As I was reading The Fierce and Beautiful World, a collection of one novella and several short stories, it occurred to me that the novella, "Dzhan" (which means "soul"), must be the same as the one included in Soul and Other Stories. So I read the very insightful introduction to Soul and Other Stories by one of the translators, Robert Chandler, and learned that while they are the same, the version in TF&BW was a censored version that was published in the Khrushchev era, while Chandler had access to the full text of the novella and other stories. So I decided to read the later collection after I finished the first even though the majority of the stories in it, along with the novella, were ones I had read in the first collection.

Although I was impressed by Platonov the first time I read the stories, I was even more so the second time. I can't tell how much this was because they sank in more and how much because the translation was better and because Soul and Other Stories includes explanatory notes. Other than for the novella ("Dzhan," "Soul"), I didn't notice any dramatically different material in the stories but there were definitely noticeable differences between the censored version of "Dzhan" and the full version of "Soul" -- not only additional material in "Soul" and references to Stalin that had been deleted in "Dzhan" but also other graphic or disturbing material, even material that doesn't seem to be politically sensitive. For example, a young woman who is described in "Dzhan" as having "sad eyes" is described in "Soul" as having a horsey face with boils covered by makeup.

Platonov is a beautiful writer, with infinite compassion for the poor and the outcast; the bulk of "Soul" involves a group of people living in the desert who are so poor and starving all they have left is their souls. He explores how people struggle to find happiness and what that is. He is fascinated by technology -- railroads, especially, and electricity -- with some of his characters able to work with machinery by feeling it, and at the same time deeply observant of the natural world, including both plants and animals, and how we humans react to it. Without his saying anything overtly political, it is clear to the reader that Platonov puts the individual and his emotional needs first. The stories require and deserve close attention.

Platonov died young, and Vassily Grossman, one of my all-time favorite authors spoke at his funeral. They are very different writers, but both are superb.

If you have a choice, read Soul and Other Stories instead of this collection.

As the New York Review of Books list gains volume, it also takes shape. Russian and French avant-garde works mix with mid-twentieth century American fiction, with an emphasis on Jewish-American themes, World War II memoirs, and women writers. It's a version of the "New York Review of Books" itself, with an admixture of Bookforum-style internationalism. By printing central and Eastern European avant-garde fiction along with some surrealism, the series also replicates the conventional interests of North American departments of art history, where surrealism and Cubo-futurism continue to be expected specialties. (It would be interesting to make a graph of the birth dates of the authors in the NYRB list: I imagine they were writing mainly in the period 1920-1970.)

Andrei Platonov is billed, in Tatyana Tolstaya's introduction, as an author with "no literary predecessors," who writes "as though no one before him had evre written anything" (pp. ix, x). That is a kind of literary wishful thinking, which might have a function for Tolstaya in her own writing. Platonov's predecessors are th Russian avant-garde, including absurdists and existentialists. Tolstaya says Platonov "never uses... narrative... in a conventional way," and that he "copntinually undermines the reader's expectations." But that is only true if the reader's expectations are based mainly on nineteenth-century Russian writing like Chekhov's or Tolstoy's. It's not that Platonov's narratives defy expectations, it's that they make continuous, deliberate, slight deviations from what would have been an expected norm. The effect is not unlike Georges Perec's experiment in "Life: A User's Guide." Tolstaya accurately calls Platonov's experiments in form "microdeviations." (p. x)

