Мakarova M.V.Existential anxiety in works by Daniil Kharms: absurdity as ontological foundation

This article explores the phenomenon of existential anxiety in the works by Daniil Kharms within the context of the philosophy of absurdity as articulated by Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. A comparative analysis of key prose texts by Kharms (“Cases,” “The Old Woman,” “The Old Women Who Fall Out,” etc.), used together with an existential-phenomenological approach, revealed that the absurdity in Kharms’s work is not only a literary device, but also an artistic representation of the ontological anxiety of existence, generated by the collision with the meaninglessness and chaos of the world. The study establishes that Kharms’s works, anticipating the “hyper-absurd” of the 21st century, perform a psychological function for the reader by validating and containing existential anxiety, offering a model of aesthetic rebellion as a means of coping with it. Kharms is interpreted as a “diagnostician” and “therapist” of the human existential condition in an era of lost metanarratives.

Keywords: Daniil Kharms’s works, absurdity, existential anxiety, unpredictability, profound experiences, containment, aesthetic rebellion, literature of the absurd, phenomenology