At the end of 1931, Kharms and Vvedensky were arrested, accused of 'distracting the people from the building of socialism by means of trans-sense verses' and exiled to Kursk. However the exile was fairly brief, the times being what Akhmatova described as 'relatively vegetarian'. Nevertheless, little work was to be had thereafter; Kharms was in and out of favour at Detgiz and periods of near starvation followed. Kharms and Vvedensky (the latter had moved to the Ukraine in the mid-30s: see Kharms's letter to him) survived the main purges of the 1930s.

However, the outbreak of the war brought new dangers:On 23 August 1941, he was arrested. The doorman asked him to come down into the courtyard for something. He was taken away half- dressed, wearing slippers on his bare feet. Vvedensky's arrest took place the following month in Kharkov. Vvedensky died in December of that year and Kharms (it seems of starvation in prison hospital) in February 1942. Both were subsequently 'rehabilitated' during the Khrushchev 'Thaw'. Most of their adult writings had to await the Gorbachev period for publication in Russia.

Most of Kharms's manuscripts were preserved after his arrest by his friend, the philosopher Yakov Semyonovich Druskin, until they could be safely handed on or deposited in libraries. From 1962 the children's works of Kharms began to be reprinted in the Soviet Union. Isolated first publications of a few of his short humorous pieces for adults followed slowly thereafter, as did mentions of Kharms in memoirs. Only when Gorbachev's policy of glasnost' took real effect though, from 1987, did the flood begin, including a major book-length collection in 1988. Abroad, an awareness of Kharms and the Oberiuts began to surface in the late 1960s, both in Eastern Europe, where publication was often easier, and in the West, where a first collection in Russian appeared in 1974. In 1978 an annotated, but discontinuous, collected works of Kharms began to appear, published in Bremen by the Verlag K-Presse (appropriately enough, the 'Kafka Press'), edited from Leningrad. Four volumes (the poetic opus) have appeared to date. It is probably safe to assume that virtually all of Kharms's surviving works have now appeared. The most recent 'find' is a selection of rather mild erotica, largely clinically voyeuristic and olfactory in nature, which suitably counterpoints certain tendencies already noticeable in some of Kharms's more mainstream writing.

Kharms offers a skeletal terseness, as opposed to the comprehensive vacuousness on offer from many a more conventional literary form. It is the environment in which he wrote that is the most striking thing of all. Kharms, the black miniaturist, is an exponent not so much of the modernist 'end of the Word' (in a Joycean sense) as of a post-modernist, minimalist and infantilism 'end of the Story' (in a sense perhaps most analogous to Beckett). His writing have seen to signal the end of the Russian avant-garde and to herald the European Theatre of the  Absurd. What emerges from close textual analysis is an appreciation of the spiritual and religious dimension to Kharm's art- a theology of the absurd.

The most striking feature, for many readers, will be the recurrence of Kharms's strange and disturbing obsessions: with falling, accidents, chance, sudden death, victimisation and all forms of apparently mindless violence. These again are often carried to extremes, or toyed with in a bizarre manner which could scarcely be unintentional. Frequently there appears little or no difference between Kharms's avowedly fictional works and his other writings. In his notebooks can be found such passages as:                                        

"I don't like children, old men, old women and the reasonable middle-aged. To poison children -- that would be harsh. But, hell, something needs to be done with them! . . . I respect only young, robust and splendiferous women. The remaining representatives of the human race I regard suspiciously. Old women who are repositories of reasonable ideas ought to be lassoed . . . Which is the more agreeable sight: an old woman clad in just a shift, or a young man completely naked? And which, in that state, is the less permissible in public? . . What's so great about flowers? You get a significantly better smell from between women's legs. Both are pure nature, so no one dare be outraged at my words."

You can find other material concerning Daniil Kharms at the following web pages:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8926/Kharms/    

http://kulichki.com/Kharms/

http://free-linkz.freeyellow.com/Kharms.html

http://www.seraj.dk/Kharms/Kharmseng.htm

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"On falling into filth, there is only one thing for a man to do: just fall, without looking round. The important thing is just to do this with style and energy"

"I am interested only in 'nonsense'; only in what which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation"