Damyan Damyanov

Daniil Kharms had a difficult destiny in both his literature and his life. Avant-garde in his prose, he was one of the first absurdists in Soviet literary history. Since his texts for adults were not published, he began writing stories for children, the most popular of which is from 1928 and tells about the make-believe trip to Brazil by two boys, friends from Moscow. In the dialogues/arguments between them are elements that look to be borrowed from the Russian folklore tradition. The visible and the fantastically distant are constantly mixed, which increases the tension and creates a particularly spiral narrative. Damyan Damyanov has chosen a mixed technique to illustrate this unusual text – drawing in pencil and partial watercolor painting of individual characters and elements. This visual method also raises doubt – is that which is depicted true, or only contingently possible? The Brazilian flora and fauna are studied in detail in pencil, but the images of the friends are in color in their real-life dispute. The pilot who helps with the trip to Brazil flies the two boys a short distance to a nearby field with a magical device – a color airplane over the pencil-sketched landscape. The exaggerations and stylizations of the characters are quite in the nature of the book. The overall feeling is that the illustrator shows a very good analytical insight into the author’s ideas.