands in the second half of the 18th century and the first
journal for children, “Детское чтение для сердца и разума” “Children’s readings for the heart
and the mind” is created (Babushkina, 72). This growth in children’s literature was in part due to
the polemics over various pedagogical rules, which began to be debated (Babushkina, 73-73).
Later in the 19th century, Belinsky called for children’s literature to adhere to realism and urged
that it should be of a finely crafted quality (Setin, 3). The early 20th century saw the
development of more organized engagement with children’s literature, with development of
numerous publishing houses and children’s journals mostly under the direction of Chukovsky
and Marshak. Chukovsky began by writing mainly critical articles, many of which were on
children’s literature and pedagogy. In 1903, he visited London where he developed a fondness
for English nursery rhymes, some of which he would translate into Russian as we have seen
above (Sokol, 4). In 1907, Chukovsky wrote a series of articles on the state of children’s
literature and then his first major children’s work, “Krokodil,” was published in 1917 (Sokol,
4-5).
However, even before scholars and writers turned their attention to children’s literature,
children's verses and songs existed in early folklore and oral tradition. Like with many traditions
around the world, nonsense for children can be found in early Russian folk and oral traditions.
There is a long standing tradition of nonsense in folk poetry, lullabies, and childrens songs.
Martin Esslin notes that the connection between the two goes all the way back to some of the
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oldest nonsense verses, which are children’s nursery rhymes (Esslin, 241). Play features
prominently in early children’s rhymes and there is a strong connection between the type of
linguistic play one finds here and nonsense. Additionally, Elena Sokol in her book Russian
Poetry for Children, reminds us that these types of children’s songs and stories are either told by
adults to children or told by children themselves (Sokol, 26). It’s very likely that in the second
case, the child creates nonsense rhymes while experimenting with the limitations and building
blocks of his own language, as we have already seen in chapter 1 and in the Futurist interest in
the child-poet. Counting songs and rhymes that make up a large portion of these children’s verses
are often found to contain nonsense, either in content or in their use of neologisms, while
engaging the child in play as seen in the following example:
Один, два, -
Голова,
Три, четыре, -
Прицепили,
Пять, шесть, -
Сено везть;
Семь, восемь,
Сено косим;
Девять, десять, -
Деньги весить;
Одинадцать, двенадцать,-
На улице браняця
One, two96

Head,
Three, four,-
They hooked it on,
Five, six,-
To carry hay;
Seven, eight,
We are mowing hay;
Nine, ten, -
They are weighing the money;
Eleven, twelve, -
They are quarreling in the street63

A particularly productive connection between nonsense writing and children’s literature
developed in the early 20th century, when many artists were afforded creative freedom in
children’s literature that had become off limits in adult literature. This tolerance made children’s
literature a space for nonsense to thrive in published form. However, the marriage between
nonsense literature and children’s literature was not merely a political necessity but a sincerely
compatible expression of Soviet avant-garde poetics and pedagogical ideals. On one hand,
authors and critics such as Chukovsky argued for the pedagogical appropriateness of avant-garde
art, such as nonsense literature, produced for children. On the other hand, avant-garde artists and
critics took an interest in art produced by children and art produced through a child-like aesthetic
63 Provided in Elena Sokol’s Russian Poetry for Children. The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.
1984 p. 33-34.
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as I have explained earlier. Nonsense, children’s literature, and the Soviet writers of the early
20th century foreground elements of play and language.
Even before Socialist Realist doctrine took hold in 1932, literary censorship and restrictions
in the mid to late 1920s were becoming tighter. It became clear that acceptable literature was
politically motivated literature. According to Katerina Clark, starting in 1925 the number of
works by proletarian writers increased, the formalists came under attack, and “The era of
flamboyant revolutionary culture was waning” (Clark, 187). Experimental and nonsense works,
which earlier the party tolerated and even occasionally celebrated, were met increasingly with
official disdain in adult literature. By 1927, many young avant-garde writers already fully
entered children’s literature.
Elena Goodwin notes in her book Translating England into Russian that “Despite ideological
didacticism and Party control, the early Soviet state actually allowed new ways of creative
expression in children’s literature. This resulted in literary experiments with the theme of
nonsense in the 1920s, for example by the OBERIU group of writers.” (Goodwin, 60). Ainsley
Morse, links this creative freedom to the lower status of children’s writing on the Soviet literary
scale (Word Play, 47). This freedom extended to both original nonsense as well as imported
nonsense, as noted in the beginning of this chapter. Additionally, original nonsense works for
children blossomed under the pen of Oberiu writers in journals such as Чиж and Еж from the
late 20s until about 1941 (Minin, 143).
Of course, this does not mean that children’s authors experienced complete freedom. Scholars
such as Olga Voronina have aptly pointed out that the view that children’s literature somehow
escaped party censorship is “rife with contradiction” (Voronina, 30). Indeed, children’s literature
also experienced an increase in censorship and party control in the 30s. Starting in February of
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1928, Chukovsky’s Крокодил came under fire in an article by Nadezhda Krupskaya in Правда,
in which she accused Chukovsky of maliciously parodying Nekrasov and not teaching children
anything about crocodiles (Chukovsky, 604). She ended her scathing article with, “Я думаю,
“крокодил” ребятам нашим давать не надо, не потому, что это сказка, а потому, что это
буржуазная муть” and for a short time the work was banned (Chukovsky, 609). “I think we
don’t need to give our children ‘Crocodile,’not because it’s a fairytale, but because it’s bourgeois
mud.”64
In 1931 the first round of arrests of children’s authors included Bakhterev, Kharms, and
Vvedenskii, who were released only to be arrested again in the early ‘40s (Minin, 145).
Moreover, by 1933, state publishing house Детская литература (Children’s Literature) had total
control over children’s literature (Goodwin, 52). Yet, despite this, nonsense writings in children’s
literature experienced great success.
The success of nonsense in Soviet children’s literature in the 20s and 30s was in part due to
the relentless defense of nonsense for children by figures such as Chukovsky, Marshak, and
Lunacharsky. As explained in Chapter 1, Chukovsky defends children’s nonsense literature,
arguing that not only are children naturally drawn to it, but that it strengthens the child’s mind.
But Marshak was able to recruit into the ranks of the children’s writers Kharms and Vvedensky,
who already had inclinations towards nonsense prose and verse in their own unpublished works.
65
65 For later Soviet writers experimenting with nonsense in children’s literature see Morse, Ainsley.
“Between Summer and Winter: Late Soviet Children’s Literature and Unofficial Poetry.” Russian
Literature, vol. 96–98, 2018, pp. 105–35
64 Many writers came to Chukovsky’s defense, with Gorky calling the article “...слишком субъективна, а
потому - несправедлива” “...too subjective, and as a result, not fair” (Chukovsky, 612).
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Chapter III:
“Only That Which Has No Practical Sense:” Daniil Kharms and the Metaphysical
Meaning of Nonsense
“Меня интересует только “чушь”; только то, что не имеет никакого практического смысла.
Меня интересует жизнь только в своем нелепом проявлении.”
“I am interested in ‘nonsense;’ only that which has no practical sense”
Daniil Kharms, 1937
“Нам непонятное приятно,/
Необъяснимое нам друг”
“To us the incomprehensible is comprehensible/
The inexplicable is our friend”
A. Vvedenskii, From “Приглашения меня подумать” “Invitation for me to think”
1. Daniil Kharms: An Introduction
Daniil Kharms, born Daniil Ivanovich Iuvachev, is one of the most important contributors to
the Russian and Soviet nonsense tradition. His enchanting works for both children and adults
have captivated readers and scholars since their recovery and publications starting in 1965 in
Russian (I am a Phenomenon, 30). Shockingly short and deceptively simple, Kharms’s poems,
stories and even diary entries expand the volume and quality of Russian and Soviet nonsense.66
Scholars who attempt to make sense of these works may find themselves in a precarious
position: assign too little significance and you run the risk of missing the deeper vision hiding
beneath, but overanalyze his works and you lose the essence of their illogical and discontinuous
nature. Kharms is somehow solid yet squishy, sturdy yet delicate. Kharms’s works engage in all
the hallmarks of nonsense: tensions between extremes, emotional detachment, room for -and I
would go so far as to say an insistence on - metaphysical connections, intense emphasis on the
verbal and linguistic, and play/ games. His ideas of the metaphysical or a higher reality, which
66 Freud lists “brevity” as an important prerequisite for a joke, Kharms is the master of the humorous short
form, in both verse and prose (Freud, 18).
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can be accessed through art, are most evident in his letters and journal entries and will be treated
in the second part of this chapter. While his engagement with and creation of nonsense is most
obvious in his poetry and prose works in relation to his play with logic and his listing device,
investigated in the third part of this chapter.
Daniil Kharms was a beloved Soviet children’s author and one of the last Soviet avant-garde
writers. Now he is most well known for his relationship and work with OBERIU, often described
as “the last gasp” of the Russian avant-garde, but he was also a member of other Leningrad
groups such as the Chinari and Radix, an experimental theater group.67 His participation in these
circles led to relationships with thinkers such as Leonid Lipavskii (1904-1941) and Iakov
Druskin (1902-1980), the latter of whom would save many of Kharms’ journals and writings
from his apartment after his death during the siege of Leningrad. Other important associations
and influences included avant-garde artists active at the turn of the century, such as Futurist
theorist Aleksandr Tufanov, with whom Kharms participated in a Zaum workshop, futurist
Velmir Khlebnikov, and suprematist painter Kazmir Malevich, who became a beloved mentor to
Kharms (Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, xv).68 69
69 Niel Cornwell notes on Kharms’s influence: “In a verse and prose sequence entitled The Sabre ( Sablia ,
of 1929), Kharms singles out for special admiration Goethe, Blake, Lomonsov, Gogol, Kozma Prutkov
and Khlebnikov; in a diary entry of 1937, he lists as his ‘favourite writers’ Gogol, Prutkov, Meyrink,
Hamsun, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. 19 Such listings are extremely revealing in determining
Kharms’s pedigree.”(The Absurd in Literature, Manchester University Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=1069563.)
68 Kazimir Malevich gave Kharms a copy of God is Not Cast Down with the inscription “go and stop
progress” (Fink, 96). When the members of Radix (Kharms, Vvedensky, and Zabolotsky) extended an
invitation to Malevich, he said, “I’m an old troublemaker, and you’re young troublemakers. Let’s see
what happens” (Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, xvi).
67
“OBERIU” has often been used by scholars to refer to the general circle of thinkers and artists who
worked closely together during this time, though not all were officially involved in the group. It tends to
be applied to the members, even after the group itself ceased to officially exist. For more on this see
Ostashevsky’s Editor’s Note in Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism.
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Daniil Kharms was born to Nadezhda Koliubakina and Ivan Pavlovich Iuvachev in 1905 in
St. Petersburg (Shubinskii, 14).70 His father had been radical in his younger days, joining the
group The People’s Will, and was arrested August 13, 1883. During the years of his
imprisonment, he underwent a religious conversion that would remain a strong influence in his
life (Shubinskii, 25). In 1897, Ivan Pavlovich was allowed to return home and he married
Nadezhda in 1903 at age 43 (Shubinskii, 31). Ivan Pavlovich was also a writer, though indeed he
is less well known than his son. He wrote several books and stories, which he sent to Yasnaya
Polyana, where he had once been a guest, to Leo Tolstoy and his wife for feedback (Shubinskii,
37). 71
Daniil Ivanovich Iuvachev (Kharms) learned German and English during his education at
Peterschule, though he was not gifted at either (Cornwell, Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the
Absurd : Essays and Materials, 4). He was not a studious child and his grades failed to meet the
standards of the school thus he was forced to leave, and in 1922, he continued his studies at
Detskoe Selo (I Am a Phenomenon, 13). Kharms returned to Leningrad after his graduation in
1924 where he began studies at the Electro- Technical College (I Am a Phenomenon, 15). By
1926 Kharms was expelled from the Electro-technical College, but at this point, his interests in
literature and performance had already become quite developed and he had been taken under the
wing of more established poets (I Am a Phenomenon, 19).
Kharms married his first wife, Ester Aleksandrovna Rusakova, in 1928. The two had had a
passionate, yet rocky on-and- off relationship since 1925 and she frequently appears as the object
of his erotic desire in his journals and stories. In 1931, Kharms and several of his fellow
71 Some of these works reflected Ivan Pavlovich’s time in prison such as Шлиссельбургская крепость
and Восемь лет на Сахалине (Shubinskii, 26-27).
70 The city would be renamed Petrograd in 1914 and then Leningrad in 1924.
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children’s authors were arrested and interrogated. He was sentenced to three years in a prison
camp, which was later commuted to internal exile (I Am a Phenomenon, 27). During his exile,
Kharms lived with his close friend and fellow writer Aleksandr Vvedenskii (1904-141). They
were allowed to return to Leningrad in 1933 but their fortunes would not improve much (Oberiu:
An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, xx). After his permanent divorce from Ester Rusakova, he
married his second wife, Marina Vladimirovna Malich in 1934. Malich lived until 2002 and left
behind a published account of their life together after Kharms’s posthumous rehabilitation (I am
A Phenomenon, 580). In June of 1941, Nazi Germany invaded The Soviet Union and shortly
after in August, Kharms was arrested again. While in prison in a besieged Leningrad, Daniil
Kharms underwent a psychological evaluation and was placed in the psychiatric ward of the
prison. When his wife Marina Malich arrived to drop off a parcel to her husband, on February 7,
she was unceremoniously told he had died on the 2nd (I Am A Phenomenon, 29).
Kharms, even in his circles, was strange, riotous, and performative in his everyday life. He
was quite fond of public stunts, which often involved dressing strangely and orating from above
the street. He could juggle and was rumored to have kept in his apartment a mysterious machine,
which did nothing (Cornwell, Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd : Essays and
Materials, 7). He was fond of dressing like Sherlock Holms, whose name we can hear echoes of
in the nom de plume “Kharms,” as well as an invented aristocratic brother who brought his own
dishware to restaurants. On occasion Kharms was even known to don a fake mustache at the
theater for effect (The Man with The Black Coat, 7). Kharms’s outlandish behavior mirrored
much of his work. This is one of the aspects, in which the influence of Henri Bergson, who
shows up in Kharms’s reading list, is evident.The idea of “life creation” (Zhiznotvorchestvo), or
melding of art and life was favored by Bergson and the earlier Russian modernists (Fink, xv).
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From the fictionalized story of his own contraception, birth and subsequent “second birth” to
masquerading around Leningrad as his own fictional bourgeois brother, Kharms blends and blurs
the line between fiction and life (Shubinskii, 17).72
It is presumably this attitude that led poet
Aleksandr Vvedenskii, and Kharms’s life-long friend, to insist that Kharms himself was art
(Druskin, 22). Similarly, Neil Cornwell, in his introduction to Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of
the Absurd, explains, “Socially, he was largely known as an eccentric, a clown, or a dandy, and,
to one memoirist as ‘the most original of originals’” (Cornwell, 7).
By far, the most successful group Kharms belonged to, in terms of showcasing his adult
works, was OBERIU (ОБЭРИУ) which stood for Объединение реального искусства or The
Association of Real Art.73 The group, formed in 1927 and active until 1930, was composed of
Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-1958), Konstantin Vaginov
(1899-1934), Igor’ Bakhterev (1908-1996), Boris Levin (1899-1941), Yury Vladimirov
(1909-1931), and the filmmakers Aleksandr Razumovsky (1907-1980) and Klementy Mints
(1908-1995). The first three in this list have become most representative of the group’s overall
aesthetic, though many are quick to unjustly leave out the young Zabolotsky. Zabolotsky’s gentle
mannerisms, his possibly strained relationship with Vvedenskii, and his artistic differences from
Kharms and Vvedenskii certainly set him apart. Additionally, Zabolotsky is the only of the three
who manages to survive the Stalinist years and therefore his poetry had the chance to grow and
change, marking a difference between his early and mature work. As Sarah Pratt explains in her
book Nikolai Zabolotsky: Enigma and Cultural Paradigm,
73 Kharms is credited with the changes to the spelling of the acronym in order to give the name a more
interesting sound (Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, xvi).
72 Kharms actually penned several fictionalized versions of his own birth.
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Among the three central figures of the Oberiu, Kharms, Vvedenskii, and Zabolotsky, the
first two are the most easily linked. Each can be seen as a creator of nonsense
(bessmyslitsa) based on verbal play and a quest for metaphysical truth. The goal of the
quest was a manifest bond between man and God, and the quest was undertaken by
means of apophatic or "negative" theology. It is more difficult to see the connection
between the Kharms-Vvedenskii axis and Zabolotsky. Zabolotsky did not write nonsense
of the type practiced by the other two, choosing rather to use forms of the grotesque in his
avant-garde search for truth. Moreover, his search was less for a specific connection
between man and God than for a way of seeing the world in the fullness of its true eternal
physical and metaphysical nature, a quest to see the divine nature of the universe through
transfiguration.(67)
The group was heavily influenced by the Futurists and Formalists but, as the quote above
suggests, they take an interest in metaphysical and even religious meanings. Nota bene: despite
the obvious influences of Futurist Zaum and antics on the work of the Oberiuty, the Oberiu
manifesto distances their work from that of the Zaumniki, proclaiming,“There exists no school
more hostile to us than Zaum.” According to this Manifesto, which was published in 1928, their
aim is not to destroy meaning but to “broaden and deepen the meaning of the object and the
word.”74 The literary section, authored by Zabolotsky, claims that
The concrete object, cleansed of its literary and everyday shell, becomes the property of
art. In poetry, the collision of verbal meanings [столкновение словесных смыслов]
expresses that object with mechanical precision…perhaps you will assert that our plots
are ‘unreal’ and ‘not logical’ [«не-логичны»]...but who said that ‘mundane’ and
74 The introduction of the manifesto divides Oberiu’s interests into four categories: literary, artistic,
theatrical, and cinematic.
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‘everyday’ logic [житейская логика] is necessary for art… art has its own logic, which,
rather than destroying the object, helps us to know it.
Through the creation of nonsense, this verbal play that is unhindered by worldly logic, the artist
is able to get at some unseen truth and meaning.
The manifesto further describes what each member contributes with their work. Of these
Vvedenskii, Zabolotsky, and Kharms’s sections are of particular importance in the creation and,
in particular, the aim of nonsense. Vvedenskii, relegated to the “крайняя левая” of Oberiu,
Breaks the objects into parts, yet the object does not lose its concreteness. Vvedenskii
breaks action into bits but the action retains its artistic necessity. Once fully deciphered
the result is the appearance of nonsense [бессмыслица]. Why the appearance? Because
while a trans-rational [заумное] word is obvious nonsense, there are none such in
Vvedenskii’s work. One needs be more inquisitive and make sure to examine the clash of
verbal meanings. Poetry is not porridge [манная каша] that you swallow without
chewing and immediately forget.
For Oberiu, a poem, which may be fragmented and made-up of illogical words, should in fact
harden and become concrete, revealing the object in new light. Zabolotsky, too, is described as,
“A poet of naked concrete figures, brought right up to the level of the observer’s eyes…the
object is not fragmented but, on the contrary, knocked together and condensed to its very limit.”
Here again we see that the poet distorts not the thing itself, which remains solid and stripped, but
that the poet distorts the way we perceive the object, giving us a new understanding of it.75 This
idea that a poem is not “kasha” but rather something solid is echoed later in a letter that Kharms
sent to Klavdia Pugacheva in 1933, in which he describes how words of a poem can be taken
75 This type of view of art may remind of the Formalist concept остранение.
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from the paper itself and thrown at the window causing it to shatter.
76 According to the
manifesto, Kharms’s focus, “is not on the static figure, but on the collision of a series of objects,
on their interactions. At the moment of action the object takes on new concrete outlines full of
real meaning. The action, its face turned inside out in a new way, retains in itself a classical
imprint and, at the same time, represents the broad range of the OBERIU sense of the world.”
These descriptions contain an acknowledgement of the strangeness and incomprehensibility, with
which readers would inevitably regard their art, yet unlike with the earlier Futurist manifesto,
Oberiu assures their readers that this is not simply a chest-thumping flouting of the conventions,
but a way of revealing and understanding the “real” world that has existed unnoticed in front of
us.
The members of Oberiu were able to successfully organize one riotous event called Three
Leftist Hours on January 24, 1928 at the Leningrad Press Club (Дом Печати). The night
consisted of three hours of performance followed by a “debate” accompanied by Jazz. The three
hours were divided into poetry, theater, and film. According to the poster for the event- provided
below- during the first hour the “Master of Ceremonies” would “ride around on a tricycle
making improbable lines and figures” while six poets read their work (I Am a Phenomenon,
173). During the poetry section of the night, Kharms, wearing a tophat, appeared perched atop a
wardrobe in the center of the stage. He proffered “semi-comprehensible” poetry to the audience
(Pratt, 66). The poets shouted out Oberiu slogans “We are not meatpies!” and “Art is a
76 Klavdia Vasilievna Pugacheva was a stage and cinema actress best known for her role in Остров
Сокровиц in 1937. She performed in the Children’s Theater Studio in Leningrad before moving to
Moscow. She developed a close epistolary relationship with Daniil Kharms in the early 1930’s, though
how close in reality this relationship was, is difficult to discern. Shubinskii claims, she “...была
несколько разочарована его женитьбой – но никаких реальных любовных отношений между ней и
писателем не было” “...was somewhat disappointed with his marriage - but there was never any real
romantic relationship between her and the writer”(Shubinskii, 569).
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wardrobe!” (I Am a Phenomenon, 22). While in the theatrical section of the event the group
performed Kharms’s play, Elizaveta Bam, an experimental and structurally fragmented drama
about a young woman who is arrested for the murder of one of the arresting officers. In the
Oberiu manifesto, the plot of the play is described as “shattered by many apparently extraneous
themes” but contends that these unconnected fragmentations of the performance, “are valuable in
themselves and are dearer to us. They lead their own existence, not subordinate to the ticking of
the theatrical metronome.” The final hour was dedicated to the now lost film The Meat-Grinder,
which evidently was constructed with found footage (Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian
Absurdism, xvii).
The reception of the event in the press was highly unfavorable, with Lidia Lesnaya
condemning Three Leftist Hours in The Red Gazette (Красная газета) the very next day. She
proclaims that, “Yesterday something not fit to print took place at the Press House” then
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compares the Oberiuty to the Futurists, evaluating Zabolotsky’s poems as good, Vvedenskii’s
poems as bad, and generally ranting “What the hell?!”and “Who needs this clown show” (I Am a
Phenomenon,175). With this review and official tastes shifting away from pageantry and the
avant-garde and towards Socialist Realism, which would take a firm hold by 1932, it is perhaps
unsurprising that this was the only event Oberiu would hold. The members of Oberiu found
themselves in an increasingly hostile publishing environment and much of their adult works were
not able to be published.
However, it is around this time in 1928 that Nikolai Oleinkov (1898-1937) first invited
Kharms, Vvedenskii, and Zabolotsky to help with the children’s journal The Hedgehog (“ёж”
also standing for ежемесячный журнал, monthly journal) (Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian
Absurdism, xvii). They were quickly invited by Samuel Marshak to continue working on The
Hedgehog, and in children’s literature more generally. In 1936 -37 Kharms would begin to work
on another children’s journal, The Siskin (“Чиж'' or чрезвычайно интересный журнал,
incredibly interesting journal) (Shubinskii, 7). Kharms and his fellow Oberiu writers found that
working for Samuel Marshak on children’s literature was a successful way to make a living.
Kharms in particular seemed especially adept at children’s literature, According to Marshak,
Хармс великолепно понимал стихи. Он читал их так, что это было их лучше
критикой. Все мелкое, негодное, становилось в его чтении явным. Постепенно он
понял главное в детской литературе. Что такое считалка, что такое счет - это ведь
колоссально важное дело. Хармс понимал ту чистую линию в детской поэзии,
которая держится не на хохмах, не скатывается в дешевую эстраду… (Marshak,
586).
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Kharms perfectly understood the poems. He read them so that this was their best
criticism. Everything trivial, improper, became obvious in his reading. Progressively, he
understood the main thing in children’s literature. What is a rhyme, what is counting -
this indeed is a colossally important matter. Kharms understood here the pure line in
children’s poetry, which is neither based on jokes, nor slides into a cheap bandstand.77
Kharms soon gained popularity in children’s literature and is still read by children today, this
despite his adamant assertions that he hated children. Indeed, children in Kharms’s works often
find themselves on the receiving end of violence and horrendous acts. In Меня называют
капуцином (They call me Capuchin) (1938) Kharms protests that “О детях я точно знаю, что
их не надо вовсе пеленать, их надо уничтожать. Для этого я бы устроил в городе
центральную яму и бросил туда детей.” “About children I know for sure, that they don’t need
to be swaddled at all, they need to be destroyed. For this I would build a central pit in the city
and throw the children in there.”78 However, Iakov Druskin claimed that Kharms could not have
hated all children and still been so successful among them. He reports that Kharms had a certain
fondness for those children who were trouble-makers, reminiscing of a day when Kharms
marveled at some school boys who were burning holes into their nice velvet jackets (Weld, 163).
Taking all of this into consideration, Sara Pankenier Weld asserts that, “...Kharms’s professed
hatred for children must be regarded as inflammatory rhetoric and a deliberate provocation. It
also represents a backlash against an overdeveloped cult of childhood in his time that he ascribes
to the influence of Tolstoy” (Weld, 163). Kharms and the other members of Oberiu would
continue to publish in children’s literature throughout the 1930s as a way to make a living.
78 My translation
77 My translation
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2. Nonsense As a Path to a Higher Reality
Many scholars have termed Kharms’s work “absurdist.” However, this term is as hard to pin
down as Kharms himself. Matvei Yankelevich rightly points out in his introduction to a
collection of Kharms’s works that absurdism is “itself ill defined” and sometimes “overplayed”
(Today I Wrote Nothing, 12). I contend that many scholars have been over zealous in attributing
nihilist or anti-meanings to these elements in Kharms’s art, crowning him a predecessor to the
“Theatre of the Absurd,” or Camus, connecting him with Dadaism, nihilism, or an “anti-world”
as Anthony Anemone does (Anemone, 71-72).79 These interpretations deny a major component
of Kharms’s creations, which is that one can find metaphysical meaning in Kharms’s art. As
Matvei Yankelevitch notes, “For one thing, in Kharms’s world, absurd life is real life.
Transcendent, noumenal reality can be glimpsed only in the oddest objects, in the most awkward
gestures and the most senseless events” (Today I Wrote Nothing, 12). For another thing, Kharms
did believe in some greater truth, in perhaps a religious, mystical or even an occult sense, which
we as humans have thus far failed to reach. Kharms’s spirituality, in so far as it is connected to
his belief in greater truth, brings us into the realm of nonsense, which unlike the absurd does not
exclude reality or metaphysical connections.
In fact, Kharms’s spirituality is just as iconoclastic as his work and life. Though the official
state doctrine was atheism, Daniil Kharms was no stranger to traditional Orthodoxy. His father,
Ivan Pavlovich Iuvachev, had become a devout Orthodox Christian during his time in prison.
After his release in 1899, Ivan Pavlovich, published a number of books and essays on Orthodoxy
as well as a memoir of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem ( I Am a Phenomenon, 12). Kharms, himself,
79
Interestingly, Camus opens his section on “the Absurd Man” with a quote from Dostoevsky’s Demons
(Camus, 49). The same quote is echoed by Sakerdon Mikhailovich in Kharms’s The Old Woman (O
Yavleniyakh, Starukha).
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went to Orthodox mass and at least one friend recalls seeing him on his knees praying in church
(Pratt, 79). In his journals, “... his poems, paraphrases of the gospels, allusions to Biblical texts
and poetic versions of them coexist on equal footing with travesties of nursery lullabies and
children’s counting songs” (Perlina, 175). A glance through his notebooks and diaries reveal
written-out personal prayers. These prayers, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in German, span
subjects ranging from the highly intimate, bordering inappropriate, to the ritually traditional. In
one entry, Kharms will reproduce a traditional Orthodox prayer and in the next he will ask God
to grant him a highly specific sexual encounter with Esther Rusakova. While, like all of his
writings, Kharms’s prayers may have been idiosyncratic, Sarah Pratt notes that, “The striking
thing about most of Kharms’s prayers is that, as much as they are linked to specifics of Kharms’s
own very peculiar life, they nonetheless reflect the cadence, mood, and fervor of standard
Orthodox prayers” (Pratt, 80). Consider the following lines by Kharms, in which he prays for
skill in his poetic craft and for understanding of meanings that can only be attained through faith,
Господи, среди бела дня
накатила на меня лень.
Разреши мне лечь и заснуть Господи,
и пока я сплю накачай меня Господи
Силою Твоей.
Многое знать хочу,
но не книги и не люди скажут мне это.
Только Ты просвети меня Господи
путем стихов моих.
Разбуди меня сильного к битве со смыслами,
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быстрого к управлению слов
и прилежного к восхвалению имени Бога
во веки веков.
28 марта 1931 года в 7 часов вечера
Lord, smack in the middle of the day
a laziness came over me.
Permit me to lie down and go to sleep, Lord,
and while I sleep, oh Lord, pump me full of Your Strength.
There is much I wish to know
but neither books nor people will tell me.
Only You can enlighten me, Lord,
by way of my poems.
Wake me up strong for the battle with meanings
and quick to the governance of words
and assiduous in praising the name of God for all time. (Today I Wrote Nothing, 176)
The text is a sincere and fairly standard prayer. Kharms is hardly the first poet to pray for help
with his craft. I want to highlight here that the two important desires Kharms prays for are
“Разбуди меня сильного к битве со смыслами” “Wake me up strong for the battle with
meanings,” which significantly can not be done through books or other people, and “быстрого к
управлению слов” “Quick with the governance of words.” He is interested in meaning that is
beyond usual understanding and the precision to convey that meaning.
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While Kharms’s journals also reveal an interest in spells and divination, there is no evidence
to suggest that this negated his Orthodox beliefs. In one journal entry from 1931, Kharms
explains that he believes there is a special power that exists in words and specific combinations.
He explains, “The power latent in words must be set free. There exists certain combinations of
words in which the action of this power can be felt more strongly” (I Am a Phenomenon, 289).
He designates these combinations as verbal machines and continues, listing four types:
“....poems, prayers, songs and spells,” which “are constructed not by means of calculation or
reasoning but by another means, that which we call the ALPHABET” (I Am a Phenomenon,
290). However, this mingling of occult mysticism with Orthodoxy has led some scholars to view
Kharms as nonreligious or even anti-religious. For example, Anthony Anemone, evaluating
Kharms’s beliefs through a very Western lens, claims that Kharms showed no “sense that the two
approaches shouldn’t be mixed;” and further, “Judging from our reading of the notebooks,
Kharms combined superstition, a desire for miracle, and a belief in magic with interest in Eastern
mysticism, occult thought, and the Kabbalah so haphazardly that he entirely lacked the ability to
see the world in religious or ethical terms.” (I Am a Phenomenon, 34).80 But in Russia, folk
belief, spellcasting, and magic have long existed in relative harmony with Orthodoxy as
Dvoeverei.
81 Kharms’s seemingly contradictory interests do not exclude one or the other from
81 The melding of pagan and christian traditions after 988 ad became known as “dual faith.” Dvoeverie
allowed for the incorporation of folk belief into the Christian tradition. For example, many folk tales
explain how the Devil created the spirits that lived in the rivers and forests to torment man. Still others
claim that when God cast the Devil and his followers from Heaven, some of the demons fell to earth
80 One specific example that Anemone gives for not reading Kharms through a spiritual lens comes from
an entry in his journal from 1929 in which Kharms contemplates “The positive action of reverse
thinking.” In one part of this complex entry Kharms says “faith is not necessary,” which Anemone takes
as the conclusion. However, this statement is not a stand alone conclusion, but instead it plays a role in the
overall argument of the entry. At the beginning of this section of the entry Kharms also says “complete
faith is necessary.” This statement also cannot be taken in isolation. Both of these statements lead up to
the last section of the entry titled “Assertion,” which asserts that one must “subordinate one’s conscious
thoughts… to subconscious thoughts” (I am a Phenomenon, 237).
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being a sincerely held belief. And in fact, Iakov Druskin, a close friend of Kharms, has argued
that what one might take as a-religious or anti-religious in Kharms is really exposing “religious
automatism.” Druskin explains,
Religious automatism is actually anti-religious, the worst form of anti-religiosity is
Pharisaism. It is not Kharms’s stories which are nonsensical and alogical, but the life
which he describes in them...of some of the real conditions particular to every human
being. He used to say that there were two significant things in life: humour and sanctity.
Sanctity was connected to the concept of the miracle. He meant the sanctity of authentic
life, living life. He used humour to expose inauthentic, stagnant, dead life -life that is not
life, but merely the dead shell of life, impersonal existence (Druskin, 24).
Druskin’s evaluation of Kharms may remind us of Henri Bergson’s theory on laughter at
mechanization. “Laughter in the Bergsonian sense draws attention to the depersonalized
mechanism of human activity in order to become free of it (‘correct it’) and return ‘life’ to
movement,” (Fink, 100). Bergson’s philosophical influence on Russian Modernist writers as
well as his compatibility with Eastern Orthodox tradition has been well documented by Hilary
instead of Hell and landed in the forests, pools, lakes, and groves becoming the Leshii and the Vodanoi
(Ivanits, 64-82).
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Fink.82
We can easily observe the intersection of both of these principles in Kharms’s prose work
Старуха (The Old Woman).
