Book talk with Alexander Cigale on Russian Absurd by Daniil Kharms

Join NEA Fellow in Literary Translation Alex Cigale as he reads and discusses excerpts from his new book, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings. Kharms, beloved in Russia as a writer of children’s and adult fairy tales, is thought of in the West primarily as an Absurdist or Surrealist. By restoring the chronology of his prose and poetry, and contrasting it with materials from his diaries and letters, to enable the reader to map the events of Khams’s life over to his writing and thus trace his development as a writer, Cigale attempts to present a new picture of Kharms as a protoexistentialist and even a proto-post-modernist writer whose work remains highly relevant to our own day and place.