Paradise in the Soviet Socialist Republic : the origin of the world by Daniil Kharms

Bibliogr. s. 255.

In 1934 Daniil Kharms wrote a poem The Fall, or the Knowledge of God and Evil (with the subtitle “didascalia”), which is a close adaptation of The Fall – a play from The Book of Genesis. The poet, however, creates an utterly different literary space to the one found in the biblical text. Paradise, in which Kharms’ Adam and Eve are living, seems to be concrete and tangible, as if it were human-made. This is the Garden of Eden of which an artist at the beginning of the twentieth century could dream. The aim of this paper is to expose the possible literary sources of such a vision. The article also presents ways in which mythological and biblical narratives which attempt to explaining the origins of the world and the first fall of humankind might be transformed in the poem written by an avant-garde artist.