Matvei Yankelevich '95 is the editor and translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook, 2007). He gave a talk about his translation at Downey House on March 3, 2008. Daniil Kharms (1905 –1942) has been heralded as one of the most iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era, but the full breadth of his achievement is only in recent years being recognized internationally, following the opening of Kharms' archives. A master of formally inventive poetry and what today would be called “micro-fiction,” Kharms built off the legacy of Russian Futurist writers to create a uniquely deadpan style written out of—and in spite of—the absurdities of life in Stalinist Russia. Daniil Kharms was a founding member of one of the last Russian avant-garde movements of the 1920s—the OBERIU—or the Association for Real Art, a group that has often been called a predecessor to the European Theatre of the Absurd. Yankelevich has also co-translated OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. His translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “A Cloud in Pants” is included in Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky. He is the author of a long poem, The Present Work. He teaches Russian literature at Hunter College in New York City and edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn.