Volume 47, Number 6 · April 13, 2000
Out of This World
By Tatyana Tolstaya
Andrei Platonov is an extraordinary writer, perhaps the most brilliant Russian writer of the twentieth century. Very different from any other writer I know of (in a sense he has no literary predecessors), he is still little known to the Western reader, in part be-cause of the extraordinary difficulty of translating his prose, in part because he is not a 'proper' writer; he is 'different.' Platonov never uses the formal elements of narrative—plot, character, denouement, conclusion—in a conventional way. He continually undermines the reader's expectations in the most bizarre manner. In a Platonov story, the reader encounters a range of sensations for which he has no sensory organ—and this organ may or may not develop in the process of reading.
Feature, 2811 words
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