While still on the school bench he invented a pseudonym for himself - Kharms, which he varied with astonishing ingenuity, sometimes even in the signature under one manuscript: Kharms, Khorms, Charms, Haarms, Shardam, Kharms-Dandan, etc. The point is that Kharms believed that an unchanged name brings bad luck, and took a new surname, as if in an attempt to get away from it.
Daniil Kharms came from the family of the famous Narodolovtsy Ivan Yuvachev, sentenced in his time to the death penalty, commuted to life imprisonment, who was serving an exile on Sakhalin, where Chekhov met him. Danya was born after his father's release, when Yuvachev returned to St. Petersburg.
Kharms the writer was formed in the 20s, influenced by Khlebnikov and Trufanov, and found like-minded people in the circle of poets who called themselves Oberiuts (from OBERIU - Association of Real Art). In 1931 Kharms and some of his friends were arrested and exiled for a year to Kursk. The only two "adult" publications of Daniil - a poem each - in two collections of the Union of Poets (in 1926, 1927) were left behind. Kharms did not manage to publish a single "adult" line during his lifetime. After 1928 he made no attempts to publish his works. And he wrote every day.
Having started to cooperate in the magazine "Ezh" (since 1928), and then "Chizh" (since 1930), over the years he wrote less and less often. And one can only wonder that with a relatively small number of children's poems ("Ivan Ivanovich Samovar", "Vrun", "The Game", "A Million", "How Daddy Shot Me a Ferret", "A Man Came Out of the House", etc.) he created his own country in poetry for children and became its classic.
The world was surprised to recognize Daniil Kharms, having read him for the first time in the late 60s - early 70s. Until then, Ionesco and Beckett had been considered the progenitors of European literature of the absurd. But after reading hitherto unknown works - "Elizabeth Bam" (1927), prose and poetry, the play "Christmas Tree at Ivanov's" (1939), everyone realized that such a popular branch of literature appeared long before these authors.
The second arrest in 1937 did not break the writer. After his imminent release, he continued to create. It was in this year he wrote the stories "Connection", "Trunk", "Comprehensive Study", "On How I was visited by messengers".
In September 1941 Harms was recognized insane and sent for compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital, where he died.
His wife M. Malich, together with Harms's friend Ya. Druskin, collected all of her husband's manuscripts. The suitcase with the works Druskin took as the greatest value in the evacuation. When he returned to Leningrad, he took the second part of the archive, miraculously preserved, from Harms's sister. It contained letters and the manuscript of the unfinished story "The Old Woman," Kharms's largest prose work.
