http://www.newleftreview.org/ ...In May 1933, Platonov wrote to Gorky urgently asking him if he thought it was ‘objectively impossible’ for him to be a Soviet writer. The letter went unanswered, but the rest of Platonov’s career seems to have been an attempt to respond to it for himself—or at least to keep re-stating the question. Seifrid has argued persuasively that the combinations of peasant speech and Soviet slogans, utopian speculation and industrial terminology, of harsh socio-historical fact and deep-seated existential yearning, make Platonov’s ‘the most quintessentially Soviet prose of the century’. It is thus all the more ironic that the audience best equipped to appreciate it was able to read it only as the ussr entered terminal decline. His status, however, is now fully assured, paralleled in 20th-century Russian letters only by Nabokov—in many senses his polar opposite, both in terms of social origins and political views: the noble-born Nabokov harshly opposed the Soviet regime from the Right, while Platonov directed his best efforts to serving it from an independent position on the Left. Moreover, Nabokov’s linguistic virtuosity was uprooted from his native context, his talent translatable into other tongues and traditions, while much of Platonov will surely be lost to anyone reading him in abstraction from the historical circumstances interwoven with his work.... New Left Review 33, May-June 2005 Tony Wood on Andrey Platonov, Happy Moscow and Soul. Recently discovered works by the neglected giant of twentieth-century Russian letters. The singular language and multiple ambiguities of Platonov’s style, and heroic impasses of his life and times. TONY WOOD ANNALS OF UTOPIA Perhaps the most striking literary consequence of perestroika, standing out even amid the late 1980s’ flood of new publications and overturning of established truths, was the rediscovery of Andrei Platonov. Born in 1899—the same year as Nabokov—Platonov had previously been known only as the author of a handful of stories and tales who had, in the early 1930s, attracted the ire of Soviet officialdom, and remained in literary limbo until his death in 1951. But with the appearance, in 1987 and 88, of two major works, Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit) and Chevengur, he rapidly came to be seen as one of Russia’s greatest 20th-century writers. Composed at the turn of the 1930s, neither work had been published in the increasingly hostile literary climate of Stalin’s ussr. Though both came out in the West in the early 1970s—English translations soon followed—it was their reception in Russia that lifted Platonov from minor figure to the status of modernist master. They combine a deep-seated yearning for utopia with troubled awareness of the distance, difficulties and violence that separate it from the present, encapsulating the contradictions of the Soviet experience like few other texts. While Russians’ new-found access to Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and others undoubtedly broadened their cultural horizons, Platonov’s work required a full recalibration of the literary tradition—a process which continued as more texts emerged from the family archive. Most notable among these have been Schastlivaia Moskva (Happy Moscow), his unfinished novel of the mid-1930s, which first came out in Russian in 1991, and Dzhan—written in 1935, published in various, incomplete forms in the Soviet Union since 1938, and now translated in full as Soul. Both have been elegantly rendered into English by a team led by Robert Chandler, adding to similarly scrupulous work on The Foundation Pit and a selection of stories, gathered under the title The Return in 1999; their version of Chevengur, now under way, will undoubtedly be superior to that published in the us in 1978, and will be eagerly awaited by Anglophone audiences everywhere. It is difficult to imagine translations more attuned to the cadences of the original prose, or more sensitive to the texture of the author’s times. For Platonov presents more formidable obstacles to the translator than any other Russian writer. Native Russian speakers’ first reaction is generally one of bafflement at the seeming awkwardness of the prose: it is replete with redundancies, ill-suited collocations and syntax-muddling elisions; metaphors are literalized, the abstract and concrete are confused or interwoven. The overall effect approaches that of dream-logic or perhaps even aphasia. But this is not an idiom of damage so much as of raw construction: language itself, Platonov implicitly tells us, is the primary material out of which utopias are built, its ungainliness marking our passage into a transformed sphere of human relations—or else highlighting the points where we are still anchored in its unreconstructed double. At a syntactic level, Platonov’s prose disrupts the flow of our expectations and assumptions. His words are chosen with immense care, and usually conceal some proposition or pun that forces the reader to return to the sentence and re-read it, without correcting or normalizing its oddities. A relatively simple example: in The Foundation Pit, the proletarian Chiklin punches a peasant in the face to get him to start living consciously. The peasant staggered, but was careful not to lean over too far in case Chiklin thought he had kulak