The tragic work of a comedic genius. Charms' work nearly fell into the machinery of history: until the late 1980s, the texts of this genius of the comic 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 of the first German collected edition, which, in the translation by Beate Rausch and Alexander Nitzberg, re-discovers Charms not only as a master of the satirical-grotesque and absurd but also as a great word artist and hilariously nonsensical creator, a Russian counterpart to Ringelnatz.