Daniil Harms: language “anomalies” or the logic of language

Abstract

The linguistic and aesthetic comprehension of Daniil Harms’s texts should, first of all, be interpreted based on the postulates of avant-gardeism, to which the literary and theatrical group OBERIU belonged – an association of real art. Harms, as the founder and a prominent representative of this group, modeled his own linguistic and poetic concept of constructing literary texts paying fundamental attention to the semantemes of the lexemes absurd, antinorm, abstruse and alogism. We turn to Harms’s discourse and identify the fundamental principle of his life and work – total inversion. Total inversion appears at all linguistic levels, which, as a result, leads to a narrative deviation, the destruction of the actual formation of words and meanings in the writer’s linguopetics. In this regard, it is important to note that the author’s linguistic picture is based on his own socio-political worldview. Harms perceived the reality around him extremely keenly, which is why he created his own artistic world, a world that has the ability to maximally interpret the real one, in which the writer had to exist. In this fictional, unreal world, “the purity of order” comes into action when the reader is invited to forget about the laws of language and comprehend harmony - with the work, the world and oneself.