inclinations himself, and so he moved even closer to him, hoping to pick up some more serious injuries and so win entitlement to a poor peasant’s right to life. The second distinctive feature of Platonov’s language—which to a certain extent explains its strangeness—is his deployment, deformation and re-combination of the wide variety of discourses, from official slogans to peasant proverbs, that collided during the lexical upheavals of the post-Revolutionary period, as illiterate masses came into contact with new political jargon and Bolshevik bureaucratese. It is this polyphonic, disjointed idiom that separates him from the rest of the Russian literary tradition, and from his contemporaries. Platonov’s prose has none of the terse urgency of Babel, the verbal somersaults of Belyi, or the relentless, punning intelligence of Nabokov. If he can be identified with any particular literary strand, it is the satirical-grotesque of Gogol and Leskov, with whom he shares not only largely rural characters and settings but also the use of skaz—a third-person narrative voice into which the sub-standard locutions and verbal tics of the protagonists often tumble, skewing the perspective from which the reader views the action. But Platonov takes this strategy still further, to the point where so many varieties of speech are present that there is no longer a main thread, and the narrator stands at an unidentifiable distance from events. (A point well made by Thomas Seifrid in his excellent 1992 monograph on the writer.) In The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson spoke of the ‘glaciality of Platonov’s tone’, a ‘dissociation of sensibility so absolute that it sometimes evades our attention altogether like a pane of glass’. Yet at other times, the prose is suffused with tenderness, its occasionally beautiful sentences translating the discomfort and melancholy of the characters into aesthetic satisfaction, at least, for those on the other side of the page. Indeed, ambiguity is arguably Platonov’s defining trait—the parallaxes of narrative voice, the tensions between parody and sympathy, the unresolvable play of ironies, all combining to blur his authorial position even as they reveal his astounding talent. As a result, interpretations of his work have ranged across the theoretical and political spectrum. Joseph Brodsky praised him for showing us ‘the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language’, seeing Platonov as attacking ‘the very carrier of millenarian sensibility in Russian society’. Anti-communists have cast Platonov as a lone voice laying bare the totalitarian assault on reason, and the brutal follies of utopianism per se—downplaying Platonov’s fundamentally positive attitude to Soviet power. Others have viewed him as the ultimate realist, portraying the ghastly absurdity of everyday life, or else as a dreamy humanist; still others have focused on the intertextual dimensions of his work, and debts to a range of Russian thinkers. There was until recently, however, a broad critical consensus that Platonov’s output declined in quality after Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, and that his attempts during the 1930s to arrive at a style that censors would not object to resulted in a dimming of his creative energies. Silenced by the Stalinist literary bureaucracy, so the argument runs, Platonov adapted his singular mode of expression to produce acceptable, if still eccentric, variations on standard Socialist Realist themes. Soul is taken as exemplary in this regard, relating as it does the story of a half-Turkmen, half-Russian Communist sent from Moscow to lead his nomadic people into the socialist future. But its melancholic, emaciated characters and political and historical ambiguities constantly act to subvert its supposed genre allegiances. Similarly, Happy Moscow’s formally prototypical protagonists—parachutist, engineer, doctor—are beset by existential troubles and emotional torment, tainting the flurry of socialist construction around them with shapeless fear and anomie. While Soul is a subtle exercise in Platonovian subversion, Happy Moscow is a full-blown masterpiece, worthy not only of consideration alongside its author’s better-known works, but of comparison with modernist fiction’s greatest achievements. The translation of these two works into English requires us to re-examine Platonov’s trajectory, the better to appreciate their place in his oeuvre, and to arrive at a truer measure of their author’s stature. Platonov was born in the Black Earth province of Voronezh, as Andrei Platonovich Klimentov; he seems to have assumed the name Platonov around 1918, at the start of his writing career. He grew up in a settlement outside Voronezh, between railway lines and open steppe—precisely the border terrain between the ruminative rhythms and vast spaces of peasant life on the one hand, and the tokens of technological progress on the other, that recurs throughout his work. His father was a metal-worker for the railway, and a locally renowned autodidact and inventor. The oldest of eleven children, Platonov started work in his early teens, mostly in local industry. Too young to fight in the First World War, he had by 1918 enrolled in the Voronezh Railway Polytechnic, and that autumn began to write for the local Bolshevik press on a wide variety