Soul: And Other Stories (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Andrey Platonov (Author), Robert Chandler (Translator, Introduction), Olga Meerson (Translator), John Berger (Afterword)

Book Description

Release date: December 4, 2007 | Series: New York Review Books Classics

A New York Review Books Original

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I squint back on our century and I see six writers I think it will be remembered for.  They are Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, William Faulkner, Andrey Platonov and Samuel Beckett.... They are summits in the literary landscape of our century ... What's more, they don't lose an inch of their status when compared to the giants of fiction from the previous century."—Joseph Brodsky

 

"Soul ( New York Review Books ) gathered eight works from another Slavic giant, Andrei Platonov. Works of great tenderness and insight in the face of oppression, they're brilliantly rendered by one of the great translators of our time, Robert Chandler, and his team. It features a striking afterword by John Berger..." --The Guardian

 

"Andrey Platonov has not yet received the attention he richly deserves here...[he] turns out to be one of the finest writers of the 20th century, worthy to stand alongside Kafka and Joyce. So thanks to NYRB Classics for publishing the Platonov collection Soul, which contains an informatively polemical introduction by Chandler, a smattering of stories ('Among Animals and Plants' appeared last year in The New Yorker), and the short novels 'Soul' and 'The Return.'" --The Arts Fuse

 

“In Russia it is Platonov who is increasingly described as the best writer of the post-revolutionary epoch.” –Victor Erofeyev, The Times Literary Supplement

 

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

 

“Platonov is a realist as only the Russians can be realists, unsparing and utterly without any literary device except the exact and telling detail. The result seems. . .more myth than reality, as Platonov’s Russia is incredibly strange.” –Guy Davenport

 

“Reading Platonov is always an exhilarating, depressing and moving experience.” –Slavonica

"The most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union." –The Independent (UK)

 

"In Platonov's prose, it is impossible to find a single inelegant sentence." –The Times (UK)

 

"In this century the best Russian prose has been written by our poets and Platonov, but he is an exception...Platonov speaks of a nation which in a sense has become a victim of its own language; or, more precisely, he speaks of this language itself which turns out to be capable of generating a fictive world and then falling into grammatical dependence on it." –Joseph Brodsky

 

“As his versions of Andrey Platonov prove, Robert Chandler is the supreme translator of difficult Russian rose.” –The Literary Review

 

“Rarely does literture come this close to music.” –The Observer (UK)

 

"In Soul, Platonov weaves together Sufi philosophy, Persian travelogue, socialist realism, and the language of Soviet bureaucracy into a magical tissue with the luminous, universal quality of myth. Soul is an unforgettably weird retelling of a familiar story: the struggle of an educated young man to assimilate his present with his past." –Elif Batuman, The Daily Beast

 

About the Author

ANDREY PLATONOV (1899—1951), the son of a metalworker and the eldest of ten children, was born in a village near the Russian town of Voronezh. He began to publish poems and stories in the 1920s and worked as a land reclamation expert in central Russia, where he was a witness to the ravages of the Great Famine. In the 1930s Platonov fell into disfavor with the Soviet government and his writing disappeared from sight.

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.

ROBERT CHANDLER has translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire and is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida. His translations from Russian include Pushkin's Dubrovsky and The Captain's Daughter, Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and Hamid Ismailo's The Railway. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes in the UK and the US. His Alexander Pushkin is published by Hesperus in their series of Brief Lives. He teaches part time at Queen Mary, University of London.

ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator of several volumes of Platonov and of Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter.

OLGA MEERSON teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of Dostoevsky's Taboos (in English) and Platonov's Poetic of Re-Familiarization (in Russian). She is a co-translator of Platonov's The Foundation Pit and Soul and Other Stories, which, in 2004, was awarded the AATSEEL prize for best translation from a Slavonic language.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics; First Printing edition (December 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159017254X
• ISBN-13: 978-1590172544
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #161,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A startling blend of lyricism and objectivity, expect the unexpected November 13, 2009

By T. M. Teale

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The back cover description and the Publisher's Weekly paragraphs will give you the main plot lines of the title novella, _Soul_, and the other stories, but I want to say that Platonov is astonishing. How could anyone--in such a short life--have felt and known so much and also had time to master the craft of story-telling? Truly a genius. Platonov loved life so much that he had to write it out, and if he stopped writing, his life would have been too painful. His combination of harsh objectivity and lyricism could be accounted for by, perhaps, considering the mix of pain in his own life. He invested the simplest human act with a sense of wonder. Sitting on a bench waiting for a friend becomes a spiritual moment. A character who hears a cricket chirping as he approaches a friend's door would be sentimental or precious if written by a lesser artist or someone with fewer hard edges than Platonov, or in a setting less deprived than Russia in the 1930s.