83
The Old Woman, written in 1939, is Kharms’s longest prose text.84 The plot, if the story can
be said to have one, is narrated by an unnamed writer struggling to write. The narrator
encounters an old woman who later barges into his apartment, orders him to kneel and lay on the
floor, then sits herself in his chair, where she promptly dies. The narrator spends the rest of the
story trying to figure out what to do with the corpse of the old woman in his apartment. In
frustration, he kicks her body, leaving a mark and leading him to conclude he can no longer alert
the authorities as they may suspect that he had something to do with her death. In desperation
and hunger, the narrator goes out to the store, he meets a young woman and is ready to take her
back to his apartment when he realizes he already has a woman there, the dead old woman. So he
runs away from the young lady and visits his friend, Sakerdon Mikhailovich. They discuss the
existence of God and eat raw sausages due to a mishap with the cooking pot. After the narrator
returns home, he decides to stuff the old woman’s body in a suitcase, take her on the train, and
dump her outside of the city in a swamp. On the train, however, the raw sausages wreak havoc
84 Rosanna Giaquinta notes, it is precisely in The Old Woman, “…that the concise, incisive motifs of the
Sluchai (‘Happenings’) collection of mini-stories reappear in a plot of far greater complexity” (Daniil
Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd, 132). The Sluchai collection is covered in the third section of this
chapter.
83 For more on Kharms as a religious writer, see Carrick, Neil Peter. Daniil Kharms and a Theology of the
Absurd. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Northwestern University, 1993.
82 As Fink explains, “The deep-rooted tradition in Russian thought of Orthodox ontologism'-whereby
knowing is not separated from the known and faith informs cognition-is opposed to the traditionally
rational emphasis in Western philosophy on an epistemology informed by the dichotomy between knower
and object of knowledge. Russian thinkers historically have rebelled against this dichotomy (epitomized
by Kant's assertion that it is impossible to know the "thing-in-itself') because it contradicts the notion of
the world as an organic whole and stifles man's intuitive ability to apprehend and take part in the true
nature of reality. Russian modernists such as Daniil Kharms sought to grasp the noumenal world through
pointedly nonanalytical means, and thus were attracted to Bergsonian philosophy, which emphasized
artistic intuition and an antimechanistic approach to life” (“The Kharmsian Absurd and the Bergsonian
Comic: Against Kant and Causality,” 526)
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on his stomach and force him to use the bathroom before his stop. When the narrator returns to
his seat, the suitcase containing the dead old woman is gone, presumably stolen. The narrator
exits the train and walks into a forest where he inspects a caterpillar, then says a prayer. The
story ends with a note from the narrator letting the reader know that the manuscript has already
gone on too long and now must be ended.
At first glance, the story appears to the reader as a parody. We are reminded of Pushkin’s The
Queen of Spades,where an old woman dies in a chair after the main character, Hermann, breaks
into her room and frightens her, leading her ghost to haunt Hermann. Although in this case, it is
the old woman who has invaded the protagonist’s room and died, much to his chagrin (Daniil
Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd, 132). Additionally, references to Dostoevsky's Crime and
Punishment and Demons are reflected in the story. The narrator fears that he will be investigated
for the death of the old woman and charged with her murder calling to mind the murder of the
old woman committed by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. But there are direct echos of
Demons in the dialogue of the story. In Demons, we are told, “Ставрогин если верует, то не
верует, что он верует. Если же не верует, то не верует, что он не верует.” (Dostoevsky,
Location 14903). “If Stavrogin believes, then he doesn’t believe that he believes. If he doesn't
believe, then he doesn't believe that he doesn't believe.” While in Kharms’s story, the narrator
explains, “по-моему, нет верующих или неверующих людей. Есть только желающие верить
и желающие не верить. — Значит, те, что желают не верить, уже во что-то верят? — сказал
Сакердон Михайлович. — А те, что желают верить, уже заранее не верят ни во что?” (O
iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh, 194). “In my opinion, there are no believers or non-believers.
There are only those who want to believe and those who do not want to believe. ‘So those who
do not want to believe already believe in something?’ said Sakerdon Mikhailovich. ‘And those
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who want to believe already believe in nothing?’” (Today I Wrote Nothing, 121-122). This type
of reasoning, that leads to the opposite of the desired effect, is just the kind of cyclical system
that we find in abundance in nonsense.
In fact, the story engages in infinity-like structures through the narrator’s ideas on time or
timelessness, eternity, and immortality. The narrator has an interesting relationship to time.
Throughout the story, the narrator keeps track of what time it is or how much time has passed
almost obsessively. Nakhimovsky has suggested that, “The continual notations of time serve a
dual function: besides establishing the atmosphere of a diary, they point to a crucial difference
between the narrator's understanding of time and that of the old woman-his ties to the "earthly,
Euclidean world" and her freedom from it.” (“The Ordinary, The Sacred,” 210). At the beginning
of the story, as the narrator leaves his apartment and first interacts with the old woman, he asks
her for the time. The old woman is holding a wall clock (“стенные часы”) that has no hands on
its face, but this doesn't stop her from telling the narrator the time and the narrator does not
question how one can tell time from a clock with no hands. Shortly after it is revealed that the
narrator had a pocket watch in his vest the whole time. (O iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh,
176). Additionally, when the narrator and Sakerdon Mikhailovich meet and eat sausages and
drink vodka, the narrator asks his friend if he believes in the existence of God (O iavleniiakh i
sushchestvovaniiakh, 193). He later clarifies that what he is actually interested in knowing, is if
Sakerdon Mikhailovich believes in immortality (“ в бессмертие”) (O iavleniiakh i
sushchestvovaniiakh, 194).
There are several Alice-like moments in the story. At various times, the narrator falls asleep
and has strange dreams featuring transformations of his body. Much like Alice, the narrator talks
to himself, and chides himself for fearing the dead old woman. Right after this, the narrator grabs
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a croquet mallet and rushes into the apartment. (O iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh, 201). In
fact, he uses the croquet mallet twice to defend himself against the dead old woman.
Additionally, the story ends with the narrator inspecting and touching a big green caterpillar
while he kneels. Then he explains, “Легкий трепет бежит по моей спине. Я низко склоняю
голову и негромко говорю: — Во имя Отца и Сына и Святого Духа, ныне и присно и во
веки веков. Аминь.”(O iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh, 212). “A light shudder runs up my
back. I bow my head low and quietly speak: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit, now and forever. Amen.” (Today I Wrote Nothing, 134). The caterpillar as a symbol, is
already connected to questions of transformation, identity, and cyclicality because of its life
cycle. But because it is placed next to the narrator’s prayer, there is an emphasis on cyclical time
and eternity. Neither Kharms nor the narrator make any attempt at interpretation and the whole
thing is drawn to a quick close underscoring the literary nature of the manuscript. This leaves the
readers wondering about the meaning. Perhaps, the narrator’s questions of immortality are linked
to the nature of the literary text which sees that its characters endure long after their author. Or
perhaps, there is a religious meaning.85
Many scholars have interpreted the text through the lens of faith. Nakhimovsky for example
argues that the story contains a “strong religious strain that underlies much of Kharms’s writing”
(Nakhimovsky, 1). While Roberts explains that Kharms is concerning himself with testing ‘truth’
and “The ‘truth’ which he tests ostensibly concerns the existence of God and the possibility of
miracles” (Roberts, 41). The miracle suits Kharms’s particular brand of nonsense well. The
miracle is both impossible and possible, outside the reach of human understanding yet true, and
85 For Nakhimovsky, the interpretation is clear, “This unexpected declaration of faith is Kharmns's
miracle. It is significant that the formula he chooses associates God and timelessness, God and eternity;
it is thus the resolution of the opposition of time and timelessness which began with the old woman and
her wall clock.” (“The Ordinary, The Sacred,” 215).
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maintains strong associations with Orthodox belief. All of this feeds into Kharms’s notion of a
universal truth and the contradictory nature inherent in miracles plays out in the creation of the
nonsense. It seems to me that in The Old Woman, as with the prayer mentioned earlier, Kharms is
interested in literary craft, meanings, and unexplainable miracles. At the beginning of The Old
Woman, the narrator explains that he is a writer and he wants to write a story about a miracle
worker who does not perform miracles. He explains,
Это будет рассказ о чудотворце, который живет в наше время и не творит чудес. Он
знает, что он чудотворец и может сотворить любое чудо, но он этого не делает. Его
выселяют из квартиры, он знает, что стоит ему махнуть пальцем, и квартира
останется за ним, но он не делает этого, он покорно съезжает с квартиры и живет за
городом в сарае. Он может этот старый сарай превратить в прекрасный кирпичный
дом, но он не делает этого, он продолжает жить в сарае и в конце концов умирает,
не сделав за свою жизнь ни одного чуда.(O iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh, 176).
It will be a story about a miracle worker who lives in our time and does not work
miracles. He knows he is a miracle worker and could create any sort of miracle, but he
does not do it. He is evicted from his apartment—he knows that were he to just wave a
finger the apartment would stay his, but he does not do it; he timidly vacates his
apartment and lives outside of town in a shed. He can turn this old shed into a wonderful
brick house, but he does not do it; he continues to live in the shed and in the end he dies,
not having worked a single miracle in all his life.” (Today I Wrote Nothing, 109).
The narrator only manages to write one sentence, “Чудотворец был высокого роста” (O
iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh,178.“The miracle worker was tall.” (Today I Wrote Nothing,
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109). We have a miracle worker who does not perform miracles and a writer who can only write
one sentence. Right after this sentence is written, the old woman knocks on the narrator’s door
and when that door is opened, the real miracles of the tale begin. Three times the old woman
commands the narrator and three times, he complies. Despite his protest that she has no right to
command him, he is unable to stop himself from fulfilling her commands, which get
consecutively stranger. The second command, kneeling, is what triggers the narrator’s protest.
This position is one of prayer. While it at first may seem innocuous, we see the narrator fall into
the same positions at the end and prays. The old woman commands him a third time to lay in a
much more awkward position with his face in the floor, which he “instantly” does( O iavleniiakh
i sushchestvovaniiakh,179). It is as if this old woman has come to show the narrator that miracles
do exist against his will. Once this task is done, she dies. Although, this is not to say that the old
woman ceases to be miraculous. As Giaqunta explains, “the use of active intransitive verbs
seems to lend to the old woman a lasting will of her own…Having crossed the threshold of
death, the body eludes all norms; death as a concept half-way between the physical and the
psychic world opens the way in the fantastic for limitless possibilities in the creation of events
beyond even the most elementary rationality” (Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd,
139). Indeed the old woman’s corpse still has some amount of agency given to her by the
narrator. For example, she seems to occasionally move, the narrator imagines her crawling across
the floor towards the door, and he even fears she will bite him when he decides to stuff her into a
suitcase.
A shorter nonsense story by Khamrs that deals with faith, which we should consider is “One
Man Fell Asleep:”
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Один человек лег спать верующим, а проснулся неверующим. По счастию, в
комнате этого человека стояли десятичные медицинские весы, и человек имел
обыкновение каждый день утром и вечером взвешивать себя. И вот, ложась
накануне спать, человек взвесил себя и узнал, что весит 4 пуда 21 фунт. А на другой
день, встав неверующим, человек взвесил себя и узнал, что весит уже всего только
4 пуда 13 фунтов. «Следовательно,– решил этот человек,– моя вера весила
приблизительно восемь фунтов.»
One man fell asleep a believer but woke up an atheist.
Luckily, this man kept medical scales in his room, because he was in the habit of
weighing himself every morning and every evening. And so, going to sleep the night
before, he had weighed himself and had found out he weighed four poods and 21 pounds.
But the following morning, waking up an atheist, he weighed himself again and found out
that now he weighed only four poods thirteen pounds. “Therefore,” he concluded, “my
faith weighed approximately eight pounds” (Ostashevsky, 137).
The short text plays with the idea of faith as a material that can be measured. He measures that
which cannot be measured by traditional rational means. There is both meaning and no meaning
in the text. All interpretations are possible at the same time. On the one hand, the loss of 8
pounds of faith could be viewed as a weight lifted, freeing the man. On the other hand,
something substantive is lost.
There are also reflections of Orthodoxy in the Oberiu’s views on art. While, the Oberiu
manifesto makes no outright mention of religion, and it would be overzealous to claim there is a
veiled reference, scholars like Sarah Pratt see in the manifesto a “mirror” of sorts, which through
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its philosophy on art, captures many of he the aspects of Orthodox tradition (Pratt, 77). She
explains, “But in spite of its avant-garde bravado and gestures in the direction of revolutionary
politics, the Oberiu declaration is at base a profoundly conservative doctrine, and a close reading
suggests that the members of the Oberiu drank more deeply from the well of religion than most
of their peers and many of their predecessors” (Pratt, 77). In the manifesto, the Oberiuty
specifically seek, not to destroy or change the world, but to reveal the world as it truly is in a
greater reality. It is this new way of seeing that leads to understanding which reflects some of the
ideas of Orthodoxy.
If we understand Kharms, and the other members of Oberiu, in a religious context, then
accordingly, we cannot apply the label “absurd” as so often has been done. As made clear in
Chapter 1, the absurd man is a man that lacks connections, and distinctly, connections to God
and spirituality. There is no hidden metaphysical meaning waiting to be revealed. While both
nonsense and the absurd use similar devices, we may take negation as an example, Kharms’s art
is not that of an unconnected absurd philosophy, but rather of an apophatic theology. For the
nonsense writer, this is a perfectly acceptable approach following in the tradition of Carroll and
Lear, both unquestionably religious men. 86
Kharms appeared to believe that through his works he could reach a higher plane. In a letter
to the actress Klavdia Vasilievna Pugacheva in 1933, Daniil Kharms wrote,
The world started to exist as soon as I allowed it to enter into me. Granted still in chaos,
but nonetheless it exists! However, I began to put the world in order. And at that moment
86 This may also help us understand why nonsense writers seem so often to be interested in mathematics
and non-euclidean geometry. Kharms is no exception and develops his own theory of the number 0. Neil
Carrick elucidates this connection by viewing Kharms’s short prose works as “non-euclidean art” and
explains that these type of experiments gesture at a reality that cannot be seen or grasped but which
nonetheless we all exist within (Carrick, 154).
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Art appeared…Now my concern is to create the correct order (правильный порядок)...
But I’m not simply making a boot, but, first of all, I’m creating a new thing. It is not
enough for me that the boot turn out comfortable, sturdy, and that it look good. It is
important for me that the order (парядок) in the boot be the same as that of the entire
world… (I Am a Phenomenon, 414).87

In his search for correct order, or what he calls later, “purity of order” (“чистота порядка”), he
endeavors to restructure what he understands as the chaos and disorder that exist unnoticed in
our lives. Kharms’s works, it seems, reach out towards a greater truth through not just “the
collision of verbal meanings” but also the collision of chaos and real order. The problem is, that
for Kharms, attaining this greater truth is both possible and impossible for us, leading us straight
into the territory of nonsense.
How can we understand Kharms’s interests in “purity of order” and how the methods used to
“cobble his boots'' bring him to understand the mysteries of life? I believe it is prudent, at this
point, that we take a step back to think about how we might define “order.” I would like to
propose that at the very least “order” in this sense, refers to a set of rules or laws, which govern
our world and which we understand and agree to be true, rational and appropriate. Chaos, then, is
the overturning of these laws and negating the connections we believed to be true. Or, to use
Martin Meisel’s definition,
The notion of chaos in its most general and traditional framing is a limiting case: the
extreme of disorder, where all attributes assignable to order vanish. It is disorder made
87 It is worth noting that Kharms is not the only artist to think of literature in terms of boots or linked to
boots. Lev Tolstoy used to make his own boots and Kharms’s father was an admirer of Tolstoy, even
staying at Yasnaya Polyana. The nihilist comment, “A pair of good boots are worth more than all of
Pushkin,” sometimes attributed to Pisarev, no doubt is also called to mind. Additionally, we might also
think of the Prutkov aphorism “Воображения поэта, удрученного горем, подобно ноге, заключенной
в новый сапог” “The poet’s imagination, oppressed by grief, is like a foot imprisoned in a new boot.”
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absolute. It follows from a desire to give shape or a name to our perceptions of
discontinuity and dissonance, of confusion and incoherence, perhaps to quarantine them
from what belongs to symmetry, shapeliness, and consequence. To attempt to represent
chaos at the full, as surprisingly many have done, is a desperate business requiring a good
deal of poetic imagination. To attempt to set out the shape of that lawless condition is on
the face of it a paradoxical undertaking, like that of Descartes rationalizing the passions
or Freud making us conscious of the unconscious, since it seems to entail the undoing of
the essential character of the given.” (Meisel, 31).
Kharms indeed, had a great amount of imagination and attempted to give shape to the chaos that
exists in our world in his quest for reaching a true “purity of order.” This seemingly “paradoxical
undertaking,” involves the collision between the logical and illogical, creating nonsense.
