Customer Reviews

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

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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!

In 2004 the American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages awarded their annual translation prize to our translation of SOUL, the title novella of this collection. The citation reads as follows: 'The Harvill Press translation of Platonov's Soul - a collaborative effort - accomplishes the seemingly impossible in bringing the notoriously idiosyncratic language of this talented writer to English-language readers. The superb yet compact apparatus includes an essay on "Platonov and Central Asia," an introduction explicitly treating the challenges of translating Platonov, a map, a pronunciation and meaning guide to names, and endnotes. This translation and accompanying material will be invaluable in bringing Platonov into the English-language classroom and making his work accessible to our students

"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.