While the novella, _Soul_, isn't autobiographical, there is a line about the protagonist, Chagataev, that suggests to me the key to Platonov himself: "He felt as if he belonged to others, as if he were the last possession of those who have no possessions, about to be squandered to no purpose, and he was seized by the greatest, most vital fury of his life" (p. 94).

These stories and the _Soul_ novella are proof that literature transcends ideology and politics at the same time that politics conditions people's lives. Platonov and other writers might have been suppressed by men who wanted to dictate what literary art should be, but writers and readers in comfortable, "democratic" nations are persecuted by a silent enemy: mediocrity. Platonov was a total stranger to the "m" word. He never knew complacency.

While death and disaster seem to condition the intensity of Platonov's work, it is from out of his vision of humanity that his writing comes; he has a way of getting to the human truth of a scene or conversation in just a sentence, with exactly the right words. With every carefully constructed sentence, he trained my senses to the point where I was ready to expect the unexpected. In other words, in every sentence there is a kind of tension that has an undercurrent of doom or despair; every moment I expected the characters to be dealt some horrible blow, or some bitter ending, but inside each character is a kind of heroism that turned everything around. Most surprising, in the final story, "The Return," is a nearly 12-year-old boy whose courage saves his family and brings a spiritual epiphany to his father, a returning war veteran. With real boys like that no one needs magic or special effects.

And, I never knew a story about railway workers could be so gripping, so impossible to put down, until I read Platonov's "Among Plants and Animals." I didn't know a man could write so well about women until "Fro." "The River Potudan" is invested with such weightiness that I could sense the huge body of water flowing.

In closing, I'd like the reader to know that this translation of Andrey Platonov's _Soul and Other Stories_ reminds me again how NYRB has reinvented the paperback, winning me away from the Penguin and the Oxford classic paperbacks (which I collected for years). The book covers are well-chosen, and the typeset and spacing between the lines make an easier reading experience, and each page is visually pleasing. A paperback reading experience does not get better than this. And now this incredible translation by a team of experts led by Robert Chandler! Of course, the Platonov we get is due to these translators, and Chandler wrote a remarkable Introduction on Platonov's life and on the art of translating from the Russian and why a group of translators was necessary. But the unsung heroes are the women and men who (miraculously!) preserved all Platonov's manuscripts until the right translators could be found. What a work for humanity. Bravo!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Among Plants and Animals January 28, 2012

By Mary Wilbur

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

"Among Plants and Animals" is the second of Andrey Platonov's stories anthologized in "Soul," and I am going limit my review to a few remarks about it and one rather long quote. "Among Plants and Animals" is a very funny parody of the utopian society which Soviet propaganda alleged to have achieved in the mid-1930's. The protagonist, Ivan Alekseyevich Fyodorov, is a railroad switchman assigned to a remote forest outpost somewhere in Siberia. While he is extremely dedicated to his job, it doesn't entirely satisfy. He yearns for culture. He acquires a radio and a windup gramophone, but they only serve to whet his appetite to "hear a melody in an orchestra and to watch a spectacle in a theater, so as to have some understanding in his soul about the truth of life and to see the universal horizon"(p. 169).

Fyodorov reads every book that comes his way. He receives a copy of "The Travels of Marco Polo" at a lecture given by a member of the Writer's Union, as a gift because he asked sixteen questions. "The book was extremely interesting. Fyodorov had at once begun reading, from page 26. At the start of a book a writer is just thinking, and that makes it dull; the most interesting part is the middle, or the end, which was why Fyodorov preferred to choose pages at random--now page 50, now page 214. And although every book is interesting, reading this way makes it even better, and still more interesting, because you have to imagine for yourself everything you have skipped and you have to compose anew passages that don't make sense or are badly written, just as if you too are an author, a member of the Soviet Union's Union of Writers. Fyodorov had been so carried away by one book--"Lime," or was it "Stone?"--that he had read it from the end all the way to the beginning and had realized that it was a good book but that if you began at the beginning it would be false and ideologically suspect" (p. 169). Fyodorov eventually gets his wish and is transferred to "Bear Hill," which is Robert Chandler's translation of Medvezhya Gora, the capital of the Gulag Archipelago. Medvezhya Gora was a remote outpost which became the headquarters for the construction of the notorious White Sea Canal, built by prisoners without tools at the cost of a minimum estimate of 25,000 lives. By the mid-1930's so many of the cultural elite had been sent to the camps that Medvezhya Gora "was said to have one of the best opera houses in Russia, frequented mainly by camp guards" (p. xxiii). This is the ironic subtext to "Among Plants and Animals," but it only begins to scratch the surface of this fine story.

All of the stories in "Soul" are different. I choose to focus on the humourous one because I am hoping it will entice any readers of this review to choose to read this fine book by one of the 20th century's most gifted authors.