of themes—philosophy, technology, politics, poetry. By 1922 he had published over 200 articles, a pamphlet on electrification and a book of poems. Platonov’s enthusiasm for industrial modernity comes across in lines such as ‘We will kill the universe with machines’; ‘In our furnaces beats the captive sun’; or ‘We are building steel bridges into the unknown’. It is difficult to get a precise sense of Platonov’s intellectual formation—he never kept a detailed diary. Boyhood acquaintances refer to earnest discussions of Kant, while his early journalistic output was clearly influenced by both the science fiction and philosophical ideas of Aleksandr Bogdanov, the unorthodox Marxist theorist of Proletkul’t, an organization in whose Voronezh structures Platonov was very active around 1920. Platonov undoubtedly read widely, and his works allude to a fairly broad range of writers; non-Russians include Freud, Spengler, Swift, Carlyle, Montaigne. The thinkers featuring most prominently in his mature works, meanwhile, were Vasily Rozanov, whose aphoristic philosophy focused on corporeality, and above all Nikolai Fedorov, a librarian whose posthumously published Philosophy of the Common Task (1906) argued that the chief source of discord in the world was the endless succession of generations, and that mankind should divert its full technological resources to the bodily resurrection of the dead. The bizarre, eschatological dimension of Fedorov’s ideas was quite in tune with the spirit abroad in pre-Revolutionary Russia—apocalyptic pseudo-mysticism was rife. His project contains, moreover, elements of the critique of capitalist industrial modernity common to much of the Russian intellectual tradition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To be sure, Platonov did not adopt Fedorov’s views wholesale; but he shares with him a tendency to conflate the physical and metaphysical, and in his works repeatedly raises the Fedorovian theme of death not simply as ineluctable, memory-destroying force, but as a physiological fact to be confronted and potentially transcended. One is reminded here of the child who dies at the conclusion of Chevengur—whereupon one of the protagonists furiously decides that communism cannot have been established after all. In the summer of 1919 Platonov was mobilized as a rifleman in the Red Army, and fought against the Whites in his home town; it has been suggested that, as a member of a Special Detachment, he may have participated in forced grain requisitioning. The Civil War was, at any rate, clearly a formative experience, and one that Platonov was to evoke several times throughout his career, in a variety of registers: from bleakly dispassionate description of the slaughter of the bourgeoisie in Chevengur, to tender evocation of a veteran’s awkward homecoming in ‘Reka Potudan’’ (The River Potudan, 1937). He was briefly a member of the Communist Party, from spring 1920 to autumn 1921; local Party documents state he was expelled as an ‘unstable element’ who had refused to attend meetings, while Platonov himself privately told friends he had been disillusioned by the adoption of nep. He seems to have been more committed to the transformative possibilities of the Revolution than to any Marxist or other theoretical tradition; a certain anarchistic idealism comes across in his works, but his politics as of the mid-1920s—his request to rejoin the party in 1924 was turned down—are above all those of an independent-minded, critical sympathizer with Soviet rule. It was Platonov’s desire to make a concrete, practical contribution to the new order that led him to quit journalism in 1922, in order to carry out land reclamation for the local Soviet authorities. Though he continued to write—his eclectic output now included science fiction stories, anticlerical tales and earthy sketches of peasant life—Platonov was until 1926 largely occupied with land improvement and hydrological work, and especially with reversing the consequences of the harsh drought of 1921. He oversaw the digging of hundreds of wells and ponds, drained thousands of acres of marshland, rehabilitated dried-up rivers and streams choked with silt. It is in this capacity that he makes a cameo appearance in Viktor Shklovsky’s Tret’ia fabrika (Third Factory, 1926). Shklovsky travelled around the Voronezh region with Platonov in a jeep in 1925, and reported discussions ‘about literature, about Rozanov, about how one should not describe sunsets and should not write stories.’ Pictures from the time show a fair-haired man with a high forehead, slightly drooping nose and kindly but sombre eyes. Judging by the accounts of acquaintances and friends—there is as yet no full, standard biography, in Russian or any other language—Platonov seems to have been a modest, private person, capable of laconic humour, but also given to intense seriousness. In 1926, Platonov went to work for the central land agency in Moscow and was promptly posted to Tambov—centre of a rural uprising against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. Immensely isolated, Platonov was also extremely productive during this period, starting work on Chevengur and writing several stories which would be published in the collection Epifanskie shliuzy (The Epifan Locks) in 1927. The collection was praised by Gorky, and by this time Platonov