Andrey Platonov

Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1899-1951) was the son of a railway worker. The eldest of eleven children, he began work at the age of thirteen, first in an office, then in a factory, and finally as an engine driver's assistant. He began publishing poems and articles in 1918, while studying engineering. Throughout much of the 1920s he worked as a land reclamation expert. Between 1927 and 1932 he wrote his most politically controversial works, some of them first published in the Soviet Union only in the late 1980s. Other stories were published but subjected to vicious criticism. Stalin is reputed to have written "scum" in the margin of the story "For Future Use," and to have said to Aleksandr Fadeev (later secretary of the Writers' Union), "Give him a good belting—for future use." During the 1930s Platonov made several public confessions of error, but went on writing stories only marginally more acceptable to the authorities. His son was sent to the Gulag in 1938, aged fifteen; he was released three years later, only to die of the tuberculosis he had contracted there. During the war Platonov worked as a war correspondent and published several volumes of stories; after the war, however, he was again almost unable to publish. He died in 1951, of tuberculosis caught from his son. Happy Moscow, one of his finest short novels, was first published in 1991; a complete text of "Soul" was first published only in 1999; letters, notebook entries, and unfinished stories continue to appear.

The Foundation Pit
A new translation, the first to be based on the authoritative Russian text, of Platonov's most political novel, in which the people struggle to build a workers' paradise, but succeed in creating only the immense hole of its foundation. "A Russian Waiting for Godot crossed with Lewis Carroll and Maxim Gorky."—Irish Times
Soul
Andrey Platonov is one of Russia's finest post-revolution novelists, and this definitive and newly translated collection of his works positions him amongst the greatest of twentieth-century writers. On Robert Chandler's translation, The Observer wrote, "Rarely does literature come this close to being music."

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