About the work
“Elizaveta Bam” (Russian “Елизавета Бам”) is a play by the Russian poet Daniil Kharms. He wrote it within a few days in December 1927; early working titles meant roughly “A Murder Case”. It premiered on 24 January 1928 at the Leningrad House of the Press in the Shuvalov Palace on the Fontanka, as part of the evening “Three Left Hours”, the first public appearance of the artists’ group OBERIU. The cast consisted mostly of amateurs.
Plot
Two men, Pyotr Nikolayevich and Ivan Ivanovich, arrive to arrest Elizaveta Bam because she is said to have committed a murder. She insists on her innocence while the scene keeps transforming: Elizaveta appears now as a grown woman, now as a girl, her parents intervene, and her father kills none other than Pyotr Nikolayevich in a chivalrous duel. In the end the two men lead her away, and the action comes full circle.
Cultural significance
The play is regarded as an early example of the Theatre of the Absurd and is compared by scholars with Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano”, Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and Kafka’s “The Trial”. The premiere met with sharp rejection in the Leningrad press; today the text counts among the key works of the Russian avant-garde.