What keeps these experiments interesting is the reasoning that apparently drives the microdeviations. Platonov sometimes thinks like a fin-de-siecle short story writer, inserting fragmentary or truncated vignettes, deliberately swerving aside from full psychological portraits, subverting what he clearly imagines are readers' expectations of completed narratives. All that is just part of the history of the short-story form. What makes Platonov different is that some of the microdeviations are made for entirely different reasons: Platonov is in thrall of a certain kind of collectivism and utopianism, and he sometimes writes for, and even writes as, a collective future. He is also hypnotized by the spells of new science, which for him takes two forms: dreams of infinite electric power, inspired largely by Tesla and by large industrial projects; and dreams of railroads, which inhabit his mind as much as they transfix his characters. Both electric power and railroads are animated presences in these stories, capable of collective good but also of unpredictable and inexplicable destruction. They have the power to galvanize men and sometimes women (with "galvanize" taken in the original meaning -- the characters are shocked into precipitous action or perpetual stasis). Tolstaya says Platonov's characters inhabit "a cosmic world, the world before... the appearance of God," but that's another piece of poetry (p. xvi). His characters inhabit a world where sometimes the idea of individual action, and even the depthless romantic attachments that are so characteristic of late-Romantic prose, can be instantly and irreparably erased. In the space of a sentence, a character can become the mouthpiece of some physical, electrical, or utopian collective ideal: a strange state of affairs, and an interesting tonic for contemporary fiction, which has forgotten that way of achieving the death of the author.

So it's not the microdeviations from the standard, Barthesian characteristics of the late romantic story, as much as the microdeviations from comprehensible characters to instruments of a collective and even inhuman or natural mind, that make these stories so interesting. I don't think they have anything in common with Tolstaya's work. ( )

I grabbed this book because Nadezhda Mandelstam esteemed Platonov highly and because a quick scan of its pages didn't dissuade me. I was completely unprepared for how wonderful it is and I feel like reading it while I was traveling wasn't even fair. This has immediately shouldered its way into the ranks of my favorite books (of all genres, ever) and I am about to set off on a massive Platonov jag to see if there is more to love.

Anyone who thought McCarthy's "The Road" was special, should read "Dzhan," the novella at the beginning of this collection for a similar story rendered with more wisdom, fewer calculated shock stunts, more beauty and a more satisfying conclusion. The three stories immediately following "Dzhan" deal with human relationships in such a humble and piercing way that I will return to them often. I was reminded of the insight into human doings that stands out in several Austrian writers (Musil and Handke come to mind); but Platonov avoids artifice and has a more grown up approach to self-pity and alienation.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that i was more vulnerable to this book for its willingness to grapple with revolutionary thought (even in its dignified failure) and because it came from a writer who experienced true poverty and humility--dying of polio at 51 while employed as a janitor for a university.

In selecting a few passages that stuck with me, I noticed that nearly everywhere I had marked this collection, Platonov was making bold enough to talk about people's "hearts" or their "misery." Often writers are not sufficiently credible to speak of these things; in Platonov's case, whether he later falsifies the sentiments of one of his characters or not, they all seem true and essential:

"The girl was not interested in her guests; her eyes were engrossed with her own thoughts--probably she was living some secret, independent dream and doing the housework almost unconsciously, distracted from all the world around her by her concentrated heart."

"He understood his former naivete, all his nature started to grow harder, ripening in misery, and began to learn how to overcome the mountain of stone which blocked the road of his life; and then the world in front of him, which had seemed to him clear and attainable until now, spread itself out in a faraway mysterious haze, not because it was really dark there, or sad, or strange, but because it actually was enormously larger in all directions and could not be surveyed all at once, either inside a man's heart or in simple space."

"She was clinging to her grief, and was in no hurry to squander it. It meant that in the deepest part of a person's reason or of his heart there exists an enemy force which darkens one's life even in the embrace of loving arms, even under the kisses of one's children."

Read this book. ( )

I had never heard of Platonov before, but since this book was part of the NYRB series I figured it was probably worth checking out. Platonov is obviously Russian, and this collection of short stories feels very much like a bunch of Russian stories. Platonov's Russia is bleak...vast landscapes, hunger and isolation for the rural areas, lovers and spouses continually separated by war and work in faraway places, and the obsession with machines of the period...especially trains. Our protagonists are not generally very hopeful, but latch on to the relationships with other people are as way to ascribe meaning to their own lives. Communism/socialism have their place in these stories; usually as a positive, helpful way to live, but one that has consequences that often forces one to sacrifice the bonds that make life worth living in the first place. Of these seven stories I enjoyed "Dzhan", "The Potudan River", and "Homecoming" the best. ( )

http://amiralace.blogspot.com/2006/02/andrei-platonov.html ( )