Central Alley, Unnamed Road, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 195273
In St. Petersburg, the burial place of Daniil Kharms has been established
It has become known exactly where in St. Petersburg the writer, poet, and playwright Daniil Kharms is buried. His ashes rest at the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery in a mass grave number 9 or 23. It is now unlikely to determine the exact grave, according to the initiator of the investigation, the founder of the Kharms Prize, Alexander Mars.
It is known that 36-year-old Daniil Kharms died in besieged Leningrad on February 2, 1942, in the psychiatric ward of the prison hospital in the "Kresty" (Arsenal Embankment, 7). It was believed that the writer was most likely buried at Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, along with hundreds of thousands of Leningrad residents who perished during the blockade. Now these assumptions have been confirmed. Archival documents from the St. Petersburg Main Directorate of Internal Affairs clearly indicate that in early February, bodies from the "Kresty" prison were transported precisely to Piskaryovskoye Cemetery.
- This is, in particular, mentioned in an archival certificate issued to the relatives of one of the prisoners who died on February 11 and was buried on February 16. This prisoner was held at the same time and at the same address as Kharms. Also, in the "Blockade" Memory Book of the "Returned Names" Center, information can be found about the burial at Piskaryovskoye Cemetery of employees of the "Kresty" prison who lived at the prison address.
Then, in the archives of Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, in copies of burial record books, information was found that during those days bodies were buried in the territory of mass graves 9 and 23.
On the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery website, these graves are easy to find: grave 23 is small, while grave 9 is about one hundred meters long. It seems impossible to determine in which of the two mass graves Kharms is buried. It is not excluded that the necessary information might be found, for example, in documents related to the payment of gravediggers. Kharms’s great-grandniece has joined the study of the circumstances of his burial. There is hope that, as a relative of the poet, she will be able to learn more.
Recently, on the anniversary of Daniil Kharms’s death, activists of the prize installed a symbolic memorial sign near grave 9 at Piskaryovskoye Cemetery — a stele with the Latin inscription "Here rests Kharms." Since additional monuments are not allowed at the memorial cemetery, it stood for only half an hour as a tribute to the poet-absurdist.
