Daniil Kharms wrote absurdist stories for children that adults loved, and absurdist stories for adults that frightened the authorities. In 1941 he was arrested as a "German spy" and confined to a prison psychiatric hospital. He died there of starvation in 1942, during the siege of Leningrad.
His real surname was Yuvachyov. The pen name "Kharms" came from the English harm, or from the German Charme — or perhaps it simply sounded right; he loved names, numbers, formulas.
In 1927, together with Vvedensky, he founded OBERIU, the last Russian avant-garde manifesto. "A real object, set into poetry, becomes wider than its practical meaning." The authorities saw a dangerous formalism in this. A first arrest and exile came in 1931; the second arrest, in 1941.
Incidents, his chief book of prose, is a set of thirty short texts in which people fall out of windows, vanish into space, and quarrel about nobody knows what. It is funny and terrible at once. "That's how it goes" was his favorite ending. That is how it goes in a world where logic has stopped working and death comes at random.