Harms suitcase

The world's largest private collection of memorial objects related to Daniel Harms, belonging to the Vita Nova publishing house, includes the manuscripts of Harms and writers of his circle, personal belongings of participants in the Commonwealth of “Chinars”, publications of the works of these writers and research about them, books with Harms, originals of illustrations, collection of magazines “Chizh” and “Hedgehog”. We hope that in the future the collection will become the basis of the Daniil Harms museum, which is still not in St. Petersburg. Today we begin the opening of the virtual exhibition of the most significant exhibits of the future museum, each of which is associated with a fantastic and at the same time typical history of Harms.

Harms' suitcase,

in which Yakov Druskin took the poet's manuscript to evacuation

On August 23, 1941, Daniil Harms was arrested. On this day, the next link in the blockade ring closed around Leningrad: units of the Finnish army approached Vyborg. The regional committee and the city committee issued the decree "On the further strengthening of the revolutionary order in Leningrad and the suburbs." Of the restrained and touching memoirs of Leonid Panteleev, published in May 1965, the legend retelling him about the circumstances of the arrest of Harms was in use: he was taken "a half -applied leg on the barefoot leg." This legend was refuted by the subsequently identified documents, in particular, the memories of the wife of Harms Marina Malich:

“It was Saturday. At ten or eleven in the morning there was a call to the apartment. We shuddered because we knew that it was the GPU, and foresaw in advance that something terrible would happen now. And Danya told me:

- I know that this is behind me ...

<...>

We were in this room of ours like in prison, we could not do anything. I went to open the door. Three small strange types stood on the stairs. They were looking for him. I said, it seems:

- He went for bread.

They said:

- Fine. We will wait for him.

I returned to the room, I say:

- I don't know what to do ...

We looked out the window. There was a car below. And we had no doubt that it was behind him. I had to open the door. They now rudely, terribly rudely broke and grabbed him. And they began to take away. ”

Shortly after the writer’s arrest, September 11, 1941, a bomb hit the house No. 9 (neighboring Harmsovsky house No. 11 on Nadezhdinskaya Street). The explosive wave also damaged Harms's apartment. Marina Malich was forced to move to the “writer’s superstructure” on the Griboedov channel, 9. So the Harms manuscripts turned out to be hopeless. Perhaps because the house was depopulated, they were not burned in the first blockade winter.

At the end of 1941, the only survivor of the “Chinars”, a close friend of Harms, Yakov Druskin, despite dystrophy, reached on foot from Gatchina Street to Nadezhdinskaya, together with Marina Malich gathered the manuscript of Harms and Vvedensky and laid papers in the Charms’s suitcase.

In July 1942, Druskin was evacuated to the village of Cup of the Chelyabinsk Region. He took with him a suitcase with the Archive of Harms, putting the manuscripts presented by friends in him: autographs of Alexander Vvedensky’s works and copyrights of poems by Nikolai Oleinikov.

In the second half of the 1950s, Druskin began to disassemble the Harms archive he had preserved in evacuation ( since the mid- 1960s, Druskin’s friends, philologists Mikhail Meila and Anatoly Alexandrov, also transferred these manuscripts), and then transferred the archives stored from him to a public library. Since then, the unnecessary texts of Harms, Oleinikov, Vvedensky and Lipavsky began to publish and study.

The legendary Harms suitcase, miraculously preserved to this day, can be considered the “point of the Big Bang”, which formed the Universe called “Daniil Harms”. Indeed, during the life of the writer, only two poems “for adults” were published, and we could never know everything else, if not for the selfless act of Yakov Druskin.

The suitcase is small - 40.5 × 26 × 11.5 cm , however, as it turned out, quite spacious. After the death of Druskin, he was at the disposal of L.G. Kovnatskoy, the executive of his sister. Restoration was supposed, so the suitcase was emphasized.

It was possible to determine the manufacturing time of the suitcase with an accuracy of six months: next to the handle there is a barely noticeable embossing “Somdaris Riga” . (Produced in Riga at the SOMDARIS skin-Galanster factory. It was founded in 1940 and was called the A. Rosental factory in the first months, and in the period 11/20/1940–06.1941- “SOMDARIS” . Then it was closed and the production resumed only in 1944. The plant with this name existed throughout the Soviet and significant part post -Soviet time.)

The suitcase entered the collection of the Vita Nova publishing house at the end of 2011. He became the “point of crystallization” of the future meeting: the acquisition of this subject was prompted by the publisher to form the collection of the future museum Daniil Harms.

In 2015, this suitcase and Harms manuscripts from the publishing collection were used on the set of the feature film “Harms” (director - Ivan Bolotnikov, in the title role - Voechek Urbanski).

In preparing the publication, materials from books were used:

● Daniil Harms through the eyes of contemporaries: Memories. Diaries. Letters / Edited by A.L. Dmitrenko and V.N. Sajina. - St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2019. 528 pp.: 400 ill. + XXXII S.: 56 Ill.;

● V. Shubinsky. Daniil Harms. Human life in the wind. - St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2008. 560 p.: 215 ill. + Col. Glass. XLVIII c.;

● as well as the catalog of the exhibition “Cases and things. Daniil Harms and his entourage ”in the Literary and Memorial Museum F.M. Dostoevsky (St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2013).