With this in mind, we turn now to a diary entry from 1926. On November 2nd of 1926, a 21 year
old Kharms explains the human inability to grasp the whole “universal truth.” Kharms
accompanied the following text with a drawing of Figure 1, reproduced at the end of this
section. Kharms explains that by inhaling ether,
some people can attain to mysteries of a higher order, but only in an extremely narrow
aspect, as for example: (Figure 1). If the entire truth extends along line ab, then man can
see only a part, no further than (c) at the very limit of the possible. Using ether, it is
possible to extend perception to a different part of the universal truth, for example to d,
but it is hardly possible that man can have any real understanding of what has been
“seen,” because he will know only two parts of the world, one unconnected with the
other: that is ac and d. Genuine understanding can only come from the growth of truth
from a through b. However, in the instance given here, sequentiality is disrupted by
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segment cd. I believe that there are possibilities, albeit occult, to grasp truth, not by
carving out its separate parts, but by moving smoothly beyond the bounds of the possible
(c), comprehending the distance covered in its entirety (I am a Phenomenon, 95).
According to Kharms, we cannot truly understand our world because we do not have the tools to
fully “see” the whole line, from a to b. It is naive for us to interpret our environment as logical
when it quite simply is not logical due to our missing segments on the line of “universal truth.”
The illusion of knowledge (ac and possibly d, if you happen to sniff ether) is the false order that
exists in opposition to the “correct order,” about which Kharms wrote to Pugacheva.88 Thus,
when Kharms, “began to put the world in order” and became obsessed with creating “correct
order,” or “a higher order” as he terms it in this entry, he is presumably on the path of universal
truth. He is somehow moving further along this line. Importantly, in his letter he claims that once
he started this process, “at that moment Art appeared…” Art, then, is born from the attempted
restructuring of chaos into order at the limits of logic. Art lengthens the modest reach of human
understanding.
Several years later, in May of 1930, Kharms writes a piece with a similar thought, called
“Мыр” sometimes translated as “The Werld” or “The Whorld.” In the title of the story, Kharms
replaces the vowel “и” in the word “мир” (world) with its harder counterpart “ы.”
Я говорил себе, что я вижу мир. Но весь мир был недоступен моему взгляду, и я
видел только части мира. И все, что я видел, я называл частями мира. И я наблюдал
свойства этих частей, и, наблюдая свойства частей, я делал науку. Я понимал, что
88 Note that mind-altering substances are often present in Kharms’s more metaphysical and philosophical
works. In The Old Woman, it is precisely that moment when the narrator and Sakerdon Mikhailovich have
had too much vodka that the narrator brings up questions of God’s existence and immortality.
Additionally, in “On Phenomena and Existences No. 2,” in the introduction of this dissertation, Nikolai
Ivonovivh is drinking a bottle of vodka throughout. In fact, the bottle is introduced in the first line, even
before the character.
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есть умные свойства частей и есть не умные свойства в тех же частях. Я делил их и
давал им имена. И в зависимости от их свойств, части мира были умные и не
умные. И были такие части мира, которые могли думать. И эти части смотрели на
другие части и на меня. И все части были похожи друг на друга, и я был похож на
них. И я говорил с этими частями мира. Я говорил: части гром. Части говорили: пук
времяни. Я говорил: Я тоже часть трех поворотов. Части отвечали: Мы же
маленькие точки. И вдруг я перестал видеть их, а потом и другие части. И я
испугался, что рухнет мир. Но тут я понял, что не вижу частей по отдельности, а
вижу все зараз. Сначала я думал, что это НИЧТО. Но потом понял, что это мир, а
то, что я видел раньше, был не мир.И я всегда знал, что такое мир, но что я видел
раньше, я не знаю и сейчас. И когда части пропали, то их умные свойства перестали
быть умными, и их неумные свойства перестали быть неумными. И весь мир
перестал быть и умным и неумным. Но только я понял, что я вижу мир, как я
перестал его видеть. Я испугался, думая, что мир рухнул. Но пока я так думал, я
понял, что если бы рухнул мир, то я бы так уже не думал. И я смотрел, ища мир, но
не находил его. А потом и смотреть стало некуда. Тогда я понял, что покуда было
куда смотреть — вокруг меня был мир. А теперь его нет. Есть только я. А потом я
понял, что я и есть мир. Но мир это не я. Хотя, в то же время, я мир. А мир не я. А я
мир. А мир не я. А я мир. А мир не я. А я мир. И больше я ничего не думал. (O
iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniikh, 433-434
I told myself that I see the world. But the whole world was not accessible to my gaze, and
I saw only parts of the world. And everything that I saw I called parts of the world. And I
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examined the properties of these parts and, examining these properties, I wrought
science. I understood that the parts have intelligent properties and that the same parts
have unintelligent properties. I distinguished them and gave them names. And, depending
on their properties, the parts of the world were intelligent or unintelligent. And there were
such parts of the world which could think. And these parts looked upon me and upon the
other parts. And all these parts resembled one another, and I resembled them. And I
spoke with these parts. I said: parts thunder. The parts said: a clump of time. I said: I am
also part of the three turns. The parts answered: And we are little dots. And suddenly I
ceased seeing them and, soon after, the other parts as well. And I was frightened that the
world would collapse. But then I understood that I do not see the parts independently, but
I see it all at once. At first I thought that it was NOTHING. But then I understood that
this was the world and what I had seen before was NOT the world. And I had always
known what the world was, but what I had seen before I do not know even now. And
when the parts disappeared their intelligent properties ceased being intelligent, and their
unintelligent properties ceased being unintelligent. And the whole world ceased to be
intelligent and unintelligent. But as soon as I understood that I saw the world, I ceased
seeing it. I became frightened, thinking that the world had collapsed. But while I was
thinking this, I realized that had the world collapsed then I would already not be thinking
this. And I watched, looking for the world, but not finding it. And soon after there wasn’t
anywhere to look. Then I realized that since before there was somewhere to look—there
had been a world around me. And now it’s gone. There’s only me. And then I realized
that I am the world. But the world—is not me. Although at the same time I am the world.
But the world’s not me. And I’m the world. But the world’s not me. And I’m the world.
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But the world’s not me. And I’m the world. And after that I didn’t think anything more.
(Today I Wrote Nothing, 171-172).
This piece shares some similarities to Kharms’s letter to Pugacheva and to his estimation of
reality or ‘truth.’ The truth, reality, or in this case the world is not accessible to the narrator. It
turns out that he is not able to see the world in its whole true form. We see how things and parts
start to gradually disappear in this story until finally only the narrator remains. Through the
disappearances and the arrival at ‘НИЧТО’ ‘NOTHING,’ which is emphasized by capitalization,
the conclusion that because he still exists he must be the world. But he also notes that the world
is not him. This phrase is repeated at the end of the text several times like a chant or an
incantation. When the narrator stops thinking, he also stops writing. This is reminiscent, in
perhaps a topsy-turvy way of Descartes’s “I think therefore I am,” which itself has become
something of a chant. But here, Kharms arrives at the world or at some glimmer of truth through
negation. It is this negative theology that leads Kharms to a reality beyond comprehension, in
which it is true that both he is the world and the world is not him simultaneously. Niel Carrick
has observed that,
For all the positive 'theologies' of man promised since the death of God, it is only
Kharms's curious 'negative theology' that may rescue man from annihilation. Kharms
reinvigorates a set of arcane linguistic and philosophical devices in an attempt to effect
human salvation. Man's continued presence is asserted by recourse to a negative language
that denies his physical existence only to attest to the non-material being that ensures his
inalienable humanity (“Daniil Kharms and the Art of Negation, 643).
Carrick here is talking specifically about a piece called “Голубая тетрадь № 10” “Blue notebook
No. 10” in which a “red-haired” man is introduced and then slowly all of his features are
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negated, including his red hair, and even his hair altogether so we are told that he is called
red-haired “theoretically.”
For the purposes of the present dissertation, the meaning of this universal truth is not
important. Our interest lies rather in the means Kharms uses as he attempts to reach universal
truth, which produces Kharms’s art. This view of art and the artist is not unique to Kharms. The
view of art reflecting or bridging a greater truth or reality was embraced by a diverse group of
artists in the modernist movement. Ostashevsky notes,
OBERIU writers start off by regarding intuition as the tool for obtaining knowledge of
things-in-themselves, that is, of the ‘true reality’ inaccessible to perception and reason.
Here OBERIU fits perfectly with Russian modernist trends...The philosophers found
relief by appealing to intuition: not the Kantian intuitions of space and time but the
Bergsonian insight bordering on sixth sense. Art, as the activity proper to such insight,
was assigned the task of bridging the gap between the mental and the real. Art, argued the
philosophers, is the product of perception above the senses and reason above reason; it is
art that provides us a window upon the true structure of the world. This idea proved
seminal for Russian modernist schools from symbolism all the way to suprematism”
(Ostashevsky, xxi).
However, it is the means by which Kharms attempts to get at universal truth which gives him his
place in nonsense literature.The tension of both the possibility of obtaining universal truth
through art and the impossibility of man's understanding thus far lends itself so perfectly to the
devices and themes of the nonsense writer.
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Figure 1
3. Daniil Kharms and the Unifying Features of Nonsense: Listing, and Emotional
Detachment
I will look in detail at the ways Kharms forms his nonsense works and at the techniques and
devices that he favors.I consider his journals, his works for adults -such as his Sluchai Collection
-and his works for children. Most scholars have considered his adult and children’s works
separately and only recently scholars, such as Ainsley Morse, have begun to argue for them to be
studied together. I would like to think about why this has been the case and then to suggest
reasons we should consider them as part of the same oeuvre.89
Kharms’s works have all the hallmarks of the nonsense genre. His unique spirituality, his
belief that through his art he could attain a higher reality and create a purity of order serve as the
metaphysical underpinnings of his work. He creates a tension between extremes, logical
inversions, engages in linguistic games, and the violence in his works is treated with emotional
detachment. One of the most interesting ways Kharms achieves these qualities is through his use
of lists and series.
89 As it turns out, Kharms himself places his works for adults and children in two separate categories,
considering his children’s works “ne nastoiashchimi” because they were for material gain (Morse, 53).
Though, as I mentioned in chapter 2, Kharms did concede that some of his nonsense poems for children
were of “extraordinarily high quality” (Morse, Word Play, 53).
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Trivial as Kharms’s propensity for list making may seem, Kharms’s lists provide important
scaffolding for his version of nonsense writing, and as such they offer a feasible middle ground
for interpretation, neither underdeveloped nor overdetermined. Kharms employs lists and
sequences as a device for creating and negating connections, there is an unyielding tension
between the arbitrary and the necessary, and his lists alternately fracture into fragments and
combine. Embedded in the Kharmsian list is a play with structure over logic, which ultimately
demonstrates the collision between chaos and order to reveal a greater reality.
Indeed, Kharms’s obsession with lists is hard to deny, as they appear throughout his works,
notes, and personal writings. Lists and sequences are incredibly pliable allowing the user to
manipulate the list and its items. The listmaker can play with the arrangement of the items, for
instance using numbering, alphabetical order, size, color or countless other categorical
approaches. The listmaker may choose to use no arrangement in particular, but simply place one
item after the other. The list maker can adjust the amount of information for each item and can
choose any length. Theoretically, a list or sequence could be infinite or could have only two
items. They can be complete or incomplete, formal or informal, trivial or important. In addition
to their extreme versatility, lists and sequences impose an order to the material presented on them
as well as both implying an existing connection and, by their very nature, producing a
connection. As noted by Valentina Izmirlieva in her work on the function and importance of
listing the names of God in religious tradition, particularly in Eastern Orthodoxy, “An affinity
for order is inherent in listmaking,” as the list organizes information into a specific sequence,
which the reader will view (Izmirlieva, 55). When we read lists, we naturally assume that a
connection exists between the items on the list. For example with a grocery list, we are likely to
assume that all items on the list are needed and probably available at a store, therefore connected.
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Izmirlieva points out that one of the aspects that makes lists so interesting, and perhaps why they
are so well suited to nonsense writers like Kharms, is that, “While a list creates solidarities, it
never really loses sight of its members’ individual identities. Lists both separate and connect,
being delicately poised between continuity and fragmentation…” (Izmirlieva, 54). It is exactly
this contradictory quality of lists, coupled with their ability to give a simple structure which
makes them an ideal device for Kharms’s purpose.
In his book Daniil Kharms: Writing and The Event, Branislav Jakovlejvic has described
Kharms’ manuscripts as a “constellations of fragments” (Jakovlejvic. 5). We can feel this almost
immediately when opening one of Kharms’s journals. The Kharms journals are in a way, a listing
of life. These lists touch all sides of Kharms’s life in his journals. We see personal lists such as
those which express his opinions, goal oriented lists, those with shopping, reading, or exercising
that he planned to complete, and also work related and artistic lists. Lists appear on almost every
page of Danill Kharms’s journals, notebooks, and diaries. They range from shopping lists, to
reading lists, to lists of what is good and what is bad. In a certain sense, these journals are
themselves a list. They are a list of days and a sequence of events and thoughts. The lists in
Kharms’s journals vary widely in their content. While some serve a clear purpose, others seem to
solely exist for the fun of creating a list, or perhaps for sheer impulse.90
In an entry in 1926, right
before explaining Figure 1, Kharms has two numbered lists. One list is titled “Gymnastics,”
which lists exercises 1-5, each with the number of repetitions, and another titled “To Develop
Will Power,” which has two items listed (I am a phenomenon, 95).91
It’s evident that both of
these lists are intended to serve a practical purpose. The reader will follow the list as a set of
91 Item one on this list is illegible, while item two reads “2. Head massage 1 ½ min.”
90 Lists are often a way to cope with memory issues or the fear of forgetting. List making may have been
particularly prevalent at the time as part of the Soviet impulse to categorize and order everything.
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instructions for his physical and psychological health. The items on the list, as well as the two
lists themselves, have a strong connection to each other. However, In another more humorous
example from 1934, Kharms divides things into two lists side by side: “Good” and “Bad,”
reproduced below:
GOOD
Mozart
Big-boned women
Busty women
Young, healthy, fresh, plump, juicy women
Meat, milk
Humor
Dress should be simple, comfortable,
emphasizing he strong points of the figure
BAD
Chaikovsky, Scriabin
small -boned women
Flat-chested women
Stylish, skinny, lithe, pampered, even
demonic women
Spicy dishes, dishes with vinegar
Moods
Fashionable dress with fancy trim and
pretensions to luxury
(I am a Phenomenon, 434).
The purpose of this list is less obvious. Has this been recorded for posterity? What has prompted
it? The author himself is not likely to forget which things he considers good and bad, so who is
the intended reader? The list is semi-cohesive. We can see a one-to-one correspondence between
the items on each side of the list, however the topics seem less connected. We see the classical,
form-oriented Mozart is “good” while mystic, less structure-oriented Scriabin is “Bad,” or that
“Busty women” are good while “flat-chested women” are bad. However the link between the
topics on each list, jumping from culture to base attraction, is a bit less clear beyond the author’s
attitude towards them. I doubt if, before this moment, anyone had pondered what connections
might exist between Mozart and milk.
While Kharms numbers many of his lists and sequences, there are just as many that appear
unnumbered. For example, in an entry from 1935, Kharms lists four books unnumbered:
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Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Stevenson and Osborn’s The Wrecker, Freud’s The Psychopathy of
Everyday Life, and Yury Tynianov’s Young Vitushishnikov (I am a phenomenon, 455).92
Just
underneath this list of literature, Kharms has another unnumbered list titled “Here’s What I Don’t
Like,” than lists, “Contemporary taste in culture. Tikhon Churilin. Pasternak. The artist Lebedev.
The Artist Akimov. Palekh craftsmen. ‘Academia’ publishers. Slant-cut pockets. Broad lapels on
men’s jackets. The craze for skinny women. The tango. The cinema. The tone of spinsters: Back
off! Ray Noble’s orchestra. The gramophone, Jazz. Shortening ‘metropolitan’ to ‘metro’” (I am a
Phenomenon, 455).93
For example, in 1926 Kharms wrote a numbered list entitled “Program, ‘Casting-off’ Ritual”
which was associated with the Chinari group (I am a Phenomenon, 105). The list, mimicking an
exorcism, approaches parody. This list details a highly performative and artistic sequence of
activities to be “conducted in tulle masks” and goes as follows: “1. Silence, 10 min, 2. Dogs, 8
min, 3. Driving in Nails, 3 min, 4. Sitting under the table holding the Bible, 5 min, 5.
Enumeration of the saints 6. Gazing upon the egg, 7 min. pilgrimage to the icon…” (I am a
Phenomenon, 105). While, in 1928, Kharms writes a list of props needed for the performance of
“Three Left Hours” put on by OBERIU.
