His "adult" works were not published during his lifetime with the sole exception of two early poems. His notebooks were saved from destruction in the war by loyal friends and hidden until the 1960s, when his children's writing became widely published and scholars began the job of recovering his manuscripts and publishing them in the west and in
samizdat. His reputation in the 20th century in Russia was largely based on his popular work for children. His other writings (a vast assortment of stories, miniatures, plays, poems, and pseudo-scientific, philosophical investigations) were virtually unknown until the 1970s, and not published officially in Russia until the era of
glasnost. Kharms' stories are typically brief
vignettes often only a few paragraphs long, in which scenes of poverty and deprivation alternate with fantastic, dreamlike occurrences and acerbic comedy. Occasionally they incorporate incongruous appearances by famous authors (e.g.:
Pushkin and
Gogol tripping over each other; Count
Leo Tolstoy showing his chamber pot to the world; Pushkin and his sons falling off their chairs; etc.). His manuscripts were preserved by his sister and, most notably, by his friend Yakov Druskin, a notable music theorist and amateur theologist and philosopher, who dragged a suitcase full of Kharms's and Vvedensky's writings out of Kharms's apartment during the blockade of Leningrad and kept it hidden throughout difficult times. Kharms' adult works were picked up by Russian
samizdat starting around the 1960s, and thereby did have an influence on the growing "unofficial" arts scene. A complete collection of his works was published in
Bremen in four volumes, in 1978–1988. In Russia, Kharms' works were widely published only from the late 1980s. Now, several editions of Kharms's collected works and selected volumes have been published in Russia, and collections are available in English, French, German, Italian and Finnish. In 2004, a selection of his works appeared in Irish. Numerous English translations have appeared of late in American literary journals. In the 1970s, George Gibian at
Cornell University published the first English collection of OBERIU writing, which included stories and a play by Daniil Kharms and one play by Alexander Vvedensky. Gibian's translations appeared in
Annex Press magazine in 1978. In the early 1990s a slim selected volume translated into British English by Neil Cornwell came out in England. New translations of all the members of the OBERIU group (and their closely knit group of friends, the Chinari) appeared in 2006 in the USA (
OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. It contains poetry, drama and prose by Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms,
Nikolai Zabolotsky,
Nikolay Oleynikov, Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin, edited by
Eugene Ostashevsky and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, Thomas Epstein,
Genya Turovskaya, Eugene Ostashevsky and Ilya Bernstein), with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky (not
Susan Sontag, who is listed on some websites as the author of the foreword). His short story cycle
Incidences (1933–1939) was published in English in 1993. An English translation of a collection of his works, by Matvei Yankelevich,
Today I Wrote Nothing was published in 2007. It includes poems, plays, short prose pieces, and his novella ''
(1939). Another collection in the translation of Alex Cigale, Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings,'' appeared in the Northwestern World Classics series in 2017. A selection of Kharms's dramatic works,
A Failed Performance: Short Plays and Scenes, translated by C Dylan Bassett and Emma Winsor Wood, was released by Plays Inverse in 2018. Individual pieces have also been translated by
Roman Turovsky. ==Personal life==