Search

Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square (1915) can be considered the emblem of the Russian avantgarde in its First historical phase; its poetic equivalent is the cubo-futurists’ zaum’. The purity of form in the ‘objectless’ representation appeared then as the premise of a new perception of the world and of its possible reconstruction from zero with infinite potential. The work of Daniil Kharms is fully in line with this utopian tradition but will gradually come to show its limits and dangers. In the thirties his work articulates the threat that nothingness poses to the original purity, when ‘void’ [pustota] rhymes with ‘purity’ [chistota].