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. »

Robert Chandler's translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the series "Everyman's Poetry." His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Aleksander Pushkin's Dubrovsky and The Captain's Daughter. Together with his wife, Elizabeth, and other colleagues he has co-translated numerous works by Andrey Platonov. One of these, Soul, was chosen in 2004 as "best translation of the year from a Slavonic language" by the AATSEEL (the American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages); it was also shortlisted for the 2005 Rossica Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld European Translation Prize. Robert Chandler's translation of Hamid Ismailov's The Railway won the AATSEEL prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize. Robert Chandler is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and the author of a biography of Alexander Pushkin. »

John Berger is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including To the Wedding, the Into Their Labours trilogy, About Looking, Ways of Seeing, and G., for which he won the Booker Prize. His most recent book is Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. He lives in a small rural community in France. »

Soul

And Other Stories

By Andrey Platonov
Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson and Eric Naiman
Introduction by Robert Chandler
Afterword by John Berger

The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov's vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called "alternative realism." Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka.

This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are "The Return," about an officer's difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of "three great works of Russian literature of the millennium"; "The River Potudan," a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech.

This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov's short fiction.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Read the afterword (PDF)

Reviews

Platonov is an extraordinary writer, perhaps the most brilliant Russian writer of the 20th century.
— Tatyana Tolstaya, The New York Review of Books

Rarely does literature come this close to music.
— The Observer (UK)

"Soul," like all great works, proceeds out of experience and yearning. . . . The yearning is so intense it glows through the language.
— George Szirtes

Andrey Platonov is increasingly being recognized, in Russia and elsewhere, as one of the greatest writers of the Soviet period.
— The Spectator

The most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union.
— The Independent (London)

Also see:

Life and Fate
By Vasily Grossman
Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Robert Chandler

An epic tale of World War II that interweaves a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia.
White Walls
By Tatyana Tolstaya
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell and Antonina W. Bouis

This first comprehensive collection of stories from a writer whom Edna O'Brien dubbed "an enchantress" shows off Tolstaya's unparalleled ability to reflect the heartbreak and humor of everyday life in contemporary Russia.

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Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $15.95
Price: $12.76 (20% off)


Dec 4, 2007
400 pages
ISBN: 159017254X
9781590172544
NYRB Classics
Literature in Russian

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