Already, with these examples, we can see that the list structure lends itself to tension
between extremes, illogical combinations, fragmentation, and negation related to Kharms’
particular brand of “бессмыслица” or “чушь.” Both Kharms’s artistic works for children and
adults are rich in listing and sequencing. In Kharms’s short prose works, often referred to as
93 On April 3rd 1926, Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedenskii sent Boris Pasternak a letter, in which they
addressed him by wrong patronymic while asking him for the possibility to publish their works. He did
not send them a response, Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto offer this as a possible reason for
Pasternak’s appearance on this list (I am a Phenomenon, 83).
92 Incidentally, Klavdia Pugacheva starred as Jenny in the 1937 Soviet version of Treasure Island.
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“miniatures,” included in the Случаи collection, for example, the device of listing and
sequencing is heavily relied on for its inherent order, which is often contrasted with the negation
of cause and effect, a lack or logical connections and illogical combinations. This device often
works to subvert the reader’s expectations causing us to laugh despite the dark and violent nature
of the content. In fact, one could even consider this collection as a master list of lists. All of the
stories in Kharms’s Sluchai deal with one theme: creating a new “correct” order through the
“chaos” of existing structures and through this form Kharms’s particular brand of nonsense. In
his Sluchai collection, Kharms rips away this façade, which we have agreed constitutes “order”
to reveal chaos. The effect is twofold: the indulgence in chaos and absence of logic produces
nonsense, while gesturing at a higher reality that was hitherto unseen. It is no wonder that Neil
Carrick asserts that, “In these miniature prose pieces Kharms is experimenting with a
non-euclidean art to suggest a realm outside man’s rational perception, but within which he
exists” (Carrick, 154). It suddenly occurs to us that our boots are leaky, unattractive and ill fit for
our surrounding world. The device of listing and sequencing is heavily relied on for its inherent
structure which is often contrasted with the negation of cause and effect or a lack of logical
connections in this collection. This device often works to subvert the reader’s perception of the
dichotomy of order and chaos. All of this works toward the same goal: stripping off our
disintegrating illusion and replacing it with a boot that fits- Nonsense.94

Let us take for our first example of the listing device in “Sluchai.” In this piece, we see the
formal structure collide with the chaotic content. The sequence provides structures but we soon
94 Many scholars read this collection as an expression of rebellion against Stalin and the Soviet
experience. Interestingly, Druskin believed that, “His Sluchai are directed not against the Stalinist regime,
but against any regime whatever. They were not anti-Soviet, but anti-political, anti-social. In other words,
they were religious” (Druskin, 26).
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realize that there are no logical connections between these events. Cause and effect seems not to
exist.
Однажды Орлов объелся толченым горохом и умер. А Крылов, узнав об этом, тоже
умер. А Спиридонов умер сам собой. А жена Спиридонова упала с буфета и тоже
умерла. А дети Спиридонова утонули в пруду. А бабушка Спиридонова спилась и
пошла по дорогам. А Михайлов перестал причесываться и заболел паршой. А
Круглов нарисовал даму с кнутом и сошел с ума. А Перехрестов получил
телеграфом четыреста рублей и так заважничал, что его вытолкали со службы.
Хорошие люди не умеют поставить себя на твердую ногу. (О iavleniiakh i
sushchestvovaniiakh, 301).
Once upon a time, Eagleman stuffed himself with roasted peas and croaked. And Winger,
learning of this, also croaked. And Spiridonov’s wife fell off her high chair and also
croaked. And Spiridonov’s children drowned in the pond. And Spiridonov’s mother
turned into an alky and became homeless. And Mikhailov stopped grooming himself and
came down with scurvy. And Circleman drew a lady with a whip in her hands and went
mad. And Crosseshimself received, via the telegraph, four hundred rubles and got so
high-and-mighty that he was removed from his post.
Nice, decent people simply don’t know how to place themselves on good footing.
(Russian Absurd, 109)
In this example, the narrator lists information about various people. The story at first seems to
possess a logical progression, as the first two sentences are connected. The people in the list are
at first related to one another. We have at one point, Spridonov, then his wife, then his children,
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and then his grandmother.
95
However, soon the sequence devolves so much that not only are the
sentences unconnected to each other, but even the thoughts within the sentences are unconnected.
For example, “А Михайлов перестал причесываться и заболел паршой. А Круглов
нарисовал даму с кнутом в руках и сошел с ума.” (О iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh, 301).
“And Mikhailov stopped grooming himself and came down with scurvy. And Circleman drew a
lady with a whip in her hands and went mad” (Russian Absurd, 109). The thoughts within these
sentences have no logical connection or progression and neither do the two sentences relate to
each other. The use of the Russian conjunction “a” here would normally suggest a connection,
either through contradiction, juxtaposition, or parallelism. Yet here this is not the case. Kharms
subverts even the conjunction in this sequence and sever what little connective tissue is left in the
items on the list. Additionally, the death and pain that the people in this example experience is
treated with complete emotional detachment. The narrator does not linker on the consequences of
the deaths nor does he attempt to evoke an emotional response. The quickness with which one
reads the series, due to the basic nature of a series or list, does not allow time for the reader to
contemplate the events. They are given as statements, facts, in quick succession.
Another example of Kharms’s use of sequencing is “Вываливающиеся старухи”
“Plummeting Old Women,” where the sequence of actions corresponds to nonsensical, chaotic
occurrences, violence is again treated with emotional detachment and the story, if we may call it
that, is abruptly ended by an event that is only loosely related to previous events:
Одна старуха от чрезмерного любопытства вывалилась из окна, упала и разбилась.
Из окна высунулась другая старуха и стала смотреть вниз на разбившуюся, но от
чрезмерного любопытства тоже вывалилась из окна, упала и разбилась. Потом из
95 Readers are perhaps reminded of the mind-numbing lists of relations and events that take place in both
the bible and the Russian Primary Chronicle, though instead of chronicling the lives of rulers and saints,
here Kharms is chronicling brief episodes in the lives of these strange people.
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окна вывалилась третья старуха, потом четвертая, потом пятая. Когда вывалилась
шестая старуха, мне надоело смотреть на них, и я пошёл на Мальцевский рынок,
где, говорят, одному слепому подарили вязаную шаль. (О iavleniiakh i
sushchestvovaniiakh, 302)
Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman tumbled out of her window, fell and
shattered to pieces. Another old woman leaned out to look at the one who’d shattered but,
out of excessive curiosity, also tumbled out of her window, fell and shattered to pieces.
Then a third old woman tumbled from her window, and a fourth, and a fifth. When the
sixth old woman tumbled out of her window, I got sick of watching them and walked
over to the Maltsev Market where, they say, a blind man had been given a knit shawl.
(Today I Wrote Nothing, 59)
The majority of this story is this sequence. One after another six old ladies fall out of a window
to their death.96 The sequence of falling old women is linked in a chain. One old woman falling
from the window causes the next to fall. The imperfective verb form in the title
“Вываливающиеся” signals an ongoing action or process. Thus, the old women are presumably
still toppling from the window even after the narrator has walked away, as if a never ending
conveyor belt of old women supplies the building. While the idea of old women plummeting to
their death should be shocking, the list is given nonchalantly and in an orderly sequence. Again
the basic structure that the sequence provides, itself contributes to the lack of emotional
attachment. Not only are we and the narrator unconcerned by the smashed-up old women, but we
may even find it humorous. It is interesting to think back here to the myth of Sisyphus. In both of
the stories we can agree that there is no progress, we are stuck in a cycle. Sisyphus will, every
96 Ostashevsky has noted that the number 6 appears in many of Kharms’s short works in the Sluchai
collection and that in “Null and Nill,” Kharms refers to 6 as “a very convenient number” but does not
elaborate (“Numbers are Not Bound by Order”, 42).
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day, roll the boulder to the top of the hill to no result. Similarly Kharms’ old women tumble out
the window to their death one after the other. Significantly though, we do not regard Kharms’
story with the same anxiety and anguish as the myth of Sisyphus. In an almost counter-intuitive
twist, I argue that the description of the old woman (and subsequent old women) “разбилась”
“shattered” or “smashed” injects the story with some humor, which is only enhanced by the
narrator's total disinterest in the spectacle at the very end. While in both stories we may not be
able to find any meaning, with Kharms’ story any anxiety in this lack of meaning is undercut by
the ending which subverts our expectations and buts the narrator’s interest in lack-luster gossip
on the same level as undoubtedly become a pile of old-women growing below the building.
In “A Sonnet,” Kharms relies on the disruption of a numerical sequence. The entirety of the
story revolves around the narrator, who is unable to recall what number (7 or 8) comes after 6,
asking different people for the answer, however no one is able to figure out the correct order and
the issue is never settled (О iavleniiakh i sushchestvovaniiakh, 303). Kharms flips a common
place rule, in this case rearranging the order of numbers in a well-established, basic sequence. As
Ostashevsky points out, it is impossible to forget which number comes next because it is not a
question of memory but of rationally knowable information (Ostashevsky, 35). The basic laws of
mathematics are violated through the disruption of this sequence. However, the laws of poetics
remain intact, as the title, a sonnet, implies, there are indeed 14 lines. The reader may even view
in this a parody of Dostoevsky’s famous 2 x 2 = 5. It’s worth mentioning that this is not the only
sequenced story, in which Kharms plays with numbers or math. Ostashevsky has argued that
“Вываливающиеся старухи,” mentioned earlier is, “an allegory of the sequence of natural
numbers, whose succession, Kharms believes, appears necessary but is actually arbitrary.”
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(Ostashevsky, 41). It is exactly this tension between the “necessary” and the “arbitrary,” which
Kharms highlights in the content and structure of such sequences and lists.
In another example is the story, “The Beginning of A Very Fine Summer Day: A Symphony”
The story is as follows:
Чуть только прокричал петух, Тимофей выскочил из окошка на крышу и напугал
всех, кто проходил в это время по улице. Крестьянин Харитон остановился, поднял
камень и пустил им в Тимофея. Тимофей куда-то исчез. «Вот ловкач!» — закричало
человеческое стадо, и некто Зубов разбежался и со всего маху двинулся головой об
стену. «Эх!» — вскрикнула баба с флюсом. Но Комаров сделал этой бабе
тепель-тапель, и баба с воем убежала в подворотню. Мимо шел Фетелюшин и
посмеивался. К нему подошел Комаров и сказал: «Эй ты, сало!» — и ударил
Фетелюшина по животу. Фетелюшин прислонился к стене и начал икать. Ромашкин
плевался сверху из окна, стараясь попасть в Фетелюшина. Тут же невдалеке
носатая баба била корытом своего ребенка. А молодая, толстенькая мать терла
хорошенькую девочку лицом о кирпичную стену. Маленькая собачка, сломав свою
тоненькую ножку, валялась на панели. Маленький мальчик ел из плевательницы
какую-то гадость. У бакалейного магазина стояла длинная очередь за сахаром. Бабы
громко ругались и толкали друг друга кошелками. Крестьянин Харитон, напившись
денатурату, стоял перед бабами с расстегнутыми штанами и произносил нехорошие
слова. Таким образом начинался хороший летний день. 1939 (О iavleniiakh i
sushchestvovaniiakh, 354)
As soon as the cock crowed, Timofey jumped out of a window onto the roof and scared
the daylights out of everyone who was out on the street at the time. The peasant Khariton
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paused, picked up a stone, and hurled it at Timofey. Timofey disappeared somewhere.
“Isn’t he clever!” cried the human herd, and someone by the name of Zubov took a
running start and slammed his head against a wall with everything he had. “Ho!” cried a
woman with a cold sore. But Komarov gave her a knick-knack-paddywhack and the
woman ran away moaning into the nearest courtyard. Fetelyushin was walking by,
chuckling to himself. Komarov walked up to him and said, “Hey, lard ass!” and hit
Fetelyushin in the stomach. Fetelyushin leaned against the wall and started to hiccup.
Nearby a big-nosed broad was beating her baby with a tub. Meanwhile, a young chubby
mom rubbed her cute little girl’s face into a brick wall. A small dog squirmed on the
sidewalk with one of its thin legs broken. A little boy was eating filth from a spittoon. A
long line for sugar formed in front of the dry goods store. The women argued loudly,
shoving each other with their baskets. The peasant Khariton, drunk on methyl, stood in
front of the women with his pants undone declaiming filthy words. And so began a fine
summer’s day (Today I Wrote Nothing, 103).
In this case, we have a list of horrible events placed one after the other. Initially, it seems a
tenuous connection exists, as Timofey’s actions prompt a reaction from the people in the street.
Again, though, the sequence devolves and from one sentence to the next, there are no causal
relationships. Additionally, there is a disconnect between the title and the violent, vulgar
behavior that fills the list. Not only does the title not match, but there is also an illogical
combination of items on this list. A woman beating her child and another smashing her child’s
face into a brick wall are placed on the same level as waiting in a very long line at the store. This
creates a humorous new connection between the brutality of abuse and waiting in line. There is
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the disconnect between title beginning of the title and the components of the list.The varying
degree of violence to irritation displayed subverts the reader’s expectations yet again, though not
so much as to upend the list entirely. And yet, when we look at the last part of the title, “A
symphony,” we do find that this example is saturated with sounds from the very first line.
Furthermore, there is much more yelling and dialogue than in previous examples. So in the same
way that “A Sonnet” adheres to the literary prescription of twelve lines, we find here a
composition of sounds. We, as readers, again feel no emotional horror in response to the material
because of the delivery method.
The last example I would like to look at is one of Kharms’s children’s poems. Ainsley Morse,
in her book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature, asserts that “The
contrast between (Kharms’s) often violent, dark work for adults and the cheery slapstick humor
of his picture books has led the reading public and scholars alike to read Kharms’s work as
largely split between official and unofficial, children’s and adult, even while the work shows
stylistic unity. In fact, Kharms’s work demonstrates a real blurring of the boundaries between the
genres of adult and children’s poetry”(73). I tend to agree with this view as lists show up in many
of his nonsense works for children as well as those for adults. In the children’s poem “44 Happy
Siskins,” each of the seven stanzas functions as a list of silly things that the 44 siskins do. For
example, in the fourth stanza the siskins play instruments:
После охоты
Брались за ноты
сорок четыре
веселых чижа:
дружно играли:
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чиж на рояле
чиж на цимбале
чиж на трубе
чиж на тромбоне
чиж на гармони
чиж на гребенке
чиж на губе
(Daniil Kharms, 21).
After the hunt
they took up the notes
forty four
happy siskins:
they played together:
a siskin on the piano
a siskin on the cymbals
a siskin on the trumpet
a siskin on the trombone
a siskin on the accordion
a siskin on the comb
a siskin on his lips.”97
This cute feathered marching band subverts the laws of nature. Not only do the siskins play
many classical and common instruments, they also play less common instruments such as the
comb, while one even plays his own lip. In this instance, like with many children’s nonsense
97 My translation
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poems, we have the enumeration of siskins and their instruments. Much like Chicka Chicka
Boom Boom, which uses nonsense as a means to teach the ABCs, Kharms uses his silly siskins as
a counting poem for children. Additionally, the repetition in the structure “чиж на
инструменте” and the repeated rhyme creates a series of its own. On this type of repetition,
Sewell argues, “indeed this type of series is the exact equivalent of the ‘one and one and one and
one’… the serial quality in repetition is not an invention of my own; it is accepted
mathematically in the form of pseudo-series “(76).
For my own part, this is by no means an exhaustive list of examples of Kharms’s play with
list making and sequence in his works. Lists abound in Kharms’s artistic works as well as his
diaries and journals. The artificial, highly structured, connective nature of the list collides with
the illogical and chaotic content while retaining the fragmentariness of the overall stories. The
list is an experiment in the juxtaposing of extremes and it’s format provides a vehicle for the
delivery of violence and death without any of the horror or consequence. Through lists,
sequences, and serials, Kharms subverts the logical connections of our reality. This interaction
contributes to the charming comical effect and helps form the nonsense in Kharms’s work.
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Chapter IV:
How Carroll’s Caterpillar Becomes Nabokov’s Butterfly
Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense”
Robert Frost
1. Vladimir Nabokov’s engagement with Lewis Carroll
Olga Sedakova once observed, “For me, Nabokov’s fantasy, his combinatorial imagination,
undoubtedly bears the mark of Alice. This could be why many people see him as a ‘non-Russian’
writer, too alienated from ‘soulfulness.’”98 For many, Olga Sedakova’s words ring true. One feels
there is something distinctly Carrollian in the word games, puns, and strange worlds, in which
Nabokov delights. Certainly, many scholars make this same observation when discussing his
works. However, few give more than a passing comment on Lewis Carroll’s influence on
Nabokov. While it is a stretch to designate Nabokov’s works as nonsense literature, Nabokov
nonetheless engages with nonsense works and exhibits many of the same affinities as nonsense
writers such as impulse to categorize, listing, punning and game play - chess, cards and
especially linguistic game play. Additionally, many scholars, most notably Vladimir Alexandrov,
have argued that hidden behind Nabokov’s works is a hint at something otherworldly, a realm
beyond our comprehension, of which we may only manage glimpses. This otherworldly and its
indescribability is connected to the lasting quality of a text as well as that which is beyond the
text. As Richard Rorty explains, “He [Nabokov] is sure that there is a connection between the
immortality of the work and of the person who creates the work — between aesthetics and
metaphysics, to put it crudely. But, unsurprisingly, he is never able to say what it is” (Rorty, 150).
