Best known for the mainstream Taras Bulba (romantic epic, 1835-42), The Inspector General ("naturalist" comedy, 1836), and Dead Souls (1842) the Ukrainian Gogol (pronounced "goggle") wrote some excellent early absurdist stories including "The Nose," "The Carriage" (both 1836), and the seminal "Diary of a Madman" (1835). Another well-known story, The Overcoat (1842), considered one of Gogol's best works, also has several distinctively absurdist characteristics, including: the antinomy of outward appearance and inner reality, the related issue of questioning socially established values, and the fantastic ending.

• Project Gutenberg Titles by Nikolai V. Gogol
• Another portrait, a striking full-color portrait (43k jpeg).
• One of Shostakovich's principal operas was The Nose, based on Gogol's classic tale.

Author of the famous but unfinished novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika; and of "Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," "The Hunger Artist" and other stories and parables; also well known is "Letter to his Father."

Kafka is almost an archetype of the modern individual at odds with an impersonal bureaucracy, connived by paternalistic society into feeling guilt and insufficiency before the projected super-ego or conscience or what we feel driven to achieve. For the Surrealist Magus Andr Breton, "Kafka flashes the capital question of all times: Where are we going, to what are we submitted, what is the law?"

A Polish author sadly neglected by publishers and public but whose genius has been recognized by such established authors as John Updike and Isaac Bashevis Singer. He wrote two books of stories, Sklepy cyanomonowe (1934; English translation published in the U.S. as Cinnamon Shops, in Britain as The Street of Crocodiles, 1963) and Sanatorium pod klepsydra (1937; English translation, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, 1978), both of which Schulz illustrated. Although Schulz is credited with the first Polish translation of Kafka's The Trial, he only attached his name to that work to ensure its publication.

Schulz's drawings are characterized by sexual idolatry bordering on sado-masochism. He made his living teaching art at a local school. His Drawings have been issued both separately and with his selected Letters, which include an exchange with Witold Gombrowicz -- whose work Schulz admired and lectured upon.

Lovers of dark literature and art are indebted to Jerzy Ficowski for his strenuous efforts to preserve the creative works of Schulz.

Schulz was murdered by the Nazi SS after talking a walk one night in 1942 and wandering into the "Aryan" section of his native town, Drohobycz. How ironic that Schulz's work embodies a kind of search for what is intrinsically noble, and the Sanskrit root-word "arya" means "noble." Pictured: Bruno Schulz, c. 1933.

• Stories of Bruno Schulz Translated by John Curran Davis. A Schulz site!! With links to numerous Schulz studies.
• Explosions of the sun was a page dedicated to Schulz with a short biography and excerpts from his stories. (Cached.)
• Self-portrait, 1919 (drawing) (31k)
• Self-portrait, 1920s (drawing) (22k)
• In Memory of Bruno Schulz Artwork by Tania Fred
• The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is now available from Walker and Company (1989). The first complete collection in hardback; translated by Celina Wieniewska; includes illustrations by the author, with an afterword by Jerzy Ficowski.
• The Brothers Quay -- Stephen and Timothy Quay made a film called The Street of Crocodiles (1986) based on Schulz's story "Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies." This site, "Shifting Realities: The Brothers Quay -- Between Live Action and Animation," by Suzanne Buchan, examines their films.
• Concerning Translation of Schulz Titles a note from a correspondent (Krystof Roedling).
• E. Baur, Die Prose von Schulz (1975)

A virtually unknown Russian author whose absurdist stories were long preserved only in samizdat or underground, hand-circulated manuscripts. Born Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachev, he invented the name "Kharms" (also "Charms") in high school. He participated in the Leningrad avant garde literary group the Oberiu, which collaborated with Malevich and the Russian Futurists in the 1920s. His writings, which include children's stories, are characterized by coincidences and acausal occurences, sudden disjunctions often of a violent nature, non sequitur endings, and stripped-down narrative that prefigured minimalism. Kharms himself was "disappeared" by the Stalin regime in 1942. His selected works are available in English along with those of Oberiu co-member Alexander Vvedensky in George Gibian's Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1971).

Romanian writer best known for his plays "The Bald Soprano" (1950, which ushered in the Absurd Drama), "The Chairs" (1952), and the landmark "Rhinoceros" (1959), Ionesco himself preferred his short stories. The Colonel's Photograph and Other Stories (NY: Grove, 1969) is one collection. He also wrote a novel, The Hermit, and the autobiographical Fragments of a Journal (1967). The Hermit deals with a man who inherits wealth and withdraws from work and society into a comfortable life ruled by habit, indifferent to the turmoil of the world, which grows until it engulfs him as well.

Ionesco cited Apollinaire's "The Breasts of Tiresias" (1917) as one of his earliest influences, and he also greatly admired Camus.

French novelist, essayist, playwrite. Best known for the novel The Stranger (a.k.a. The Outsider) and the essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" (both 1942). He is often considered a nihilist, or extreme absurdist who believes that life is senseless and useless; however, this may be an unfair characterization, and he is more safely classed as an existentialist. His rejection of revolution, even for independence, and his attacks against Lautramont and Sade resulted in a feud with the surrealists. His unfinished final novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man) was published in 1995. Photo courtesy Robert Daeley.