There probably is a way to read the Soviet novelist Andrey Platonov and come away from the experience with something, but I didn’t find it. I read four of his bright dark works in English (it took me ten months), and I have next to nothing to say about them. They might as well have been written in some other alphabet for all the good I got out of them. (They were.—Ed.) My progress was painfully slow; two pages a day was about my limit. Even that was enough to exhaust me, and to color the days. There went 2024. Platonov wrote his books faster than I could read them. Still, some fossilized sense of duty, presumed long extinct, kept me going. I blamed my circumstances. It was the chair. It was my reading glasses. It was the light. Actually, it was the books.
I’m not really a quitter by nature. After sixty years of reading, more or less successfully, I thought I didn’t have much left to learn about it. But nothing had prepared me for Platonov, something so contrary, so arid, so barbed, so irregular, simultaneously so anonymous and so idiosyncratic. The experience was like nothing else I’ve had in reading. In small doses—in tiny doses—I could sometimes enjoy it, but in bulk I found it overpowering, static, unassimilable, both too big and too small. Each book came with the pace and scale of a continent, or not so much a continent as a polar region. The white flag of surrender or snow blindness was never far from my hand or my thoughts. (I did offer, twice, and was talked out of it.) In the end I was unable to turn away from something so stark. Even though the experience wasn’t one I either liked or understood, I couldn’t say it was nul. In fact, that was the last thing I could say.
By force of habit I made my usual pen strokes in the margins, only later to feel an invincible reluctance to open the books to see what I had marked and maybe transcribe the odd word or passage. I understood that what I was doing was performing reading. Essentially everything—the whole vital, nervous contact between book and reader—still lay ahead of me, still remained to be done. There was a kind of dread, a fear of distance, coldness, strangeness, the empty density and tracklessness of Platonov’s prose, and his world of anomie. I see a bleak, bare stage, something out of Brecht or Beckett, only chillier, and a person or ragged succession of persons (Joy Williams is absolutely right: “Characters does not seem the appropriate assignation”) trekking across it in a kind of off-season chiaroscuro. Again and again. It is picaresque, like Don Quixote.
Robert Chandler, who cotranslated all four of these books, admits “Platonov’s lack of interest in conventional plotting and character development.” In the space of a few pages of gavotte called “Around Happy Moscow,” Chandler has Platonov hoping “he would be able to produce the kind of novel the authorities were calling for,” assuring us that most likely “Platonov knew very well what he was doing,” and conceding that his “apparent distress” on not getting it published—during a period (1930–1936) when he wrote more unfinished works than at any other time in his life—“might lead one to think that he truly did not understand quite what he had written.” But is it inexhaustible parody or orthodoxy beyond all reason? It is not in the nature of either to allow the claim that it is a bit of both.
Reading Platonov is like following a fire hose hundreds of miles long, held by thousands of anonymous—though named—firemen. It is like encountering a novel written in haiku. It has smooth ball bearings for clockwork. There is no grip, no engagement, no involvement. And accordingly, I might have been my small granddaughter, complaisantly holding the books upside down. Weeks, months later, I still felt a deep unwillingness to open them. I gave myself deadlines and sailed through them, ultimatums and breached them. I moved the little stack of books—strickenly kept together, as though they were my most valuable possessions—upstairs and down, from one surface to another. I lugged them back and forth across the Atlantic, something I would normally do absolutely anything to avoid. Platonov my albatross. I was like someone swimming the Channel, but in endless installments, mostly at night, and complaining each time about how cold the water is before absolving his pitiful twenty-five yards.