had decided to become a professional writer and move to Moscow; he now began to be published in the major Muscovite literary journals—Novyi mir, Krasnaia nov’, Molodaia gvardiia. Portions of Chevengur appeared in their pages in 1928, and a book containing its first section, entitled Proiskhozhdenie mastera (The Origins of a Master) came out the following year. Indeed, the novel was due to be published in full in 1929—it had even been typeset—but printing was suspended. Part of the reason for this was probably the mounting campaign by rapp, the Revolutionary Association of Proletarian Writers, against Boris Pilniak, with whom Platonov had collaborated on a play and some satirical sketches in 1928. Pilniak was dubbed a class enemy, and Platonov accused of falling too much under his influence, though the stylistic evidence for this is slight. But the major cause of Chevengur’s interdiction was surely the novel itself: an ambiguous, semi-satirical, semi-sympathetic portrayal of a peasant utopia in the southern steppes. As elsewhere in Platonov’s oeuvre, the setting is an endlessly flat landscape strewn with low huts and overgrown with burdocks; the topography, indeed, acts almost as an abstract, mathematical surface on which events unfold all but at random—characters arrive and depart with little causal explanation, like conjectural points on a plane. The loose, episodic plot follows the trail of Dvanov, a typical Platonovian innocent, and his Quixotic friend Kopenkin, who has devoted himself to the bodily resurrection of Rosa Luxemburg and rides a horse named Proletarian Strength. They arrive at Chevengur, where communism has been declared; all productive labour has ceased and the sun has been appointed ‘worldwide proletarian’ to toil on behalf of the populace. The inhabitants of utopia—having brutally disposed of the bourgeoisie by arranging a ‘Second Coming’ for them—now devote themselves to useless endeavour: moving houses around, making objects with no function, raising handmade monuments to each other. A huddled mass of outcasts—foreshadowing the wandering, emaciated people of Soul—is brought in to populate the town, a first batch of men soon followed by skeletal women who are to act as wives or mothers to the revolutionary simpletons. Some collective work eventually resumes. But the novel ends abruptly with the slaughter of the entire town by a detachment of dehumanized cavalry. It is unclear whether these are bandits, White remnants or Soviet government troops—and thus ultimately unknown whether Platonov intended such an outcome to be inevitable crackdown, chance raid, deserved downfall or tragic oblivion; or some unresolvable combination of all the above. Nightmare and ideal are inseparable in Chevengur, the deadpan violence and senseless actions of the protagonists eerily attesting to the sheer scale of upheaval required to found a new life-world. Indeed, the book’s fundamental premise seems to be that utopia would require a shift in the order of reality, and an accompanying suspension of routine, rational criteria. The protagonists’ constant muddling of tangible things with intangible ideas—communism is expected to have physical properties, such as warmth or a sharp taste—suggests they inhabit, or wish to, a world organized according to alternative reasoning and physical laws. Concerning the Chevengurians’ simple-mindedness, Jameson has pointed out, following Adorno, that utopia would remove the need for a survival instinct—at which point, ‘no longer fettered by the constraints of a now oppressive sociality’, its inhabitants would be free to ‘blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives, paranoids and schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a world of true freedom, may make up the flora and fauna of “human nature” itself.’ In Platonov’s own time, however—as Gorky argued in a letter of 1929 commenting on the manuscript of Chevengur—it simply would not do to have revolutionaries appear as ‘cranks’ and ‘half-wits’. Gorky also pointed out that, despite Platonov’s talent, the ‘lyrico-satirical’ tone of the book would be unacceptable to the censors. Nevertheless, Platonov did manage to publish several stories in the late 1920s and early 1930s that display his distinctive style—not yet fully formed in Epifanskie shliuzy—and whose satirical bent would create a storm of protest. The 1929 story ‘Usomnivshiisia Makar’ (Doubting Makar) contained numerous barbs against the bureaucratization of Soviet life, and the distance between powerful, technophile elite and unlettered masses, as the statistic-worship of the Five Year Plan gathered pace. Platonov was immediately accused by the rapp faithful of being a ‘petty bourgeois element’, of implicit support for fascism, of ‘nihilistic indiscipline’. Worst of all, according to the rapp critic Lev Averbakh, was his ambiguity, since ‘our time will not stand for ambiguity’. The shrillness of the criticism aimed at Platonov from this time onwards is all the more striking for the fact that, apart from Gorky, he was Russia’s only proletarian writer of any distinction. The pivotal event in Platonov’s career came in 1931. He had been sent out to the Voronezh region in the autumn of 1929 under the auspices of the Commissariat of Agriculture and the newspaper Sotsialisticheskoe zemledelie (Socialist Agriculture), to