Please join us on September 28th for a book talk with Author, Alexander Cigale, on Russian Absurd: Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. This talk is part of the Occasional Series, sponsored by the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.
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.
Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings, in the Northwestern World Classics series, is Alex Cigale’s first full book. In 2015, he was awarded an NEA Fellowship in Literary Translation, for his work on the poet of the St. Petersburg philological school, Mikhail Eremin, and guest edited the Spring 2015 Russia Issue of the Atlanta Review, blogging about it for one week on Best American Poetry. His own poems in English have appeared in the Colorado Review, The Common Online, and The Literary Review, and his translations of classic, Silver Age, and contemporary Russian poetry in Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, PEN America, Plume, TriQuarterly, The Hopkins Review, Two Lines, Words Without Borders, and World Literature in Today..
