From: On all aspects of Russia and the FSU
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Chandler
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2016 8:57 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: A Platonov blog, and 3 Russian Events in early 2017
This blog by me has recently been published on the British Library website:
http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/12/platonov.html
*
Tuesday, Jan 17th, 7.30 pm at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury
http://www.pushkinhouse.org/events/2017/1/17/1917-anthology-for-pushkin-club
-with-boris-dralyuk
'1917: STORIES AND POEMS FROM THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION' - Join me and Boris
Dralyuk to discuss this collection of immediate literary responses to an
event that shaped the last century. Boris Dralyuk's most recent
translations include Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories (both from
Pushkin Press). He is also co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina
Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).
See also: bdralyuk.wordpress.com
http://www.pushkinpress.com/my-family-and-the-russian-revolution/
*
Tuesday, Jan 31, 7.00 pm at LRB Bookshop, Bloomsbury
http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events/2017/1/fourteen-little-red-huts
-robert-chandler-on-platonov
ANDREY PLATONOV - FOURTEEN LITTLE RED HUTS - I am looking forward to
talking about Platonov's plays, and one of his film scripts, to people who
know him from other perspectives. Irina Brown has, amongst much else,
directed ballets by Stravinsky and THE LETTER by Vitaly Khodysh, a short
opera based on a chapter from Vasily Grossman's LIFE AND FATE. Gerard
McBurney is known both for his own compositions and for his reconstructions
of lost and forgotten works by Shostakovich. Josephine Burton, as
co-director of Dash Arts, has been involved with a variety of projects
relating to the former Soviet Union.
*
Tuesday, Feb 14, 7.30 pm at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury
http://www.pushkinhouse.org/events/2017/2/14/andrey-platonov-alexander-pushk
in-an-old-fiddler-and-a-diligent-sparrow
PLATONOV, PUSHKIN, AN OLD FIDDLER AND A DILIGENT SPARROW -
I will be talking to Julia Sutton-Mattocks about the vast scope and ambition
of Platonov's work. Though still best known for The Foundation Pit, his
bleak masterpiece about collectivisation, Platonov is an astonishingly
varied writer who could write equally vividly about a baby hare and a steam
engine, about the lives of a glamorous member of the Moscow elite and of a
railwayman in a remote northern forest. He wrote in many genres: novels,
stories, plays, film scripts and literary criticism. We will focus will be
on two recent English-language publications:
1) A SPARROW'S JOURNEY. Written in late 1936, as Stalin's purges were
gathering strength, the story is a profession of loyalty to Pushkin, to art
and to Russia. It also includes wry thoughts about strategies for survival
under totalitarianism.
<http://www.housesparrowpress> http://www.housesparrowpress.com/
2) FOURTEEN LITTLE RED HUTS AND OTHER PLAYS.
"Absurd, grotesque and seemingly surreal, the topsy-turvy world of
Platonov's plays captures the disturbing reality of Stalin's Russia in the
1930's with precision, irreverence and verbal virtuosity. The stunning
translation offers a unique opportunity for English-speaking readers and
audiences to encounter one of the most uncompromising and visionary Russian
writers of the last century."
- Irina Brown, Opera and Theatre Director
Julia Sutton-Mattocks is a PhD student at the Universities of Bristol and
Exeter, where she is researching the impact of medical advance on Czech- and
Russian-language literature and cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s. She has
a particular interest in Platonov's evocations of childbirth and what they
tell us about his understanding of the possibilities and difficulties of
bringing a new society into being.
R.