observe the progress of collectivization. Two texts resulted from the trip. The Foundation Pit, Platonov’s best-known work, is now thought to have been written in 1933, though he began making notes towards it in the summer of 1930. It focuses on a group of labourers digging the foundations of a building which is to serve as the home of the proletariat. Again the theme of utopian aspiration, and its curtailment, comes to the fore: the characters ache to live in the bright future they are building from the crudest materials, but they are held in the present by the leaden weight of circumstances. The novel is also an implicit reply to path-breaking novels of ‘socialist construction’ such as Fedor Gladkov’s Tsement (Cement, 1925), re-deploying and distorting blandly optimistic tropes into melancholic metaphors: the pit grows ever larger, and eventually comes to serve as a grave for Nastia, a wise, innocent and viciously pragmatic little girl. Perhaps the most striking passages, however, relate to collectivization: the kulaks and middle peasants are set adrift on a raft, a class-conscious bear beats his enemies into submission, horses spontaneously collectivize themselves. Here and elsewhere, metaphors are literalized and rendered absurd—‘liquidation’, ‘a bear of a man’—and yet we always remain aware that their fabular surface has a silent obverse of literal, merciless fact. That Platonov was never able to publish The Foundation Pit in his lifetime seems unsurprising to the present-day reader, given its barely concealed criticism of collectivization. But it was the 1931 publication of ‘Vprok’ (For Future Use), the other product of the journey to Voronezh—still unavailable in English—that was to cause irreparable damage to Platonov’s reputation. The story is an unstable mix of reportage on the activities of collective farms and workshops, and absurd set-pieces of peasant comedy, featuring ‘half-wits’ who are seemingly cousins of those in Chevengur. One village, for instance, has set up an electrical sun to shine constant light on it; another has devised a machine bristling with artificial arms and hands which replicate the sound of tumultuous applause—a pointed joke at the expense of the choreography of Party Congresses surely not lost on its readers. Most damning for Platonov, however, was the thinly disguised first-person narrator, an unusually direct piece of authorial positioning that is rendered all the more provocative by the story’s uncertain genre status. In the midst of semi-grotesque episodes, for instance, there is a long excursus on land reclamation which is totally redundant to the narrative, but doubtless of practical use as non-fiction. Its hybridity and satire aside, ‘Vprok’ also depicted collectivization as an incoherent, shambolic process, largely irrelevant to the needs of rural people, who were perfectly capable of organizing themselves as they saw fit. The story was characterized as ‘slander’ by rapp, and its author labelled an ‘anarchizing philistine’ and ‘literary henchman of the kulaks’. Stalin is reported to have written in the margins of his copy of Krasnaia nov’, where the story was published, the words ‘bastard’ and ‘scum’. Aleksandr Fadeev, the editor of the journal, was apparently summoned to the Kremlin and instructed to unmask Platonov as a class enemy. Fadeev wrote a stinging denunciation of material he had himself signed into print, attacking Platonov’s language: ‘He scatters about him little jokes and funny sayings, and engages in deliberate and importunate linguistic contortions’. Though rapp was dissolved in 1932 and Platonov admitted to the Writers’ Union formed that year, he was unable to publish anything until 1934, and thereafter was repeatedly attacked by the Stalinist literary establishment—most notably after another collection of stories, Reka Potudan’ (The River Potudan) appeared in 1937. Among his defenders in the late 1930s was Georg Lukács, the most prominent contributor to the journal Literaturnyi kritik, in whose pages two Platonov short stories appeared in 1936—unprecedented for a publication otherwise devoted exclusively to critical articles. Platonov also wrote several essays for Literaturnyi kritik, both under his own name and a pseudonym, ‘F. Chelovekov’—from chelovek meaning ‘man’ or ‘human’—on writers ranging from Hemingway to Mayakovsky and Akhmatova. The journal was, however, shut down in 1940 after denunciations from the literary apparatchiks, and publication of Razmyshleniia chitatelia (Thoughts of a Reader), a collection of Platonov’s criticism, was suspended; though the book did eventually come out, in 1980. Platonov’s literary fortunes revived somewhat during the war. At the instigation of Vasily Grossman, in 1942 he was taken on as a front-line correspondent for Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star), the Soviet Army journal, and travelled with the infantry on foot through Kursk, Kiev and Mogilev, among other battle-scarred places. Four volumes of his war stories came out between 1942 and 1944. His personal life, however, was marked by tragedy: his son Platon had been arrested in 1938, aged sixteen, for allegedly belonging to an ‘anti-Soviet youth terrorist and spy-saboteur organization’. Though Platonov managed to secure his release in 1941 through the offices of Mikhail Sholokhov—an unlikely friend