Tulbling Old Women By Renatil Kharms

In both “Blue Notebook #10” and “Tumbling Old Women,” Daniil Kharms exploresthe Soviet Union’s policy sending dissidents to gulags. Beginning in the 1920s, the Soviet Union suppressed freedom of speech: for any person suspected of criticizing the Soviet Union, the secret police would arrest them and send them to gulags, forced labor camps. So he wouldn’t be suspected of speaking out against the Soviet Union, Kharms used Dadaism so people wouldn’t know the direct message behind his poetry. Throughout the two poems, Kharms criticizes the absurdity of the government’s need to erase their citizens from society for speaking out against the government. In “Blue Notebook # 10,” Kharms uses Dadaism to condemn the government’s insanity for erasing

The speaker begins by saying, “Because of her excessive curiosity, one old woman tumbled out of her window” (1). Kharms uses the woman’s “excessive curiosity,” as a metaphor to compare it to the Soviet people who share their negative opinions about the Soviet government. Kharms also uses the window the woman tumbles out of, as a liminal space between the everyday life of someone living in the Soviet Union and one’s life inside the gulags after being sent because of speaking out. Kharms uses this comparison and liminal space to criticize the government for the absurdity of sending anyone to gulags if they say or do anything that the government might see as against the Soviet’s beliefs. The speaker follows by saying, “Another old woman leaned out to look at the one who’d shattered but,” she, “also tumbled from her window” (2). Kharms suggests that those who share opinions, those who just “tumbled from [their] window,” or those who had just been sent to the gulags, are also being sent to gulags. Kharms also blame the government for the insanity they express when they also send those who share any opinions about those just sent to the gulags to gulags themselves. After many women continue to fall out of the window, the speaker then says, “when the sixth old woman tumbled out of her window, I got sick of watching them” (4). Kharms begins to share his own personal experiences, saying how even though he knows what's going on inside the gulags, his use of Dadaism is allowing him to be protected from the NKVD and being sent to the gulags. Kharms also expresses how she is just so “sick,” and tired of watching the government send more and more people to the gulags. Kharms condemns the government for the threat they place on those against the government and also criticizes them for indirectly forcing him