In St. Petersburg, the portrait of Kharms, for which residents fought for 5 years, was painted over

Alexander Dybin

The portrait of the poet appeared here in 2016, the authors of the work are artists Pasha Kas and Pavel Mokich. But immediately the city authorities demanded to remove the graffiti. Residents of the house where Kharms lived before his arrest in 1941 stood up for the drawing. However, in October 2021, the city won a lawsuit and declared the graffiti illegal. But the resident was promised that instead of a drawing, in the evenings a projection with the same portrait would be displayed on the facade. Last weekend, public utilities painted over the portrait, however, they did not guess with the paint. Now there is a huge gray spot on the yellow facade of the building.

It should be noted that the war of the city authorities against drawings on historical buildings has been going on for more than a year. In St. Petersburg, portraits and paintings regularly appear on the walls of houses, but they are soon painted over. So several times the public utilities took down the portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky from the wall.

As Novye Izvestiya previously reported, the name of Daniil Kharms has recently been frequently featured on the St. Petersburg public agenda. So in February, a scandal erupted around the teacher of gymnasium No. 168, Serafima Saprykina, who was fired after the classroom hour, where she read poems by Kharms and Vvedensky to schoolchildren. According to the teacher, the school authorities reprimanded her for introducing children to "enemies of the people", although both poets are included in the school curriculum. The school said that Saprykina was fired not because of the poets, but because she changed the topic of the lesson without permission. Later, the government of St. Petersburg stated that Saprykina had a criminal record and could not work at school at all. The media reported that there really was a criminal record, but for exceeding the limits of defense during an attack. Checks on this subject did not give any results, the story simply came to naught.