Picture a tall, thin man with blazing light blue eyes parading down the main pedestrian boulevard in a city wearing a tweed suit, Sherlock Holmes double-brimmed hat and smoking a curved ivory Sherlock Holmes pipe, putting himself on display as if he were a perfectly balanced combination of Oscar Wilde and that famous London detective. And, as the crowning moment of his performance, the tall, thin man halts in the middle of a gaping crowd of onlookers and theatrically lies down in the middle of the sidewalk, and then, after several minutes, nonchalantly rises to his feet and continues his stroll.

Quite a sight; quite a man. Are we among artists in gay-Paris in 1868 or among Greenwich Village hippies in 1968? No, indeed, we are not -- we are in a totalitarian state, more specifically, we are in 1931 Stalinist Russia. Meet our one-of-a-kind author, Daniil Kharms. Considering the communist ideal of every healthy man and woman seeing themselves as a productive, hard-working citizen of the state, taking their place elbow to elbow with their comrades in the field or the factory, it is something of a miracle Daniil Kharms's short life (the state locked him in a mental institution at age 38 where he died of starvation) wasn't even shorter.

So, how, you may ask, does this one-of-a-kind writer tell a story? Before making more general comments on several stories and plays, here is a story entitled Events in its entirety: "One day Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. Krylov, having heard the news, also died. And Spiridonov died regardless. And Spiridonov's wife fell from the cupboard and also died. And the Spiridonov children drowned in a pond. Spiridonov's grandmother took to the bottle and wandered the highways. And Mikhailov stopped combing his hair and came down with mange. And Kruglov sketched a lady holding a whip and went mad. And Perekhryostov received four hundred rubles wired over the telegraph and was so uppity about it that he was forced to leave his job.
All good people but they don't know how to hold their ground."

Quite a story in the tradition of great Russian literature: multiple deaths, a case of alcoholism, disease, madness, forced unemployment. And, of course, some moral philosophy thrown in at the end. Of course, I'm being ironic, but only partially. This is vintage Kharms, a literary vision and expression that is nothing less than piercing. After all, how should an artist and poet create when living in a society that is cruel, oppressive and repressive? Write conventional, familiar narrative? It is as if those penetrating light blue eyes of Kharms could see through all the pretense, sham, invention, deceit, and façade in both life and art and he would have none of it.

This collection contains well over one hundred pieces, mostly one-page stories, but also some poems and micro-plays along with several longer works, including a twenty-two page tale involving an old woman mysteriously sitting in the narrator's favorite armchair. Again, we have another one-page story of a fight where a man mutilates his opponent's face and nose with his dentures, another one-pager about a man who not only loses his handkerchief, hat, jacket and boots but also himself, another one-pager where an artist goes to a canal to buy rubber so he can make a rubber band to stretch but meanwhile an old woman gets burned up in a stove, and still another one pager where an engineer builds a wall across all of Petersburg but never knows what the wall is good for.

Also included is a one page play where Pushkin and Gogol do nothing but repeatedly trip and fall over one another and another play where a single actor takes the stage only to vomit and is followed by three more solo appearances of vomiting actors followed by a little girl who tells the audience to go home since all the actors are sick. Weird? Absolutely. Bizarre, strange, outlandish, crazy, nutty, kooky, wild? Again, yes, absolutely.

There is an excellent twenty-five page introduction by Matvei Yankelevich giving the reader new to Daniil Kharms the cultural and literary context as well as biographical information of the author. Anything more than this introduction might be too much since the uniqueness of Kharms demands (and I don't think demands is too strong a word here) freshness. Rather than reading Kharms and being reminded of Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Beckett or Dada, keep it fresh - read Kharms and read Kharms slowly and carefully, as if you were reading literature for the first time. Be open for miracles. And you will witness miracles, lots of them.