and defender of Platonov—the boy had contracted tuberculosis in prison, and died in 1943. While he and his wife were tending their son, Platonov fell victim to the same illness; but he held out until 1951, managing to write several more stories, plays and film scripts. A casualty of the Zhdanovite hysteria that took hold in 1946, he published little in the postwar period, though in the late 1940s Sholokhov did manage to get him a contract for re-renderings of Russian and Bashkir folktales for children—an inspired move, since Platonov was ideally suited to set their magical transformations and subtle moral lessons in a simple yet expressive idiom. These are perhaps Platonov’s least-celebrated works—and, ironically, have been read by generations of Soviet children and adults unaware of their author’s identity. Platonov’s rehabilitation began with the publication of a selection of stories in 1958; more volumes trickled out during the 1960s and 70s, before the publication of The Foundation Pit and Chevengur in Russia in the 1980s revealed, as in a lightning flash, the dimensions of the talent that had previously been obscured. Much excellent scholarship has been done since then, establishing definitive dates and textual variants. Nonetheless, a scholarly edition of Platonov’s complete works is not yet available: Parts One and Two of the first of five projected volumes came out only in 2004. This is to some extent the result of caution in releasing materials on the part of his daughter, Maria; but the delay is also a consequence of the thorough revision of critical understandings of his work occasioned by manuscripts discovered in the 1990s. Happy Moscow and Soul both originate in the period of ‘enforced silence’ Platonov underwent from 1931–34. The latter was the product of a trip to Central Asia made in early 1934 as part of a brigade of writers sent to celebrate ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan, and in a sense marks Platonov’s escape from literary oblivion. Gorky recommended he be included in the brigade, and Platonov leapt at the chance to be published again—indeed, it is a striking feature of his career that he never wrote ‘for the desk drawer’, as did, say, Bulgakov. Central Asian projects—Platonov made a second journey there in 1935—interrupted work on Happy Moscow, which he began in 1932, contracted with a publisher to deliver in 1934, and reported as being near completion in 1936. The two works complement each other: one set in a sparsely inhabited, inhospitable desert, the other in a vast, rapidly growing metropolis; one has a langorous, single narrative, while the other is fragmentary and incomplete—indeed, perhaps constitutively unfinishable. Soul also strikes a relatively optimistic note, while Happy Moscow describes the physical and mental shattering of its protagonists by their social and historical milieu. Soul relates the journey of Nazar Chagataev from Moscow back to his homeland in the far north-east of Turkmenistan. He is of the dzhan people—a multi-ethnic tribe of outcasts, orphans, criminals and others, defined not so much by a common identity as by shared lack; they are called dzhan, the Persian word for ‘soul’, because ‘they had nothing they could call their own but their souls, that is, the ability to feel and suffer’. Chagataev’s task is to re-gather the dzhan nation and build socialism between the Kara Kum desert and the Ust-Yurt mountains. He wanders the desert and undergoes various tribulations, including a duel with enormous birds that is laden with Promethean echoes; though the text often alludes to Persian myth, too. Yet he is continually frustrated by the dzhan’s unwillingess to embrace life, as opposed to bare subsistence. The novel concludes with the dzhan achieving prosperity, but independently of Chagataev’s efforts to determine their fate—perhaps a sly critique of Stalinist nationalities policy, and of the father-figure frequently invoked in the text. (These references were, naturally, removed in all versions of the tale published in the ussr; a full Russian version was published only in 1999.) For all that Soul marks Platonov’s attempt to conform to the aesthetic dictates of Socialist Realism, the story is full of accents consistent with his earlier writings: the dzhan reprise the huddled masses of skin and bone from Chevengur, Nastia from The Foundation Pit recurs as the little girl Aidym, and Chagataev is pierced by the signature Platonovian melancholy—or better, toská, a richly evocative Russian word which Nabokov described as covering a range of feeling from ‘great spiritual anguish’ to ennui, via ‘a dull ache of the soul’, ‘sick pining’, ‘vague restlessness’ and yearning. Another prominent feature of Soul, which it shares with Happy Moscow, is its sensuous physicality. Unlike the Chevengurians, who were gripped by a revolutionary puritanism, the dzhan often try to ‘win children from the poverty of their bodies’; the desert insects, too, hurry to multiply. Indeed, the arid landscape of Soul is not the blank slate of Soviet pseudo-colonialist visions, but a space teeming with life and full of historical traces—ruined cities, oases, even the skeleton of a Red Army soldier from the Civil War, his bones bleached a timeless white by desert winds. The action of Happy Moscow is divided among several protagonists, all of whom