Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms

How hard is Today I Wrote Nothing to read?

Today I Wrote Nothing scores 72 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 42 out of 100

Kharms deploys strikingly plain, everyday vocabulary in his prose miniatures — characters eat butter, slip on ice, and argue about cucumbers. Cultural and historical density comes not from rare words but from Soviet-era proper names, avant-garde terminology (zaum, OBERIU, chinari), and the scholarly introduction's literary-critical register, which pushes the overall score upward.

Sentence structure: 35 out of 100

The prose pieces are built from short declarative sentences strung together paratactically, deliberately stripping out causal connectives. 'One day Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. Krylov, having heard the news, also died.' Events accumulate without subordination. This is syntactic simplicity weaponized — the flatness of the syntax is the whole point.

Abstraction: 62 out of 100

A persistent tension runs between Kharms's radically concrete surface — a man suffocating in a trunk, an old woman dying in an armchair — and deep philosophical undercurrents about being, nothingness, and language's inability to capture reality. The scholarly introduction is genuinely abstract, treating Kharms through Iampolski, Podoroga, and the OBERIU manifesto's ontological claims.

Information density: 52 out of 100

Individual vignettes are internally sparse, yet each is so compressed that meaning must be constructed from absence rather than presence. The anthology format — short prose pieces, mini-plays, diary fragments, a novella, philosophical sketches — demands sustained lateral inference. The introduction is dense with literary history, referencing Malevich, Khlebnikov, Tufanov, Zabolotsky, and a century of scholarship.

Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100

Narrators report impossible, violent, or nonsensical events in a flat, matter-of-fact tone that refuses to signal whether readers should read them literally or figuratively. A man is thrown out with the trash when deemed 'unsanitary'; the narrator of The Old Woman kicks a corpse, then worries about leaving marks. The very refusal of meaning-making is the operative meaning.

Symbolic density: 72 out of 100

Kharms resists allegory while generating unavoidable symbolic pressure. A clock without hands, the redheaded man who loses attributes until he disappears entirely, a miracle worker who refuses to work miracles — these objects resist one-to-one decoding while demanding interpretation. The introduction explicitly argues against political allegorizing, yet the texts sustain multiple simultaneous readings.

Ironic distance: 85 out of 100

The gap between surface and depth is Kharms's signature operation. False morals conclude fables ('All good people but they don't know how to hold their ground'), cheerfully reported murders resolve into commercial observations ('What big cucumbers they sell in stores nowadays!'), and the title's wry prayer for inspiration frames the entire enterprise. Every statement requires recalibration against its opposite.

Resolution withholding: 92 out of 100

Virtually every piece ends in interruption, digression, or comic non-resolution. 'And that's it, more or less' recurs as a closing formula. 'The Meeting' consists entirely of two strangers crossing paths and nothing else. Even The Old Woman, the longest piece, ends mid-action with the narrator fleeing a corpse he cannot escape. Resolution is not deferred but structurally refused.

Structural complexity: 78 out of 100

The anthology mixes short prose incidents, mini-plays, philosophical fragments, diary entries, and a novella with no transitional apparatus. Within individual pieces, mechanical repetition structures (the carpenter slipping endlessly, Pushkin and Gogol tripping over each other forever) subvert narrative forward motion. The Old Woman enacts a nested dream-within-dream structure that makes waking and dreaming indistinguishable.

How Today I Wrote Nothing is regarded

Today I Wrote Nothing holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Daniil Kharms