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Daniel Charms: A Biography

Daniel Charms researchers have often pointed out that there's no reliable information about his exact date of birth. Some claim that it's because of the war (either because noone had time to keep birth records at that time, or those records were lost); others point out that the calendar was changed so many times back then that it inevitably caused mixups and a lot of confusion. Lately, however, some new evidence has emerged, pointing towards the possibility that Daniel Charms was not even a real person. It is the task of this essay to take a closer look at this evidence and comment on the significance it could have to the study of Daniel Charms.

The new materials were found in the Archive and recently published as a series of magazine articles (see the Appendix for a reproduction of some of the key writings). It is not the task of this essay to give a complete commentary to all of these; we will only briefly comment on but a few of the writings uncovered; those writings, we think, form the crux of the evidence pointing towards Daniel Charms' irreality.

The first of these is a short story, titled "Daniel Charms: A Biography" (see the Appendix for the full text of the story). Handwriting analysis confirms that it was written by Daniel Charms -- or the person generally thought to be Daniel Charms -- sometime towards the end of his life, when his i-sight was apparently already dimming. The story gives an account of how Daniel Charms was born out of an egg. What's interesting about it is, that unlike Charms' earlier "(auto-)biographic" works, this one is mainly written in third person perspective. Only the first paragraph is written in first person:

Last night, I dreamed about being someone else and talking to myself. It was a strange experience. We were talking about me, arguing about some insignificant event from my childhood. At some point, I (the other person, that is) grabbed a book from the table, titled "Daniel Charms: A Biography", opened it, and proceeded to read a passage he had marked with a red pencil. This is what was written there.

(continued on page 23)