As I begin—and not for the first time—to write, I realize I am not capable of summarizing any of the books, or of rendering my “impressions.” I stare with incomprehension and awe at the blurbs and the snippets from reviews. “Absurdist parable”; “massive lyrical novel”; “Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest.” How do they know—or what makes them so sure? The Foundation Pit—as the title might have told you—is about a great hole in the ground. I had even read that one once before, but had no memory of it. “We are digging the pit of Babel,” Kafka wrote somewhere, but Platonov won’t have known that, and it won’t have played into his scheme. Then Happy Moscow, only that’s not about the Russian capital but a shape-shifting female of the same name. I’ll know next time. Chevengur—Platonov is full of barbarous-sounding made-up names that suggest this or that to the ear conversant with Russian—is a place where the former inhabitants are being evicted so that others can build socialism. It belatedly occurs to someone that women could have a part to play here. But it’s not a farce, and it’s not funny. It too features a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing, some of it involving a carthorse-cum-warhorse called Strength of the Proletariat.
Soul is by some way the most approachable Platonov. I think he must always be epic—even over ten pages, he is epic—but this is his least distended, his least exorbitant. It is not a novel but perhaps a novella, and it comes in a volume with other shorter fiction. More movement, footslogging in some region of Soviet Central Asia; a people, the Dzhan, require rescuing:
Chagataev cleaned out the wax that had built up in his ears, and went on listening: would there be any more words from where husband and wife lay together?
“You and I are a poor kind of good,” the woman declared. “You’re thin and weak, and my breasts are drying up. My bones are hurting inside me.” “I’ll love your remains,” said the husband.
Everyone eats, wears, and lives in grass. It is all they have. The geography is so inhospitable that a flock of feral sheep go round and round, as though on rails, so as not to get lost in the wildness beyond. Living is a contingency, an irrelevance.
All the books come in wonderful helpful editions, really nutritious editions, like randomly put together hampers, with essays, chronologies, maps, photographs, opinions on translating, textual variants and spin-offs, introductions and afterwords by the translators and others, packed with stray information and impressions. (There are, for instance, not one but two descriptions of the manufacture and layout of the Russian hut.) Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and their varying cast of helpers have over many years acquired not just expertise on but real inwardness with their author. “In Platonov’s writing the place of food is taken by warmth,” writes Vladimir Sharov, a later Russian novelist. He’s absolutely right. But one might as well be reading about a new mineral or a remote planet.
“The degree of uncertainty around Platonov himself is extraordinary,” note Robert Chandler and his cotranslator Olga Meerson. “There is hardly a single important work of Platonov’s, or important event in his life, that is not veiled in ambiguity.” Platonov’s language, Chandler writes elsewhere, has “the power of an elemental force—a friend once described it as ‘the language that might be spoken by the roots of trees.’” And so each moment in the rich apparatus is the continuation of an epic and magisterial monologue, an unbroken and unending musing aloud. Delightful, wholly natural, absolutely endorsed, but more than a little intimidating. Maybe not the thing for a new or lost reader.
And yet there is so much to say—and without the commentary, without the apparatus, I would have been utterly at sea. The sense is given that, even though there is an almost infinite amount to know, and more to try to reconcile or imagine, Platonov is at some level knowable. Which otherwise—so exotic is the prose—I would have doubted. I have a kind of Cubist biography in my head. Married, two children born some twenty years apart. From Voronezh, but lived for the most part in Moscow. “During the mid-1920s,” write Meerson and Chandler, “he supervised the digging of no less than 763 ponds and 331 wells, as well as the draining of 2,400 acres of swampland and the building of three small rural power stations.” Most of his books were not published in Russian until the 1980s and 1990s, long after his death. Stalin, a keen reader and critic of course, wrote “scum” in the margin of one. Another—Chevengur—was published in a single copy in 1929 and then pulled by understandably nervous editors.
Himself the son of a railway engineer, he too, when still a boy, worked on the railways. Of the occasional moments of tendresse in his books, not a few are directed toward trains: “Even healthy switches make a train shake and shudder as it passes over them; switches hurt trains.” “He loved locomotives so painfully and jealously that he felt horror whenever he saw them moving.” Somehow Platonov stayed out of really bad trouble in those terrible decades. During World War II he worked as a war reporter. In 1951 he died of tuberculosis caught from his young son, Platon, who, unlike his father, had been put in a gulag. His life and times would seem to have nothing but nothing in common with any received notions of a career in letters.
