Kharitonov, Evgeny Vladimirovich

Graduated from VGIK , acting department. For a short time he worked as an actor, then he entered the graduate school of the cinema department. He defended his thesis in pantomime . He put his play “The Enchanted Island” at the Moscow Theater of Facial Expressions and Gesture . He directed the pantomime studio at the Moskvorechye culture house. Director of performances of the group " Last Chance ". He was invited by Bari Alibasov to stage the next program of the Integral group. He died of a heart attack on Pushkinskaya (now Bolshaya Dmitrovka ) street the day after the completion of his last work - the play "Dzyn" (published in 1988 ). He was buried in Novosibirsk. Laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize ( 1981 , posthumous).

Kharitonov's lifetime literary publications are minimal (several translations from modern German poetry, including Ingeborg Bachmann ). The first posthumous publication, prepared by the author himself, was a selection of texts in the Catalog almanac ( Ardis , 1982), followed by publication in the only literary issue of the Paris émigré art journal, AZ (1985). Some of Kharitonov’s texts were distributed in samizdat , including in the Samizdat magazines Hours , Obvodny Channel , 37 , Mitin Journal . In modern times, Kharitonov’s collected works have been published twice, based on a body of texts compiled by himself shortly before his death.

Kharitonov’s work is at the intersection of several significant lines in Russian prose of the 20th century. A certain cryptographic character of the letter, encryption of the emotional and event series in a kind of labels of feelings and events brings Kharitonov's prose closer to Pavel Ulitin's prose (and further to the Proust and Joyce traditions in world literature); Kharitonov’s relationship with Ulitin is also related to the expressive properties of specifically typewritten graphics of the text (especially in the novel “Roman”). The thematization of the distance between the author and the lyrical subject, important in some texts by Kharitonov, largely anticipated the further work of conceptual writers ( Viktor Yerofeyev , Vladimir Sorokin ).

Kharitonov received the greatest fame as one of the founders of Russian gay literature, who convincingly described the psychological type formed by the situation of legal and cultural prohibition on the manifestation of his feelings, because of which “the desire to get at least a little love and warmth, as well as warm another, accepts the form of a complex plan, combination, exhausting calculation ” ^[1] . According to the literary critic A. Zhitenev ,

The dramatic basis of Kharitonov's prose is in the shifting border of worlds separated by insight ‐ recognition. On one side - mimicry, conspiracy (“leaned on in a youthful way, without intent”), on the other - fainting, dizziness (“we disagree as I don’t remember, there was a place”) ^[2] .

• Pantomime in teaching a film actor: The dissertation ... of a candidate of art history. - M., 1972.
• Tears in Flowers: Works in 2 books / Preface, compilation, preparation of texts and comments by Y. Mogutin . - M.: Journal "Verb" , 1993.
• Unter Hausarrest: Ein Kopfkissenbuch. - Berlin: Rowohlt , 1999. (Compilation, preparation of texts and translation by G. Leopold.)
• Under House Arrest. - London: Serpent's Tail , 1998. (Compiled and translated by A. Tate.)
• Under house arrest: Collected Works / Foreword by K. Rogov ; compilation, preparation of texts and comments by G. Morev . - M.: Publishing House "Verb" , 2005.

• Evgeny Kharitonov on the site "Unofficial Poetry" .
• Page about Evgeny Kharitonov on the Az.Gay.Ru project : Criticism, fragments of texts, books.
• Page about Yevgeny Kharitonov in Mitya Magazine : Texts, articles, memoirs.
• Website "Litefest" (inaccessible link) : Text by Evgeny Kharitonov "Tears on the Flowers."
• Stories of Evgeny Kharitonov (inaccessible link) .