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(M.K. Publishers) To the Affirmer of the New Art: Daniil Kharms. On the Death of Kazimir Malevich. [Russian and English.] St. Petersburg. 2007.Artist’s portfolio in box by Mikhail Karasik. 23.25″ x 15.5″. 17 leaves of colored lithographs, author’s offset, collage, watercolors. In a heavy black card box with a lid covered with a black paper lithograph. Signed. Separate lift-off lid to an outer illustrated box which is also signed by Karasik. Black wrappered booklet with red pages giving the English text of the book laid in. No. 15 in an edition of 21 numbered and signed copies. New.

Karasik writes: “The Daniil Kharms poem “On the death of Kazimir Malevich” which was written in May of 1935 and read by the author at the burial of the great poet, the page with the text of the poem being placed in his coffin. Another artist and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, seventy years before that ceremony, placed a pile of unpublished manuscripts of his poems in the grave of his beloved wife following her untimely death. True, several years later the coffin was dug up, the body exhumed, and the poems returned to the author. The Kharms poem dedicated to Malevich remained in the grave, buried under a vast oak on the outskirts of the village of Memchinovka, not far from Moscow. The story of its creation is complex. It’s widely believed that it was originally addressed to a friend of Kharms, Nikolai Oleinikov. Later, under the influence of the great loss of the most steadfast and highly principled artist of the Russian avant-garde, it was dedicated to Malevich. It’s possible that the mythological, planetary nature of the poem was a universal poetic form of dedication which Kharms used for the new Addressee. It can be seen as an epitaph on the grave of the artist which, unfortunately, was quickly lost among the dacha plots surrounding Moscow. It seems that the deep idea underlying the poem to this day hasn’t been fathomed, just as the magnitude of the artist’s personality remains unacknowledged. Every line in it is a message from eternity, words from the past being addressed to the future – a future that only the artist himself could envisage. Malevich died a difficult and horrifying death, with reports of his last days and photographs of the dying artist having been preserved. The idea of creating his own coffin comes to him – a suprematist sarcophagus. He himself directed the ceremony for his burial: according to the artist’s wishes, on May 18, 1935, the funeral procession proceeded down Nevsky Prospect in Leningrad, headed by a truck with “The Black Square” on the bonnet, with the body of Kazimir Malevich himself encased in a white sarcophagus.

“Malevich was the most charismatic and unshakable figure in Russian art of the 20th century, an artist who defined the future of art, founded his own school of art and left many followers. A commentary on Daniil Kharms’s poem is another attempt to decipher every phrase, every word, and to comprehend the deep concept of his lines. There is a clear link between this poem and the text of Malevich’s own On the Stairway of Knowledge (1913). It seems that many words and lines of the two poems build upon one another, forming a dialogue, and in Kharms’s work we can hear the rhythms and forms of Malevich himself. This is one of the keys to the understanding of Kharms’s text, which was written as both a response and a message to the artist. A direct appeal to a man engaged in the discovery of a world, an entire universe, originates in the poetic, universal form of the biblical world. ‘Your thought will now take on contours and leave its stamp on your actions,’ said Malevich. And Kharms answers: ‘You look around, destroying your face with pride.’ But what is now secret will be clearer than the sun,” is the last line of Malevich’s poem. the continuation is Kharmsesque:

“You look like the fading of your saving sun.” The light died out in Malevich’s face, the world was destroyed and that loss was irreplaceable.”

Related items: Artists' Books, Catalogue 37 - Summer 2009, M.K. Publishers