The Return
Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler et al Harvill Press, 215pp, £9.99
ISBN 1860465161
The Portable Platonov
Translated and with commentaries by Robert Chandler Glas New Russian Writing, Volume 20, 256pp, £8.99
In 1934, Andrei Platonov wrote to Maxim Gorky, the then chairman of the Soviet Writers' Union, to ask for help in getting his latest short story published. "No one trusts me now," Platonov wrote. "Being branded a class enemy makes it not only psychologically difficult to live, but physically impossible as well." Gorky, who had previously championed Platonov's work, replied: "I have read your story - and it stunned me. You write strongly and vividly but this, in the given instance, only underlines the unreality of the story's content, which borders on black delirium. I think it improbable that your story can be printed anywhere."
The story in question, "Rubbish Wind", is included in The Return, a selection of Platonov's short fiction. Albert Lichtenberg, a man "not yet old", but worn out by "the strain of providing himself with life", sits and watches as a crowd of brown-shirted Nazis erect a bronze statue of Hitler. On an impulse, he stands up and strikes the statue with his stick. The Nazis turn on him and beat him senseless, tearing off his ears and his genitals.
He is thrown on to a rubbish tip. After a while, his wounds heal over, leaving him covered in patches of furry skin and unable to walk upright - he becomes a mutant creature, half man, half animal. He still has the faculty of thought, however, and muses that the Brownshirts really should have torn out his tongue, too.
It is not surprising that Gorky should have wished to distance himself from this story. A parable of dissent such as this was no less applicable to the totalising madness of Stalin's forced collectivisation, then in full swing. A study in despair, wandering, alienation and the frustrated need for human companionship, this was not the sort of tale to glorify the New Man.
But Platonov should never have been seen as a "class enemy" - he is one of the very few Soviet writers to have come from a truly proletarian background. He was born, in 1899, near Voronezh, the eldest son of an engine driver. At the age of 15, he began work as a mechanic; after the revolution, he studied in the electricity department of the Railway Polytechnic. The young Platonov appears to have believed firmly in the new world that was to be constructed by socialism, and much of his work deals in detail with the mechanics of building it. However, he soon fell foul of the new order. He was expelled from the party after a year as an "unstable element"; and though he was never imprisoned, his work later underwent a kind of house arrest, much of it disappearing into the Lubyanka. Stalin himself wrote in the margin of the story "For Future Use": "Bastard! Give him a good belting - 'for future use'."
Despite his brushes with Soviet inquisitors, it would be quite wrong to see Platonov as a straightforward critic of communism in the mould of, say, Bulgakov. Platonov portrayed himself as a loyal critic of the system: his often despairing satire is born of disillusionment, and he was shocked that some of his work should be seen as counter-revolutionary.
The railway, in particular, is a recurring motif throughout these stories, an emblem of the revolution itself. For the peasants, it also symbolises metropolitan sophistication, cultured lives being lived elsewhere, far away from the barren landscape of wide skies and dusty plains from which they still scrape a living.
Platonov is also capable of delicacy of feeling. In "The River Potudan", a soldier returns from the civil war, settles down and marries a local girl. But his remote ideal of love prevents him from consummating the marriage. Tormented by self-doubt as to the nature of true happiness, he wanders away to live as a beggar. Only when his father discovers him by chance does he return to his wife and find a kind of happiness in a "poor but necessary pleasure".
The publishers Glas have admirably helped to rescue the suppressed literature from the KGB archives and bring it to both Russian and English audiences. The Portable Platonov continues this work, with extracts from Platonov's novels Chevengur and The Foundation Pit (both unpublished in Russia until 1989), several short stories and the absurdist play Fourteen Little Red Huts, a hilariously savage satire on collectivisation.
Robert Chandler, in his excellent introduction, shows how Platonov, whose language can appear simple, builds up patterns of words through low-key reiteration in a way that doesn't call attention to itself, but which constructs a mood or milieu with extreme precision. Platonov's ear is finely attuned, too, to bureaucratic neologisms and the absurdities of official sloganeering. Nearly all his work is rooted in a particular place and time, and it is hard to think of another writer who so expertly animated the sadness and unease of the Soviet period. His fiction, at its best, has the timeless quality of parable or folklore.
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