98 As quoted and translated in Victor Fet’s “Beheading first: on Nabokov’s translation of Lewis Carroll”
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As discussed in earlier chapters, nonsense leaves space for the otherworldly, unexplainable
reality, faith and miracle.
While many of the hallmarks of nonsense appear in the works of Vladimir Nabokov and he
engages to a large extent with Carroll’s works, curiously, his works do not reside within the
boundaries of nonsense literature. Rather, they reveal the delicate tension between what we can
and cannot qualify as nonsense, they illuminate a tipping point that I will attempt to articulate
below.
In this chapter, in addition to Nabokov’s works of fiction, I will look at his lectures on
literature, interviews, and his semi-autobiographical Speak, Memory. First I will demonstrate the
influence of Carroll on Nabokov’s fiction. This influence, though often noted by scholars, is
seldom investigated with any thoroughness. I will explore Nabokov’s connection to Alice in
Wonderland, his Russian translations and the reflection of Alice in his own English and Russian
works. I will next look at the similarities between Nabokov’s writing and that of nonsense
writers.
Through this analysis of Nabokov’s tricks and tendencies, I will demonstrate more clearly the
nature of nonsense writing, why it is not enough to simply have a critical mass of nonsense
“tricks,” but that there is a willingness to participate in and acceptance of a reality that cannot be
comprehended or controlled.
I argue that nonsense requires a specific attitude on the part of the reader and the writer, in
addition to the formal qualities in a critical mass. Nonsense literature builds tension between
“our reality” and a “topsy-turvy world.” Through this opposition nonsense authors tend to reveal
the illogicality of “our world” and reality turns out to be nonsensical and yet true. The nonsense
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writer, character, and readers reach some sort of acceptance of this unexplainable, unknowable,
and contradictory truth.
This concept is easier to articulate if we think about it in terms of non-Euclidean
geometry, which nonsense writers are so fond of studying. Very basically put, two straight
parallel lines going on into infinity should not intersect, however, in non-Euclidean geometry the
two lines are mathematically shown to intersect, something that should not be possible yet is.99
So we might accept that we cannot comprehend how or why this is true but that it simply is.
With nonsense literature, this unexplainable truth would seem to be the point and while there is
indeed something unknowable lurking behind Nabokov’s texts, they are at once too slippery to
fully commit to this one interpretation. Additionally, within works of nonsense, readers,
characters, and authors more or less end up on the same level, while in Nabokov’s works these
three are on different levels throughout.
Furthermore, Nabokov’s fiction is not as deliberate in defying logic as established nonsense
works. Nabokov does not commit wholly to the world of the topsy-turvy but blends each world
and each level of the text into each other, creating a novel that is too ambiguous to be nonsense.
With such a hazy and hard to establish requirements it's no wonder that we face such problems
trying to describe a genre that deals in the illogical.
Additionally, Nabokov’s works seem to open themselves to so many different interpretations
in a way that works of nonsense do not. While some scholars, like Karshan, argue that
Nabokov’s works are pure artistic play, others such as Richard Rorty, have successfully argued
for a sort of moral beneath the text.100 For Rorty, both Nabokov and his works are deeply
100 For another take on Nabokov as a writer interested in ethical questions see Wood, Michael. The
Magician’s Doubts : Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton University Press, 1995.
99 In Euclidean geometry this is not the case when dealing with lines on a sphere - which do intersect- but
these are not technically considered parallel lines they are considered great circles.
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concerned with cruelty in addition to aesthetics. For him, “These books are reflections on the
possibility that there can be sensitive killers, cruel aesthetes, pitiless poets — masters of imagery
who are content to turn the lives of other human beings into images on a screen, while simply not
noticing that these other people are suffering” (Rorty, 157). A work of nonsense deliberately
steers away from moralizing. Unlike with Nabokov’s works, it is much harder to make this type
of claim about a work of nonsense. When we consider Alice at the whim of the Queen of Hearts
and Lolita at the whim of Humbert Humbert, one feels that there is fundamentally more at stake
in Lolita’s situation than in Alice’s. So, while I am inclined toward this first interpretation - that
of play-, I do not simply dismiss the second, as it is hard to deny that one feels some emotional
undercurrent, some consequence in Nabokov’s works, which is not present in a work of
nonsense. Therefore, I read Nabokov’s moments of engagement with nonsense as moments of
pure play, that may exist next to or outside of other moralizing interpretations, with which I am
not concerned.
While Carroll’s influence on Nabokov seems intuitively obvious to most readers, the exact
essence and function of Carroll in Nabokov’s works is harder to pin down and deserves some
elaboration. What, if anything, should we make of an Alice theme in Nabokov’s works? To
answer this question, I will look briefly at Nabokov’s contact with the works of Lewis Carroll. I
will demonstrate that there does exist what I am calling “an Alice theme” in his works and
address its significance. I am defining the Alice theme as references, images, and borrowings
related to the two Alice novels, which appear throughout a work and in a critical mass, so as to
evoke Carroll’s works. While this theme fits with many of his novels, this chapter will focus on
two specific cases. In the first, Lolita, the Alice theme is quite clearly woven throughout,
including direct references to Alice and to Wonderland. In the second, Приглашение на казнь
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(Invitation to A Beheading), the theme is less immediately accessible.101 The Alice theme, while
present in the text, is not as clearly spelled out for the reader as in the first case.
Why does Nabokov employ the Alice theme and how does it function in his work? I suggest
that the Alice theme is partially connected to Nabokov’s preoccupation with game and play in his
novels and partially connected to something weightier and unknowable - the otherworldly. One
of the enduring qualities of Nabokov’s works is that the richness and complexity of his novels
lend themselves to so many different, often diametrically opposed, interpretations. This
interpretation fits into that approach, which views Nabokov as an artificer, concerned with play
and games, though I believe there is also space in this interpretation to accommodate another
view in which there is also unknowable meaning behind the novel. Through his never-ending
game play and engagement with Carroll’s nonsense tales, he is able to create slippage between
the three main realms - our reality, the fictional/textual reality, and the other world. We as readers
are ultimately unable to pin down where one realm ends and the next begins. Moments of
metalepsis pepper Nabokov’s novels.102 During these moments, it seems as if something has
crossed the boundary between our world and the novel. All the while flashes of the other world
flicker behind the text. We can perhaps view the Alice theme as a signal, much like
Senderovich’s and Shvartz’s view of oranges in Nabokov’s works as a signal to the reader that
Nabokov is engaging with Balagan gesturing to the Modernist trends of the Russian Silver Age.
Nabokov’s use of the Alice theme signals to the reader that there is an element of play involved,
that we have gone down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and should not consider the world of the
102 For more on narrative metalepsis see Gérard Genette Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
Cornell University Press, 1983. P 234 -237
101 Приглашение was published in 1936, while the earliest translation of Alice in Russian appeared in
1879 followed by several Soviet translations in 1923 and 1924 (Goodwin, 60). It is feasible to assume an
educated Russian reading public would have been somewhat familiar with both.
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text as that of a “real” world. We have fallen into a wonderland where Nabokov and the reader
now play a game with words and language, whether the reader is aware or not. The Alice theme
serves to reinforce the idea of Nabokov as an artificer and the novel as a game; it is however,
only temporary. Thus allowing the novel to unfold yet again to reveal there is more at stake in
this game. The writer in the role of artificer becomes important in the discussion of nonsense and
the limits of its borders.
Carroll figured into Nabokov’s life at an early age and never faded out. Nabokov states that he
read Alice in Wonderland in the original English at the age of six. Many years later, Nabokov
maintained that, “In common with many English children (I was an English child) I have been
always very fond of Carroll” (Strong Opinions, 108). While Nabokov was notoriously critical of
other writers, he quite comfortably designates Lewis Carroll as “… the greatest children’s story
writer of all time” (Strong Opinions, 157).
In 1923, when the young Nabokov published his first book in Berlin, Germany under the pen
name V. Sirin the work was not an original work of fiction, but a translation of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland into Russian as Аня в стране чудес. Thomas Karshan that Nabokov’s early
work on the translation “…in the light of Nabokov's future work seems a stroke of extraordinary
good fortune, since in Carroll Nabokov found a toy-box packed with images, ironies, and
aesthetic ideas about play from which he would draw over his entire career.” (Karshan, 66)
Critics praised Nabokov for his ability to translate Carroll’s playfulness and humor into the
Russian context.103
Nabokov actually Russifies the English classic, staying faithful to the spirit
103 Nabokov’s Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland is not the first. In fact, the first translation
appeared in 1879 as Соня в царстве дива (Sonya in the Kingdom of Wonder), then two more in 1907 and
1909 respectively (Demurova, 11-13). The first translation of Through the Looking-Glass into Russian did
not appear until 1924 (Demurova, 15). Interestingly, Nabokov claimed to be unaware of any of these
previous translations when writing his own (Strong Opinions, 137).
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of Carroll’s tale rather than chaining himself to a word for word translation. Immediately, in the
title, it is evident that Nabokov did not shy away from altering the text to better suit a Russian
speaking audience, trading in the English “Alice” for the more Russian “Anya.” Similarly,
Nabokov changes a jar labeled “orange marmalade” to one labeled “Strawberry jam”
(“Клубничное Варенье”). Additionally, he switches out the mouse’s history of William the
Conqueror for a History of Kievan Rus’ and Vladimir Monomakh. While the English Alice
struggles to recall “How doth the little busy bee..” producing “How doth the little crocodile…,”
Nabokov’s Anya parodies Pushkin’s “Птичка божия не знает” (“God’s bird doesn’t know”)
with “крокодилушка не знает” “the little crocodile doesn’t know”(Fet 54). While the translation
was not printed in the Soviet Union, it was hailed a success nonetheless, and one that would hold
a special place in Nabokov’s life and career. Nabokov remembering Anya’s impact on his life
said, “I recall with pleasure that one of the accidents that prompted Wellesley College to engage
me as a lecturer in the early forties was the presence of my rare Anya in the Wellesley collection
of Lewis Carroll editions” (Strong Opinions, 373).
Nabokov clearly held Carroll’s writing in high regard. Alice and Anya seem to have been
constant companions for Nabokov: from childhood, to his beginnings as an author, all the way to
his career in America as a lecturer. Nonetheless, Nabokov quite notably dismissed any likeness
to Carroll in his own works. When asked if his use of languages shared any affinities to Carroll’s
idea of nonsense, Nabokov answered, “No, I do not think his invented language shares any roots
with mine” (Strong Opinions, 109).104 However, Karshan notes that, “Arguably, Carroll provided
104 Readers of Nabokov may be interested to know that, when asked a similar question about whether he
enjoys playing games with his readers and “puzzling people,” he answered, “What a bore that would be!”
(Strong Opinions, 237). One then wonders what purpose the acrostic in “The Vane Sisters” or the
deception in the forward of the English edition to The Defense serve. Additionally, an acrostic appears in
the closing poem “A Boat Beneath the Sunny Sky” in Through the Looking-Glass spelling out “Alice
Pleasance Liddle” (Through the Looking-Glass, 219). We should also take into consideration that in the
interviews which he participated in, Nabokov wrote the questions asked by the interviewer.
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Nabokov with the inspiration for the central theme of his writing on play in 1923–4, the thought
that art involves a kind of make-believe which is neither truth nor falsehood, and only the
provisional suspension of disbelief, not full-blown faith.” (Karshan, 68).
One does feel the presence of Alice, much like Olga Sedakova does, glimpsing flashes of her
through Nabokov’s looking glasses. Both authors frequently make use of the image of mirrors
and reflecting objects. Whether it is Alice’s journey through the looking glass into a reversed
world or Kinbote in Pale Fire traveling through an imagined history as his would-be lover is
refracted into, “… an infinite number of nudes in its depths… breaking into individual nymphs”
(Pale Fire, 111). Additionally, the mad Charles Kinbote shares the same first name as Charles
Dodgson, Lewis Carroll’s real name (Fet, 61). Nota bene: Nabokov could have borrowed the
name “Ada,” the titular character from Ada or Ardor, from Carroll as well. In Alice in
Wonderland, Alice tries to determine who she is and exclaims, “I’m sure I am not Ada” (10).
While many names are changed in Nabokov’s translation of the classic, most notably the title
character’s, Ada remains unchanged as: “Я наверно знаю, что я не Ада” (Anya v strane
chudes’,15).105
Both authors have an abiding love of puns, puzzles, word games, and acrostics. In “Notes on
Nabokov’s British Ancestors,” Nina Berberova astutely connects Carroll’s invented game
“Doublets: a word puzzle” to the “word golf” played in Pale Fire (Berberova, 263). Doublets
was played by changing one letter of a word at a time until the player ended up with either the
compliment or antonym of the starting word. For example, if the starting word is “pen” then the
105 Another reference in Ada is the possible appearance of the white rabbit as a Dr. Krolik. “Кролик” is
the word that Nabokov uses in his translation for the white rabbit, while the March Hare is translated as
“Заяц.” The addition of “Dr.” may also bring to mind the color white as the reader imagines a doctor in
his signature white coat.
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ending words will be “ink” or if the starting word is “Head” then the ending word is “Tail.”106
“Word Golf” is a game played with the reader in the index of Pale Fire, in which the reader is
sent from one indexed term to another until finally circling around to the initial term “Word
Golf.”
Moreover, the general theme of games is present in the work of both authors. Particularly,
games of chess and cards. Karshan observes that King, Queen, Knave, and The Defense follow
the same game pattern (cards and chess respectively) of the two Alice novels (Karshan, 21).
While chess is central to the plot in The Defense it makes smaller appearances in other works by
Nabokov. Nabokov himself was interested in both chess games and chess problems, which are
not games but puzzles.107 Additionally, in The Defense, the rules of chess suddenly develop a
purpose for the main character. These rules leave the chessboard and enter into life, causing the
boundary between what is metaphysically real and what is play to grow thin. For a thorough
delineation of Alice’s appearances in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, one should see Priscilla
Meyer’s book, Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
where she reads Alice as “a richly elaborated subtext that is clearly meant to be detected,
gradually, with a slow grin” (Meyer, 48). More generally, Nina Demurova, in Алиса на других
берегах, claims that, “Возможно, что вчитывание в ‘Страну чудес’ в самом начале
творческого пути определило - или, скорее, помогло определить - многие темы зрелого,
гениального Набокова. И темы сна - перечитайте подряд конец “Страны чудес” и Финал
“Приглашения на казнь”(Demurova, 27). (“It is possible in reading “Anya” to determine the
very beginning of Nabokov’s creative path - or, rather, to help determine- the many themes of the
107 For more on Nabokov and Chess see D. Barton Johnson’s Nabokov as Literary Chess Problemist
106 Ex. Head, heal, teal, tell, tall, Tail (Sewell, 34).
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mature, brilliant Nabokov. Even the theme of dreams - reread in the end sequence of “Anya” and
the final of “Invitation to a Beheading.”)
Thomas Karshan claims, “Each of Nabokov’s novels asks to be considered as a game or form
of play with its own secret rules, and there is a precise relation between games that each novel
describes and the way in which it is itself playful and game like” (Karshan, 2). For Karshan, play
is, “Nabokov’s favorite metaphor for art and artistic freedom” (Karshan, 19). He frames play as
the central idea of Nabokov’s works as opposed to ideas such as morality, Art or transcendence.
In Karshan’s understanding, there are two sides to the idea of play. In Russian, both of these
sides are contained in the single word “игра,” while in English they are split into “play” and
“game.” On the one hand, play has the quality of freedom. On the other hand, games have
conventions and rules that must be followed (Karshan, 8). Interestingly for our discussion,
Karshan notes that Nabokov’s engagement with play is often rooted in violence and ugliness and
not simply the harmless, joyful play we might be imagining. He explains that,
“Nabokov presses forward with aestheticism's insistence that art must be free and
uncensored by didactic imperatives, but he tears away the veneer of superficial beauty
with which aestheticism had been associated. Looking beneath the surface of
consciousness, Nabokov investigates subterranean impulses such as violence, disgust,
loathing, and desire, and traces the aesthetic to an erotic source which frequently
expresses itself in perversity. ‘Play’ seems in its opening paragraphs a defiant
exclamation of the aestheticism which, fixing only on what is good and beautiful in
life—love, nature, art, and play—ignores ugliness and pain.” (Karshan, 12)

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We often find violence, pain, and cruelty in Nabokov’s works but it also often appears highly
aestheticised. This is another aspect of nonsense that makes it well suited for Nabokov's
purposes. As has been repeated throughout this dissertation, nonsense depicts violence, death,
pain, and cruelty in high frequency. The humor that often stems from these violent situations is
due to the emotional detachment with which nonsense literature treats its subject matter. With
Nabokov, there are moments that engage playfully in this same type of violence and gesture to
Carroll’s work and yet there are moments, when the play with nonsense has ended and the true
sadness or horror of the previous moments creeps in.
