The tragic work of a comedic genius. The collected works of the grand linguistic artist, newly translated and enriched with much material that has not been published in German until now. Charms' work nearly fell into the gears of history: until the late 1980s, the texts of this genius of the comedic and absurd were banned in the Soviet Union. The author himself starved to death in 1942 in Stalinist captivity, after years of political persecution. Only through luck and the efforts of a friend were his short stories, poems, plays, and notes saved from the Stalinist terror regime. Over the last few decades, his estate has been processed. This forms the basis for the first German collected edition, which, in the translation by Beate Rausch and Alexander Nitzberg, presents Charms not only as a master of the satirical, grotesque, and absurd.