The books make their way through successions of characters—or, as Joy Williams says, “people.” The reader has little opportunity to form any attachments; they are positively dis-individuated. Situations are too indistinct, unimportant, coded. Chevengur ends with a shoot-out or bloodbath: the scene is a comic one.
Next, an alien saber blinded Kopionkin’s eyes; taken aback, he seized the saber with one hand while cutting off the attacker’s forearm—along with this saber—with his other hand. After tossing aside both saber and burdensome limb, lopped off at the elbow, he glimpsed Gopner, who was battling in the thick of the horses, holding his revolver by the muzzle and using it as a cudgel.
The writing is like nothing else, maximally generalized, strangely wooden in its particulars when any are offered. It does only what one is taught not to.
Cliché, jargon, abstraction, kookiness. It is somehow a barbarous style, the pen as it were held in boxing gloves. Modern Medieval, Science Fiction Realism, Dull Naiveté, Post-Civilizational Burdock, Occasional Haphazard Cunning, Riot of Pleonasms.
I am full of awe at Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and their team for resisting the blandishments of English and the tyranny of normality. It is the total absence of unexceptional—or unexceptionable—sentences that makes reading Platonov such a wearing experience and imposes a daily two-page limit. Imagine if Paul Celan or Georg Trakl had written novels. Read much faster and you cease to register the strangeness, you take the edge off it. Open any book at any page. “Having eaten nourishment, the workers went off outside with spades in their hands.” “Horselessness had set in; waiting for a new generation of horses to be born and enter the province’s tractive force was out of the question, so it was necessary to seek a way out through science.” “‘That’s not possible,’ the locomotive replied with the meekness of wise strength.” “He had not bought a tram ticket and he had almost no desire to exist.” “Outside the window, in a sky unlike the earth, alluring stars were ripening.” Is it a style or a malfunction? Haplessness or originality? A detail or cosmology? You read with the hand brake on, with visibility of no more than five yards.
Time and time again, there is only earth underfoot and sky above:
Early day lit up everything around them: green pale reeds, decrepit gray-brown huts in a clearing with a little thin grass underfoot, and, up above, a sky filled with sunlight, with moist steam from marshes and loess dust from dried-up oases, a sky agitated by a high, inaudible wind, a sky that was dull and exhausted, as if nature were just another mournful and hopeless force.
These are the most cheerless and desolate of books. Man in them truly is Lear’s poor, bare, forked animal. “Some of the others saw what Sufyan was doing, went over to him, and began to share his supper of sand and water.” There is no joy, no pleasure, no distraction, no human bonds. “Her brief, human feeling of joy in her son, a living son who had grown to maturity, had now passed, or perhaps it had never really been joy at all—only surprise at an unusual meeting.”
At the end of my year, at the end of one thousand pages, in a late story about an officer returning from World War II called “The Return,” a favorite of Penelope Fitzgerald’s, I came upon a recognizable interior. In these books so entirely without food, without shelter, without love, without frills and furbelows, without sweetness, without the trophies of civilization, I almost couldn’t believe my eyes, so much Heimat in these home fires. The assertion of family is also without parallel:
While he sat there, the whole family bustled about in the living room and in the kitchen, preparing a celebration meal. Ivanov examined, one after another, all the objects around the house—the clock, the crockery cupboard, the wall thermometer, the chairs, the flowers on the windowsills, the Russian kitchen-stove. They had lived here a long time without him, and they had missed him. Now he had come back and he was looking at them, getting to know each one of them again, as if they were relatives whose lives had been poor and lonely without him. He breathed in the familiar, unchanging smell of the house—smoldering wood, warmth from his children’s bodies, a burning smell from the grate.
A Russian scholar remarked to Robert Chandler that the true Platonov hero was “the Russian people as a whole.” Well, it is either that, or it is Robert Chandler himself, and Elizabeth, and their helpers.
English (US) · 