Nabokov insists on this artistic freedom and construction of his own game. However, this is
not the whole picture. These literary games strike a balance with a hidden deeper meaning or
transcendence. So why Carroll? Nabokov admired him as a writer, but more than that, Carroll
and his particular brand of nonsense literature comes out of the age of Victorian moralizing.
Virtually all children’s works had a lesson or a moral, which Carroll does away with at every
turn, creating nonsense poems that echo established poetry, for example “Twinkle Twinkle Little
Bat,” and “You Are Old, Father William,” he depicts adults behaving poorly, and classic
lessons/sayings/images are flipped so they no longer hold established sense. Play, games and
nonsense are elevated above traditional rules. There may also be something in child’s play,
reducing characters to play things - in Alice it’s a pack of cards and chessmen, in Приглашение
(Invitation) it’s puppets - some sort of infantilization. Karshan has noted that, ““Carroll is a
crucial source of Nabokov's ideas about play” (Karshan, 21).
Additionally, the same sense of play is often at the basis for the nonsense literature, which
Carroll wrote. Nonsense literature takes an interest in games with set rules such as chess and
cards, but also in puns, word games, and puzzles (Sewell, 27). The structure of games and the
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freedom of play fit well into the world of nonsense, according to Elizabeth Sewell in The Field of
Nonsense, because nonsense literature is not, “an escape from the limitations of everyday life
into the haphazard infinity, but is on the contrary a carefully limited world, controlled and
directed by reason, a construction subject to its own laws” (Sewell, 5). According to Sewell,
nonsense presents the reader with the completed picture and the reader must puzzle out those
complex forms of play with “rigid laws” that create its structure (Sewell, 26). Nonsense is a
highly “verbal matter” its “playthings will be words” (Sewell, 3-26). While nothing in
Nabokov’s oeuvre can be considered nonsense literature, we might be forgiven from hearing here
an echo of Humbert Humbert’s cry, “Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!” (Lolita, 34).
And yet, while the characters and sometimes the readers may find themselves in the painted
set of Nabokov’s world as he, the puppet master, pulls their strings, one always feels that with
Nabokov, there is more hidden beyond the text. There is a hint at something otherworldly,
existing beyond the pages of the text. Nonsense, unlike the absurd, does not preclude this notion,
but actually leaves space for it as an unexplained possibility. Nonsense can support faith, the
mystical and as discussed in chapter 3 with Daniil Kharms, can be used as an apophatic path to
God. Again, I want to make clear that Nabokov’s works are not in the nonsense tradition, yet
their engagement with Lewis Carroll’s nonsense works seems so intuitive. Importantly, the ideas
of play, nonsense, and faith are well suited to each other. For example, Karshan claims that “Play
in Nabokov's novels is not trivial. It is something of enormous metaphysical significance, and
serves as a bridge between art and faith” (Karshan, 18). Additionally, he goes on to explain that
“Art and play are like faith in the sense that they demand one believe things to be other than they
seem to be, though they differ from faith in allowing one to qualify one's beliefs, permitting
half-belief or make-believe.” (Karshan, 68).
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An equally compelling interpretation of the Alice theme in Nabokov’s works is one
connected with this other worldly element of his works.The idea of the otherworldly as the
central concern of Nabokov’s works was popularized by Vladimir Alexandrov, who derived the
term from the Russian потусторонность (Alexandrov, 3). Alexandrov argues that “an aesthetic
rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm” is the main drive in Nabokov’s works
(Alexandrov, 3). In this interpretation, Nabokov gestures at this otherworldly meaning but “ …all
one can have is intuitions of what it may be like; no certainty about it is possible” (Alexandrov,
5) Additionally, Alexandrov argues that, “Nabokov also creates an oblique link between writing
and the otherworld by means of a network of details implying that human life is like a book
authored by a transcendent realm” (Alexandrov, 98). Perhaps,this link between writing and other
metaphysical realms will sound familiar to the reader as it is similar to the view of art that
Kharms takes, as discussed in the previous chapter. The difference between the two writers,
however, is that where Kharms fully embraces the illogical aspects of nonsense, creating works
that is fully submerged into the nonsense genre, while Nabokov only engages with the play
aspects of nonsense through references and allusions, resulting in a somewhat more ambiguous
creation that resides with only one toe in the nonsense pool. Ambiguities in play with nonsense
that Karshan claims, “Nabokov's novels never get free, and never wish to get free, from play's
dangerous ambiguities” ( Karshan, 15).
Similarly, Priscilla Meyer views Nabokov’s engagement with Alice in The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight, as building an “analogy between the interpretation of two worlds on several
levels at once - Russian/English; fiction/reality; otherworld/this world” (Meyer, 53). She goes on
to explain that, “The references to Carroll in the book create an oscillation between ontological
layers of the text, and of levels of authorial responsibility. Both Carroll tales are based on the
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opposition between two worlds: the “Real world” and “Wonderland”(Meyer, 53). Notably,
Meyer is directly opposed to the notion of Nabokov as an artificer as I have elaborated above. In
fact she argues,
Nabokov’s motives are not to be a puppet master who emphasizes his own authorship in a
postmodern mode in order to underscore the fictionality, conditionality, and made-ness of
the text, as critics have suggested. Nabokov treasures specifically verbal art, and delights
in habits of mind that are forever enlarging life by associating its vividness with literary
fiction. Reality is an infinite series of false bottoms, and so is a literary work… the levels
of interpretation loom larger and larger as they approach “reality,” moving from
Sebastian’s biography to Nabokov’s to - the infinite (further literary associations) and the
unknowable (The otherworldly). Nabokov highlights the indeterminacy of his novel
through the Alice subtext in an elaborately determined multidimensional way (Meyer,
56).
I argue that in the engagement with nonsense both of these interpretations can coexist. Nonsense,
including that of Lewis Carroll, has a heavy engagement with play, especially linguistic play, and
holds many possible meanings simultaneously. Nonsense reveals to us our human need for both
freedom and reassurance. It offers artistic, logical, social, and linguistic freedom. It reassures
through its possible metaphysical connections and the acceptance of the illogical. Its many
possible meanings, ability to gesture at the beyond and inherent value of freedom make it an
ideal genre for Nabokov to manipulate in his texts. While he can never write pure nonsense, he
can engage with Carroll’s nonsense to his own means.
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1. Alice, Cincinnatus, and Lolita: The Alice Theme Explored
In the case of Приглашение на казнь (Invitation), Nabokov develops the Alice theme
evocatively, leaving out direct references to Alice, Wonderland, or Carroll.108 Nevertheless, the
spirit of Alice pervades the text without Nabokov needing explicitly to draw the reader’s
attention to it. Nabokov develops the Alice theme most obviously through the beheading theme,
Emmochka, and Cincinnatus’s similarities to Alice and to the Cheshire-Cat.
Cincinnatus sits in prison awaiting his execution for the crime of “gnostical turpitude.”
Cincinnatus is opaque and for this offense, he is sentenced to beheading. The strange crime and
the sentence of beheading call to mind the despotic shouts of the Queen of Hearts, doling out
execution sentences for the most insignificant offenses. Both authors seem to delight in the
grotesque pomp and circumstance of the trial and execution, as well as jokes surrounding the
idea of beheadings. In Alice, for example, the beheadings are made humorous when the
characters discuss how to behead someone with a head but no body (Alice in Wonderland, 66).
While in Приглашение, much of the grotesque humor is in M’siuer Pierre’s comments on
Cincinnatus’s neck or his own arm strength. In both cases, the reader is in on the joke, though
Nabokov’s protagonist is not aware that his neighbor is in fact the headsman, casting the joke in
a darker light than Carroll’s. Additionally, both texts reveal the pure silliness surrounding the
legal ceremonies. In Alice, this is most evident at the end of the novel at the trial. During the trial
the King asks the jury to consider the verdict, “‘No, No!’ said the Queen, ‘Sentence first –
verdict afterwards.’ ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ Said Alice loudly” (Alice in Wonderland, 95).109
In
109
In Nabokov’s translation of this, there is a change in meaning: “‘нет, нет,” прервала Королева.
“Сперва казнь, а потом уж приговор” (Anya v strane chudes, 112).
108 For Alexandrov, Invitation is “characterized by a strong faith in the otherworldly dimension…” which
deals specifically with the “Individual’s relation to metaphysical reality” (Alexandrov, 84). He reads
Cincinnatus’s doubled self as a metaphysical entity in the realm of the otherworldly (Alexandrov, 87).
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Приглашение, the nonsense is found in the pomp leading up to and surrounding the public
execution.
The image of Alice herself is evoked in the description of Emmochka, the prison director’s
daughter. In her first introduction she is described as, “…в сияющем клетчатом платье и
клетчатых носках, - дитя, но с мраморными икрами маленьких танцовщиц, играла в мяч,
мяч равномерно стукался об стену. Она обернулась, четвертым и пятым пальцем смазывая
прочь со щеки белокурую прядь…” (Priglashenie na Kazn’, 235). “…In a bright checkered
frock and checkered socks - a mere child, but with the marble calves of a little ballerina - was
bouncing a ball, rhythmically against the wall. She turned, brushing a blond lock from her cheek
with the fourth and fifth fingers of her hand…” (Invitation, 41). Emmochka is shown to be a
precocious prepubescent child with high socks and blond hair. Nabokov repeatedly draws
attention to her blond hair, being called flaxen “льняные” elsewhere in the novel (Priglashenie
na Kazn’, 238). In Sir John Tenniel’s famous illustrations in Alice in Wonderland, he depicts
Alice with long blond hair, as shown in Figure 2 below.
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Figure 2.
Additionally, like Alice when she drinks or eats the wonderland concoctions that change her size,
Emmochka also finds her body distorted. M’sieur Pierre’s photohoroscope is a perverse and
farcical aging of the little Emmochka. The narrator explains, “При помощи ретушировки и
других фотофокусов как будто достигалось последовательное изменение лица Эммочки
(искусник, между прочим, пользовался фотографиями ее матери), но стоило взглянуть
ближе, и становилось безобразно ясной аляповатость этой пародии на работу времени”
(Priglashenie na kazn’, 337). “By means of retouching and other photographic tricks, what
appeared to be progressive changes in Emmie’s face had been achieved (incidentally, the
trickster had made use of her mother’s photographs); but one had only to look closer and it
became repulsively obvious how trite was this parody of the work of time”(Invitation, 170). In
both examples the laws of nature are bent or broken.
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While Emmochka seems to evoke Alice in image, Cincinnatus is the character, who seems to
be stuck in Wonderland. In the beginning of Alice, the narrator tells the reader, “So she was
considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and
stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble…when
suddenly, a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her”(Alice in Wonderland, 2). The switch
from waking life into dream occurs seamlessly and suddenly. The reader is given a small hint
that she is “sleepy” and but not until the end of the novel when she wakes up can the reader be
sure this was a dream. Like in Alice, Nabokov’s narration almost immediately follows
Cincinnatus on a dream without explicitly telling the reader that it's only a dream, indeed, the
reader is not even given the hint, which Carroll gives. It appears at first that Cincinnatus has
escaped the prison,
Пароль в эту ночь был: молчание, - и солдат у ворот отозвался молчанием на
молчание Цинцинната, пропуская его, и у всех прочих ворот было то же. Оставив за
собой туманную громаду крепости, он заскользил вниз по крутому, росистому
дерну, попал на пепельную тропу между скал, пересек дважды, трижды извивы
главной дороги, которая, наконец стряхнув последнюю тень крепости, полилась
прямее, вольнее, - и по узорному мосту через высохшую речку Цинциннат вошел в
город. (Priglashenie na kazn’, 217)
This night the password was silence, and the soldier at the gate responded with silence to
Cincinnatus’ silence and let him pass; likewise at all the other gates. Leaving behind the
misty mass of the fortress he began to slide down a steep, dewy bank of turf, reached a
pale path between cliffs, twice, three times crossed the bends of the main road -which
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having finally shaken off the last shadow of the fortress, ran straight and free - and a
filigrane bridge across a dried-up rivulet brought Cincinnatus to the city (Invitation, 18).
As Alice did, Cincinnatus walks away. Because there is no signal from his wakeful-state into a
dream-state the reader may be fooled into thinking Cincinnatus is free. However, when the
dream ends the truth is revealed just as seamlessly, “Цинциннат вбежал на крыльцо, толкнул
дверь и вошел в свою освещенную камеру. Обернулся, но был уже запрет. Ужасно!”
(Priglashenie na kazn’, 218). “Cincinnatus ran up the front steps, pushed open the door, and
entered his lighted cell. He turned around, but already he was locked in. O horrible!” (Invitation,
20). The reader realizes it has all been a dream when Cincinnatus suddenly finds himself back in
his cell just like when Alice wakes up on the riverbank where she began. While fantastic worlds
experienced in a dream are a common device in other genres of literature (Romantic, for
example), this particular borrowing coupled with the same type of transitions from wakeful to
dream state seems significant. By crossing borders (whether dream/waking world or literary), the
writer exercises ultimate creative control and freedom, he is able to toy with the reader’s
understanding and expectations.
In both novels the main character doubles. Alice frequently talks to herself as if there are two
of her. One Alice is brave and chides the other, who sits passively and cries. “‘You out to be
ashamed of yourself,’ said Alice, ‘A great girl like you,’ (she might as well say this), ‘to go on
crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!’ but she went on all the same, shedding gallons
of tears” (Alice in Wonderland, 9). There are also two Cincinnatuses in the novel. One will often
do something bold while the other is quite passive. As his execution draws nearer the reader is
told,“Цинциннат встал, разбежался и – головой об стену, но настоящий Цинциннат сидел в
халате за столом и глядел на стену...” (Priglashenie na kazn’, 356). “Cincinnatus got up, made
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a running start and smashed headlong into the wall- the real Cincinnatus, however, remained
sitting at the table, staring at the wall…” (Invitation, 193). Perhaps the most striking example of
Cincinnatus doubling comes at the end of the novel, when one Cincinnatus remains on the
chopping block and the other gets up and walks away. Victor Fet has noted that, “the novel’s
famous ending rhymes with the finale of Alice in Wonderland” (Fet, 60) after Alice has grown to
full size again and the dream begins to disintegrate. Nina Demurova, too, has commented on the
similarity between the ending of Приглашение and Alice. Alice’s final declaration in
Wonderland, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” has echoes with Cincinnatus’s accusation that
the characters around him are nothing but puppets, dolls, and parodies (Alice in Wonderland, 95).
Karshan, too, has noted Carroll as an influence on the doubles of characters in Nabokov’s works.
He argues,
This recalls Carroll's Alice, the ‘curious child’ who ‘was very fond of pretending to be
two people’, and sometimes tried to box her own ears. Nabokov's most obvious model for
such doubling would have been Dostoevsky, in whose works it is driven by humiliation
and self-disgust so bitter that the protagonists can only survive by abandoning their
identity. Instead, Nabokov, like Carroll, conceives of doubling as free and creative play
(Karshan, 80).
This doubling splits the text of the novel. Cincinnatus potentially escapes and does not. The
whole facade of the beheading starts to fall apart as does perhaps the novel itself. Characters are
playthings, revealing the writer as puppetmaster.
In the beginning of the novel, Cincinnatus’ active imagination provides various escapes for
him, he even goes so far as to call imagination his savior. One of these imaginative escapes
evokes the Cheshire-Cat. Like the cat, Cincinnatus dissolves himself until he all but disappears
165

into the air. The narrator explains,“Он встал, снял халат, ермолку, туфли. Снял полотняные
штаны и рубашку. Снял, как парик, голову, снял ключицы, как ремни, снял грудную клетку,
как кольчугу. Снял бедра, снял ноги, снял и бросил руки, как рукавицы, в угол. То, что
оставалось от него, постепенно рассеялось, едва окрасив воздух (Priglashenie na kazn’,
228). “He stood up and took off the dressing gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the
linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder
straps, took off his ribcage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms
like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly
coloring the air” (Invitation, 32). Piece by piece Cincinnatus takes off his clothes and then his
body parts until he dissolves into the air. One of the first pieces he separates from himself is his
head. The Cheshire-Cat also dissolves into the air and can reappear piece by piece. Interestingly,
this ability makes things difficult for the Queen of hearts, King, and executioner. The cat’s head
is the only part that is visible during the croquet match, When the Queen of Hearts orders it
beheaded, the executioner protests that, “you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to
cut it off from.” The cat eventually escapes by disappearing altogether, “ The Cat’s head began
fading away the moment he was gone, and by the time he had come back with the Duchess, it
had entirely disappeared: so the King and the executioner ran wildly up and down, looking for it”
(Alice in Wonderland, 66). In comparing these two scenes, we can perhaps see the beginnings of
Cincinnatus’s eventual escape where his own executioner cries out after him “Нельзя, нельзя!
