“I Am a Stream of Bright Joy”

This chapter situates Daniil Kharms's profusion of liquid metaphors within emerging Stalinist culture, demonstrating the unwitting proximity of his self-conception as a writer to contemporary labor discourse. Although Kharms's artistic values diverged sharply from those promulgated by the stewards of official Soviet aesthetics, the philosophy he developed around his creative production is strikingly similar to Soviet labor ideology. Hardly a reactionary romantic in the vein of Gorky, Kharms nonetheless inscribed himself within a discourse that preferred magical thinking to reason; imagined human energies, especially those available for work, as fluid; and believed in the transformative theurgy of the Word. At the same time, Kharms managed to write in a way that was actively, indeed dangerously, hostile to Soviet literary orthodoxy—demonstrating that, at its margins, the culture of early Stalinism was constantly threatening to flee the Party's centripetal pull. Consigned to the periphery of official Soviet literary life, Kharms nonetheless shared the sexual-hygienic preoccupations of 1930s labor culture.