Russian author Daniil Kharms was born in December 1905 and starved to death in a Soviet prison hospital in February 1942. An experimental writer and a pioneer of the hybrid text, Kharms wrote in practically every genre--from plays in verse to children's books. Charged with spreading panic and anti-Soviet propaganda during his lifetime, the majority of Kharms's work was only published posthumously, with the first major collection of his writing not appearing in book form until the late 1980s during Gorbachev's glasnost. Today, Kharms is recognized as a major figure in both twentieth-century Russian literature and in the avant-garde.