are troubled variations on standard Socialist Realist heroes. The book takes its title from its eponymous heroine, Moscow Chestnova—the surname derives from the word ‘honest’—a healthy, ruddy complexioned young woman who, over the course of the novel, flits from man to man, unable to find satisfaction in love or life. She is eventually maimed while working on construction of the capital’s Metro—a staggeringly frequent occurrence, even according to official records—and ends the novel with a wooden leg and some unspecified mental disorder. Moscow’s name obviously signals her as a synecdoche for the city itself, whose ‘solemn energy’ is evoked with the constant sounds of building work and the spark of electric tram wires; a city ‘growing every minute into the time of the future; excited by work, renouncing itself, it was struggling forward with a face that was young and unrecognizable.’ The rest of the protagonists are the succession of men she loves, in transient fashion. There is Bozhko, an employee of the Institute for Weights and Measures—where Platonov himself worked for a time in 1929—who sits at his desk late into the night writing letters in Esperanto to comrades across the world, but is unable to find happiness with the people around him. There is Komyagin, a shiftless army reservist incapable of completing any purposeful activity, and Sambikin, a doctor who becomes obsessed by the enigma of death, believing that the bodies of the dead contain an unknown substance ‘endowed with the pungent energy of life’. And there is Sartorius—surely a nod to Carlyle—an engineer who struggles to find his place in the new collective life, much like his predecessor Prushevsky in The Foundation Pit. All of the characters are beset simultaneously by aspirations to self-improvement, or even transcendence of the human condition, and by an amorphous, paralysing fear. Sambikin, for instance, believes that man is ‘a poorly constructed, homespun creature—no more than a vague embryo, or blueprint, of something more authentic’; the rest of the novel’s protagonists, too, seem to feel they are on the verge of some fundamental, almost genetic improvement. But the promise held out here could also be a death sentence: what if there is an intermediate step, some sort of triage, before the long-awaited future? After her accident, Moscow Chestnova begins ‘to feel ashamed of living among her former friends, in their shared, orderly city, now that she was lame, thin and mentally not right in the head.’ The leap into a better existence is over an abyss: Sambikin follows ‘day and night . . . the world-wide current of events, and his mind lived in a terror of responsibility for the entire senseless fate of physical substance’; before witnessing Sambikin’s dissection of a dead woman, Sartorius wants to ‘go to the trade-union committee and ask for comradely protection against the terror of his yearning heart.’ The novel climaxes with an extraordinary sequence in which Sartorius, diagnosed as ‘undergoing a process of indeterminate transformation’, goes into the streets and decides that it is necessary to research the entire extent of current life by transforming himself into other people . . . rather than preserve himself for secret happiness, he intended to use events and circumstances to destroy the resistance of his personality, so that the unknown feelings of other people could enter him one by one. He ends up at the Krestovsky market by the Riga Station and sees an endless parade of random, anachronistic merchandise: ‘priests’ cassocks, ornamented basins for baptising children, the frock-coats of deceased gentlemen, charms on waistcoat chains’. Further on, there are more rudimentary offerings—‘hammers, vices, axes for firewood, a handful of nails’. The inhabitants of the market are ‘demoralized, out-of-work locksmiths’, wrinkled widows selling food, petty thieves—a mute, hungry and brutalized underclass, true descendants of the denizens of Dostoevsky’s Haymarket, and the human residue of Stalinist modernization. It is from one of them—a certain Ivan Grunyakhin—that Sartorius purchases a passport; thereafter, he is referred to in the narrative by the name of this ‘unknown human being whose fate was swallowing him up’. The shift from Sartorius to Grunyakhin is far more than a simple switch of identity papers—foretold as it is by Sartorius’s belief that ‘it was impossible for him to remain the same uninterrupted person’. It echoes, in more explicitly traumatic register, the enigmatic passage in Chevengur where the narrator speaks of a ‘tiny spectator’ within each of us ‘who takes part neither in action nor in suffering, and who is always cold-blooded and the same’. He possesses a ‘powerless knowledge’, and is ‘somewhat like a man’s dead brother’; he is the ‘eunuch of the soul’. The Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga has argued that this passage provides a means of anatomizing the relative positions of reader, narrator and text in Platonov—and furthermore suggests that the extreme splitting of consciousness it implies may have been the product of an actual schizophrenic episode. In Happy Moscow, a similar notion is voiced by Sambikin, before being lived by Sartorius: sometimes, in illness, in unhappiness, in love, in a terrible dream, at any moment, in fact, that’s remote from the normal, we