Это нечестно…Вернитесь, ложитесь” (Priglashenie na kazn’, 380). “You can’t, You can’t! It’s
dishonest… Come back, lie down…(Invitation, 223). Cincinnatus’s executioner displays the
same confusion and frantic behavior at the absence of the subject’s acquiescence. By invoking
the smiling and playful Cheshire-cat, Nabokov signals his created world is wonderlandesque.
166

Another reflection of Alice occurs when Cincinnatus and M’sieur Pierre play chess
together. Setting aside the fascination both Nabokov and Carroll had with chess, the chess game
runs parallel to the croquet game. Both chess and croquet have ridged set rules, however, in both
novels the antagonist cheats and subverts these rules. In Alice, the poor girl complains, “I don’t
think they play fairly at all…I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog just now, only it ran
away when it saw mine coming” (Alice in Wonderland, 64). Similarly, when Cincinnatus and
M’sieur Pierre play chess, M’sieur Pierre continually takes back moves when he sees that he is in
checkmate until he has won the game (Priglashenie na kazn’, 316-317).
Of all of Nabokov’s novels, the Alice theme is most evident in Lolita. The theme is reflected
not only through direct references but also through verbal style, word play, and images. Humbert
Humbert directly references the children’s classic several times in the text. In the first direct
reference, Humbert calls to mind the world of wonderland, stating, “I moved toward my
glimmering darling, stopping and retreating every time I thought she stirred or was about to stir.
A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts…” (Lolita, 133). Humbert and the
reader imagine the sleeping Lolita as Alice lost in wonderland. However, this is not Lolita’s
wonderland but rather Humbert’s wonderland. Later in the confessional, Humbert Humbert
summons the image of Alice herself with her signature hair. He writes, “I used to recollect, with
anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a
jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful
vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet still in the act of combing her
Alice-in-Wonderland hair” (Lolita, 266).110
Humbert Humbert puts both references next to
110 The language Humbert uses in this quote mirrors the language Nabokov used when he talked about the
photographs Lewis Carroll took of semi-clothed little girls.
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Lolita. The reader, who may have already begun to sense a kinship between the two , can
visualize this relationship more sharply.
From the moment that Humbert Humbert picks up Lolita from her summer camp, the Alice
theme falls snuggly into place. Elizabeth Prioleau, in “Humbert Humbert Through the Looking
Glass,” draws a connection between Lolita and Alice, explaining, “Alice, like Lolita, is thrust
into a world where normalcy and rational law are in abeyance” (Prioleau, 435). All of the normal
laws about relationships between a little girl and her “father,” as Humbert insists he should be
viewed, are reversed much like the world that Alice experiences on the other side of the looking
glass. The perverse cross-country trip that Humbert takes Lolita on in the second half of the
novel is often connected to Alice. Jeffery Meyers, for example, reads this trip parallel to the boat
trip of that Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddle took, which is where Carroll conceived Alice in
Wonderland. Supposedly, Carroll created the tale to placate Alice Liddle on the long boat trip.
There are perhaps reflections of this in Humbert’s desperate attempts to keep Lolita occupied and
stave off her boredom and depression (Lolita, 150). In his introduction to Lolita, Alfred Appel Jr,
however, visualizes the cross-country trip as the chessboard from the illustration in Through the
Looking-Glass and even includes this illustration for the reader (Lolita, LXiX). Evidence for this
visualization might be found in Humbert’s description of the landscape as a “crazy quilt” (Lolita,
154).111 The moralistic reader may find it hard to reconcile his repulsion at the subject matter
with the charm of Humbert’s narration. On the one hand, the presence of the Alice theme seems
to signal to the reader that we need not concern ourselves with any damage done to a “real”
Lolita, that we are in a world of play and games. Yet, on the other hand, the real tragedy of
Lolita’s circumstances does not dissipate and ultimately remains equally as important to the text.
111 Also a moment where Nabokov is very clearly playing with words. Quilt into Quilty.
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This suggests that Nabokov’s assimilation to Carrollian games is only temporary or partial and
that it takes on more than one significance.
The topic of photography running throughout Lolita is actually connected with Lewis
Carroll himself and not his works. One of Lewis Carroll’s well known hobbies was photography.
In particular, he frequently photographed naked or semi-naked prepubescent girls (Meyers, 88).
Nabokov was well aware of Carroll’s unsavory hobby and referred to it on more than one
occasion. On the topic, Nabokov said:
He has a pathetic affinity with H. H. but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in
Lolita to his perversion and to those ambiguous photographs, he took in dim rooms. He
got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy.
His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather
semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.” (Strong
Opinions,109).
Despite Nabokov’s claim that he did not allude to this in Lolita, Nabokov’s knowledge of
Carroll’s photographs and “Scrawny little nymphets” led Alfred Appel nonetheless to connect
Carroll to what he calls “the photography theme” in Lolita (Conversations, 134). In the
annotation to Humbert’s wonderland comment, Appel elaborates on the connection between
Carroll and Photography:
Nabokov did allude to Carroll in Lolita, through what might be called “the photography
theme”: H.H. cherishes his worn old photograph of Annabel, has in a sense been living with
this “still,” tries to make Lolita conform to it, and often laments his failure to capture her on
film. Quilty’s hobby is announced as “photography,” and the unspeakable films he produces
at the Duk Duk Ranch would seem to answer Carroll’s wildest needs (Lolita, 378).
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Photography’s appearance in Lolita]solidifies the Alice theme by pulling in Alice’s author. The
comparison between Carroll and Humbert does not end at photography however.
Another way in which the Alice theme is developed in Lolita is through the language play
that Humbert Humbert frequently engages in. Elizabeth Prioleau rightly notes that,“…whether
intentional or not, Humbert’s style has distinct Carrollian echoes in Lolita” (Prioleau, 434).
Certainly Humbert Humbert’s punning and play with words and names reflects the linguistic
games in Alice. In Through the Looking-Glass for example, two new characters are introduced:
“Haigha” and “Hatta” (178). Of course the reader realizes that these are playful trick names. The
names are really those of the March Hare and Mad Hatter with the letter “r” missing from the
verbal pronunciation. Observe that the initials of the two become H. H. Furthermore, upon
hearing the names readers are told, “‘I love my love with an H,’ Alice couldn’t help beginning
‘because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous, I fed him with – with – with
Ham-sandwiches and Hay” (Through the Looking-Glass, 178). In Lolita, we also have the
repetition of H’s and the punning on names, especially on Humbert’s double name. This echo is
evident in his style when Humbert Humbert complains to the reader, “to the wonderland I had to
offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think between a
Hamburger and a Humburger, she would invariably, with icy precision – plump for the former”
(Lolita, 168). And just a little earlier in the text, Humbert puns on his name and wonderland
saying, “She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland” (Lolita, 168). The
playfulness of language employed by Carroll and Humbert is remarkably similar in style.
Still more allusions to Alice can be found in Lolita. For example, Meyers readsthe tennis
match Lolita plays as the Croquet game from Alice, while Prioleau hears in Charlotte Haze’s
170

nagging, the chiding of the Red Queen (Prioleau, 435).112
It is clear that these allusions are
present in the novel. As Joyce explains, “Allusions to Alice and Lewis Carroll in Lolita are
undeniably significant. The explicit connection Nabokov made between Humbert Humbert and
Lewis Carroll in the Vogue interview only confirms what appears to be pervasive use of Carroll’s
affinity for Alice as leitmotif in Lolita” (Joyce, 347).113 The astute reader should be aware of the
Alice theme in Lolita, and recognize this as a signal that Nabokov is playing a game.
In comparing Nabokov’s use of play and games with those central to nonsense literature in
general, and Carroll in particular, we begin to see similarities. With the extensive care and
attention, which Nabokov devoted to his craft, it would be credulous to believe that Nabokov
was not aware of these similarities; or that a Carrollian influence crept over his writing without
his recognition. Nabokov is fully in control of the Alice theme in his novels. The Alice theme
functions as part of Nabokov’s preoccupation with game and play in his novels but allows space
in his works for the otherworldly. When we as readers begin to feel, “a breeze from
wonderland,” we should take this as a signal that we have crossed through the looking glass. By
invoking nonsense literature with the Alice theme, Nabokov invites us to delve into a wonderland
of puns, puzzles, word games, and grotesque humor. We are now in a purely constructed world
where Nabokov and the reader will play a game. Yet when the cards start to fall down and the set
starts to melt away, something meaningful glimmers in the background as if beyond the text.
113 In the interview Joyce refers to here, Nabokov said, “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll because
he was the first Humbert Humbert. Have you seen those photographs of him with little girls?”
(Conversations, 108).
112 Some readers may be interested to know that Lewis Carroll published four letters in 1883 on the
subject of lawn tennis. He developed a more equitable system for competition in lawn tennis. (Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography).
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Conclusion
The various possibilities of meaning, the wavy haze of the topsy-turvy, the unending games,
and dark humor make nonsense a strange and defiant genre of literature. The nonsense writer
throws out the traditional rules of the game and creates his own, he crashes through the
limitations of language, creating new words and splitting meanings, and ruptures the very order
of our reality, cracks it open to allow chaos to peek through. No matter how hard we try, this
dissertation included, one always feels as though something slips past us with nonsense. Perhaps
this is why readers everywhere, adults and children, are so drawn to nonsense.
Over the course of this dissertation I have defined nonsense, outlined its major qualities and
devices, and explored its relationship with children’s literature. Nonsense is not the lack of
meaning but, rather, simultaneously many meanings held in tension with no meaning. Nonsense
engages heavily with games and play, most often this takes the form of linguistic play, such as
puns, portmanteaus, word games, and neologisms. Nonsense plays with extremes and
dichotomies on various levels of the text. For instance, listing as a device gives the nonsense
writer a structural order to impose over the chaos and disconnectedness of the content as we have
seen with writers such as Daniil Kharms. Listing is one of the devices that creates simultaneity in
nonsense.
When we consider the point or pointlessness of nonsense we find that while nonsense very
distinctly does not have a moral, that doesn’t mean it does not have a function, as we have seen
in the context of children’s literature. Nonsense can serve a pedagogical purpose for small
children who are testing out their linguistic abilities and understanding the nature of our reality.
Additionally, the humor in nonsense and the lack of emotional attachment to grim topics can
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serve not only to reassure the child but to help the child develop a sense of humor and deal with
difficult or tedious circumstances later in life.
This lack of emotional attachment and lack of horror with which nonsense treats topics such
as death, violence, cruelty, etc. is one of the traits which distinguishes it from the absurd, which it
is closely related to yet remains separate from. Again this is why we would expect to find
nonsense in children’s literature but not the absurd in children’s literature. In the absurd, the
“pointlessness” that we experience is backed by existential dread and horror, this is in part due to
the fact that the absurd man is a godless and isolated man, cut off from the metaphysical realm.
Nonsense does not have this problem because there are no lasting consequences attached to
things like death and in nonsense there is no emotional rumination, but also because nonsense
allows for connections, including metaphysical connections.
Nonsense tells us something about the human spirit. We need to feel free and unrestrained by
the limitations of everyday life, of logic, of language and of laws and rules. But we can not
achieve these things, so nonsense provides us with a space to play, a space where we can
experience these freedoms for a short time without repercussions. Additionally, nonsense
reassures us of life's difficulties. Nonsense helps us accept the petty inconveniences that don't
make sense in our lives and sometimes it gestures towards something otherworldly in which we
can believe in.
Nonsense in the Russian tradition comes from two sources; external and internal. We have
seen how English, German, and Italian nonsense works entered into Russian literature in
translation and were received and adapted to by Russian artists. For example, the Alice works
have never gone out of print in Russia and have undergone numerous translations into Russian
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under various titles. The nonsense boom of the 1910s to 30s saw the translations of many of
Edward Lear’s works and many English nursery rhymes with nonsense themes.
While many sources came from abroad, there are pockets of nonsense throughout the Russian
tradition that are original works by Russian authors. Like with many traditions, early examples of
nonsense came from children’s songs and folk verse. The 19th century saw a more substantial
interest in nonsense with writers such as Nikolai Gogol and the fictitious Koz’ma Prtukov. Most
of Gogol’s works dabble in nonsense alongside parody and satire. However, a notable exception,
which is a shining example of pure nonsense is “The Nose,” one of his short stories from the
Petersburg texts. Featuring classic Skaz narration that often leads nowhere yet continually insist
on its own behave that is does, alogical events and sequences, and the sheer difficulty one
experiences trying to impose any one interpretation with which to view the story make “The
Nose” an excellent case of prose nonsense solidly situated in the Russian tradition. For one
cannot talk about the Russian literary tradition without mentioning Gogol.
In the verse and aphorisms of Koz’ma Prutkov, puns, Skaz, and the alogical abound. Like with
Gogol’s, Prutkov’s oeuvre involves parody to a large extent, yet many of his verses lean too far
into the nonsense realm to be comfortably placed in the category of parody. It is clear that many
of his most alogical works lack a clear aim or moral. Particularly interesting is the fact that
Prutkov’s works come back into fashion in the late avant-garde period around the same time the
Oberiu writers are experimenting with nonsense and translated nonsense is appearing in
children’s literature in a considerable amount.
During the early avant-garde period, the Futurists, such as Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, were
experimenting with Zaum, or “beyondsense.” The Futurist experimentation with neologisms
(both those based on roots of real words and those which transgress against the limits of
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understandable linguistic units) as well as their interest in the child-like aesthetic and the child as
poet lead to new expressions of nonsense. The culmination of nonsense writing would take place
in the later avante-garde group Oberiu, both their works for adults and for children.
In particular, the oberuit Daniil Kharms produced many nonsense prose works and poems. I
consider Kharms as a master of the nonsense genre next to Carroll or Lear and push back against
the common characterization of his work as “absurdist” by scholars. To this point I make a case
for the ways in which nonsense provides the space for an apophatic path to God and aligns neatly
with his ideas on art and a “higher reality.” I extensively analyzed his construction of nonsense
through the device of listing and sequence. Kharms uses lists and sequences to create and negate
connections, to create a sustained tension between the arbitrary and the necessary, and to fracture
while combining. The essence of these lists is play, a play with structure over logic, which
ultimately demonstrates the collision between chaos and order to reveal a Kharmsian “higher
reality.” In these examples of Kharmian listing we can see the creation of simultaneity so
characteristic of nonsense writing.
Through the analysis of Nabokov’s engagement with Lewis Carroll we can see that it is not
enough to use the devices of nonsense, but that there must be an agreement between the reader
and the writer to participate in nonsense. The nonsense writer, character, and readers reach some
sort of acceptance of the unexplainable, unknowable, and contradictory truth which exists in
nonsense. Additionally, the levels between the author, readers, and characters tend not to vary by
a significant amount in nonsense. Perhaps at times, the readers feel they are at a higher level of
understanding than the characters or the narrator, however, this superiority is short-lived at every
subversion of logic and meaning that nonsense presents. With Nabokov, while he employs puns
and word games, has a clear interest in play and the various devices in nonsense, the distance
175

between the author, the reader, and the characters is greater than that of nonsense. Nabokov’s
works do not engage as frequently in the alogical as established nonsense works. Further, he does
not commit wholly to the world of the topsy-turvy but blends each world and each level of the
text together, creating a novel that is, ironically, too ambiguous to be nonsense. Finally, his work
does not lack the emotional detachment necessary to nonsense. Whether we prescribe to theories
that view his work as commentary on the dangers of the inattentive artist and human cruelty or
not, it is hard to argue that his works provoke no emotional response. Through Nabokov, then,
the limits of nonsense become clearer.
Through analysis of Приглашение на казнь (Invitation to a Beheading) and Lolita I
demonstrate the presence of what what I call the Alice theme. The Alice theme is references,
images, and borrowings related to the two Alice novels, which appear throughout a work and in a
critical mass, so as to evoke Carroll’s works. I argue that the function of the Alice theme in
Nabokov’s works serves to signal to the reader that there is an element of play involved. That we
should not consider the world of the text as that of a “real” world. The Alice theme reinforces the
view of Nabokov as an artificer and the novel as a game. Notably though, this game is
temporary. Allowing the real world and, often, tragic consequences to prevail. The Alice theme is
both partially connected to Nabokov’s preoccupation with play and partially connected to
something weightier and unknowable - the otherworldly.
Nonsense will no doubt continue to enchant readers, to make children laugh as they hone
their linguistic prowess, and to confound and frustrate scholars who try so hard to pin nonsense
down. Those who write sensibly about these texts which defy sense, subverting us at every turn.
It is my hope that this dissertation can be a map to where the jumblies live with all those silly
authors who reject traditional rules of meaning, logic, and language.
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Here I will end this dissertation with a quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, “This stood for
the Evolution of Sense, his greatest course (with an enrollment of twelve, not even remotely
apostolic) which had opened and would close with the phrase destined to be overquoted one day:
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense” (Nabokov, Pnin, 32-33).
177

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