\'Daniil Kharms\' was the main, and subsequently the sole, pen-name of Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov. The son of a St. Petersburg political, religious and literary figure, Daniil was to achieve limited local renown as a Leningrad avant-garde eccentric and a writer of children\'s stories in the 1920s and 30s. Among other pseudonyms, he had employed \'Daniil Dandan\' and \'Kharms-Shardam\'. The predilection for \'Kharms\' is thought to derive from appreciation of the tension between the English words \'charms\' and \'harms\' (plus the German Charme; indeed, there is an actual German surname \'Harms\'), but may also owe something to a similarity in sound to Sherlock Holmes (pronounced \'Kholms\' in Russian), a figure of fascination to Kharms.
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