Nule i ništice

Harms's world is absolutely absurd and brutally funny: people disappear in the middle of a sentence, fall out of a window for no reason, old women fly off the roof "one after another as if in a competition", Petrov kills Petrov, and everything happens in a vacuum without cause and effect. Logic is suspended, language falls apart, and the violence is childishly naive and at the same time horrifying.

Stalinist terror peeks between the lines: people disappear from stories just as they disappeared from life. Harms writes as if he were writing for the last time - and indeed he did: he was arrested in 1941 and starved to death in a psychiatric hospital during the siege of Leningrad.

Dubravka Ugrešić, who introduced Harms to the Croatian public back in the 1980s, has here made a masterful selection of over a hundred short prose pieces, "cases", poems, children's texts and theatrical miniatures written between 1926 and 1941.

This collection is a masterpiece of Russian absurdity, on a par with Gogol and Kafka, but more radical, shorter and funnier. Along with Beckett and Ionesco, Harms is one of the fathers of the theatre of the absurd. A must-read for anyone who loves literature that destroys meaning and at the same time creates it out of nothing.