clearly sense that there are two of us—that I am one person but there’s someone else inside me as well. This someone, this mysterious ‘he’, often mutters and sometimes weeps, he wants to get out from inside you and go a long way away, he gets bored, he feels frightened . . . We can see there are two of us and that we’ve had enough of one another. We imagine the lightness, the freedom, the senseless paradise of the animals when our consciousness was not dual but single. The sense of alienation has reached such an extreme for Sartorius that a single personality can no longer contain a consciousness now divided; the only exit from this predicament is the abandonment of self, through flight into another or into madness. We gain glimpses of the new Grunyakhin’s life before the manuscript breaks off, but here too, the consciousness that was formerly Sartorius is unsettled, unable to escape the source of his melancholy. For it lies as much outside the man as within; indeed, its true location is the frenetic life-world of 1930s Moscow. It is perhaps for this reason that Platonov was unable to finish the book: his character’s escape has led him only into a new cage, through the bars of which he glimpses once again a future that, to his terror, may well be denied to him. In May 1933, Platonov wrote to Gorky urgently asking him if he thought it was ‘objectively impossible’ for him to be a Soviet writer. The letter went unanswered, but the rest of Platonov’s career seems to have been an attempt to respond to it for himself—or at least to keep re-stating the question. Seifrid has argued persuasively that the combinations of peasant speech and Soviet slogans, utopian speculation and industrial terminology, of harsh socio-historical fact and deep-seated existential yearning, make Platonov’s ‘the most quintessentially Soviet prose of the century’. It is thus all the more ironic that the audience best equipped to appreciate it was able to read it only as the ussr entered terminal decline. His status, however, is now fully assured, paralleled in 20th-century Russian letters only by Nabokov—in many senses his polar opposite, both in terms of social origins and political views: the noble-born Nabokov harshly opposed the Soviet regime from the Right, while Platonov directed his best efforts to serving it from an independent position on the Left. Moreover, Nabokov’s linguistic virtuosity was uprooted from his native context, his talent translatable into other tongues and traditions, while much of Platonov will surely be lost to anyone reading him in abstraction from the historical circumstances interwoven with his work. In a longer perspective, Platonov belongs in a distinctive Russian tradition of imagining alternative realities, stretching from the legendary peasant city of Kitezh to the Fourier-inspired social re-organization of Chernyshevsky’s Chto delat’? (What is to Be Done?, 1863), from Gogol’s phantasmagorias to the multidimensional saccades of Belyi’s Peterburg (1913). Since 1917, this line has become still more pronounced, with branches ranging from the futurological fevers of the Revolutionary period to dystopian critiques such as Evgeny Zamiatin’s My (We, 1924), and including the magical parallelisms of Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita and Nabokov’s geographical confections, Zembla and Antiterra. Recent variants would include the science fiction of the Strugatsky brothers, transferred to the screen by Tarkovsky and Sokurov, and the neo-Buddhist pastiche of contemporary Russia by Viktor Pelevin. There is much debate on the origins of this strand, but it surely relates to a deep-seated ambivalence in the culture towards definitive demarcations of reality, as products of modes of thought imported from the West. More importantly, however, these alternative visions have always been the hallmark of resistance to the inevitable, of escape from an arbitrary power or oppressive social totality. Platonov at once went furthest in reconfiguring his language and logic, so as to better convey his break with the given, and stayed closest to reality, by refusing to separate his vision from the present entirely—denying himself the comfort of a sealed, personal world in favour of an anxious collective aspiration. Outside Russia, Platonov has often been compared to Kafka—largely in terms of literary-historical significance, rather than style or content. It is hard to find a single apposite comparator, though one could align Platonov with many early 20th-century writers in his evocation—most of all in the shift from Sartorius to Grunyakhin—of the embattled subjectivity of modernity, stretched to breaking-point by the pull of vast, contending social and historical forces. Connections could also be made to the plural poetic voices and personalities of Fernando Pessoa, the forlorn flailing of Beckett’s protagonists, Joyce’s radical linguistic innovations, Rilke’s persistent, eerie engagement with death. But Platonov is more unlike these figures than he resembles any of them, just as he differs markedly from Russian writers of his time. His singularities are entirely specific to him, and perhaps it is best to let him speak to readers in his own richly complex idiom—comical and mournful by turns, but powerfully expressive of the dreams and doubts that haunted its creator and his country.