It is 50 years since I first began translating Andrey Platonov. Wondering how to set about this article, I realised that I am grateful to him, above all, for the many different people—both real and fictional—whom he has brought into my life.
The son of a railway worker who also gilded the cupolas of churches, the writer we now know as Andrey Platonov was born at the turn of a century—on 1st September 1899—and between town and country, on the edge of the central Russian city of Voronezh. He died in 1951, of tuberculosis caught from his son, who had been infected during a two-year spell in the Gulag. A passionate and idealistic supporter of the Revolution as a young man, Platonov wanted his work to be of service to Soviet society. Nevertheless, his clarity of understanding and acute sense of irony made it impossible for him to write what the authorities required of him. Around half of his work was published only to be subjected to vicious criticism, while the other half remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until long after his death.
I first encountered his stories in 1974, while spending a year in Voronezh on a British Council exchange scholarship. A Russian friend lent me one of the somewhat bowdlerised Soviet selections of his work published during the 1960s. Though bewildered by his style, I sensed that this was something extraordinary and that I needed to read more. On my return to England, I immediately ordered copies of his two great early novels, Chevengur and The Foundation Pit; the Russian texts were at that time available only from émigré publishing houses. I also obtained through inter-library loan the small collection of his versions of Russian folk tales that he published in the late 1940s. These tales immediately charmed me; some moved me deeply.
For the main part, Platonov stays close to his sources, simply adding vivid and witty details—but there is one tale, “No-Arms”, that he treats with great freedom. This mini-epic ends on a note of intense lyricism, with a paean to the power of love. After long years of wandering, after undergoing suffering of all kinds and playing a key role in a terrible battle, rescuing her only son without realising who he is, the heroine is reunited with both this son and her husband. Only slowly and falteringly, after many years of separation, do the three recognise one another. Platonov continues:
No-Arms wanted to embrace her husband – she had been separated from him for a whole age – but she remembered she had no arms. They had withered away again immediately after she had stood by her son in the battle. But No-Arms couldn’t bear it, and she reached out towards her husband. She had always loved him; she had never forgotten him. And then, as if from her heart, her arms grew, as strong as they had ever been, and with them she embraced her husband. And from that moment her arms stayed with her forever.
I soon translated the whole of this story, simply to show it to English friends. This was the first translation I had carried out on my own initiative. I then took it into my head to translate two more of these tales and to send all three to the children’s literature editor at Faber, who quickly agreed to publish a book—six tales titled The Magic Ring.
The book attracted little notice, but it played an important role in my life, bringing me two lasting friends. The late James Greene, a gifted poet and one of the best translators of Osip Mandelstam, introduced me to the figurative painter Ken Kiff (1935-2001), who illustrated the book. James also introduced me to the poet and psychoanalyst David Black, who had recently published a verse adaptation of “The Handless Maiden”—the Brothers Grimm version of the same folktale. David and I remain friends to this day, and he has commented helpfully on most of my translations and co-translations of Platonov during the past 40 years.
Some people think of Platonov as depressing; this is understandable, given the number of cripples, orphans and suicides in his work. I myself, however, have always thought of him as a deeply affirmative writer. No-Arms has stayed with me as an image not only of heroic endurance, but also of persistent love. And, with time, I have come to understand the whole of Platonov’s work as a single story. It is as if, at the start of his career—at a time of famine and social breakdown—he had asked himself how it might be possible to bring the emotionally maimed and crippled to a state of wholeness, how it might be possible to endow the lost and alienated with a sense of belonging, to allow them to form families and enter into communion with others. Platonov was too exacting a thinker and artist to answer such questions glibly. Nevertheless—after his despairing works from the late 1920s—there is a movement, from one book to another, towards wholeness and healing.
The hero of Chevengur (1927–29)—a new translation by my wife Elizabeth and me was published several months ago—fails to form a lasting relationship with his first love and follows his father’s footsteps all too literally, committing suicide in the lake where his father drowned 20 years earlier. “The River Potudan” (1937) is the first of Platonov’s stories to end with a husband and wife managing to stay together, after rescuing each other from suicidal impulses. “The Return” (1946) ends with an entire family staying together, albeit with difficulty. And “No-Arms” (1947), as we have seen, ends with Platonov’s most moving affirmation of the power of love.
The late critic and scholar Vitaly Shentalinsky once said to me that a truly great writer is one who has brought into world culture a figure recognisable even to people who have not read any of that writer’s work; Platonov—in his view—was a great writer because of the clarity with which, in Chevengur, “he shows us the Russian people as a collective orphan, deprived by the Revolution of both their Mother Earth and their Father in Heaven.”
As Shentalinsky said this, I thought of a passage from Chevengur, a retort made by an angry peasant to a fanatical Bolshevik: “All very clever. You give us the land, then confiscate every last grain we grow on it. Well, if that’s the way it is, may you choke on that land. The only land left to us peasants now is the horizon. Who do you think you’re fooling?” This peasant appears in a single brief episode, but it is often minor characters who most clearly voice Platonov’s thoughts. As the Civil War drew to an end, there was indeed nothing left to the Russian people but the horizon—nothing but an ever-receding line of light, a shining “no-place” (the literal meaning of “utopia”) and the webs of delusion that can be spun from words.
My conversation with Shentalinsky took place in late March 1999; Nato had just begun bombing Serbia, with the declared aim of protecting the Kosovar Albanians. While we were talking, he received a phone call from his Serb translator in Belgrade, who had heard explosions during the night. Shentalinsky, himself an adamant liberal, was appalled by Nato’s campaign, saying that it was sure to strengthen the position of the most extreme hardliners in the Russian government. Sadly, he has been proved right. Platonov’s paranoid “collective orphan” has succumbed all too easily to the seductions of a former KGB officer who presented himself as a strong, protective father.
This image of the collective orphan has stayed with me over the years. Many individual figures in Platonov’s work have also become a part of my mental world. Chevengur begins with this unforgettable evocation of a wandering craftsman, a figure who, like Platonov himself, seems to live on the cusp of two very different worlds—that of the Russian peasantry and the new world represented by cities, machines and locomotives.
Old provincial towns have tumbledown outskirts, and people come straight from nature to live there. A man appears, with a keen-eyed face that has been worn to an extreme of sadness, a man who can fix up or equip anything but who has himself lived through life unequipped. There was not one artefact, from a frying pan to an alarm clock, that had not at some time passed through the hands of this man. Nor did he ever refuse to resole shoes, to cast shot for wolf hunting, or to turn out counterfeit medals for sale at old-time village fairs. But he had never made anything for himself—neither a family, nor a dwelling. In summer he simply lived out in nature, keeping his tools in a sack and using the sack as a pillow—more for the tools’ safety than for softness. He protected himself from the early sun by placing a burdock leaf over his eyes when he lay down in the evening. In winter he lived on what remained from his summer’s earnings, paying the warden for his lodging by ringing the hours through the night. He had no particular interest in people or nature, only in man-made artifacts of every kind. And so he treated people and fields with an indifferent tenderness, not infringing on their interests. During winter evenings he would sometimes make things for which there was no need: towers out of bits of wire, ships from pieces of roofing iron, airships out of paper and glue, and so on—all entirely for his own pleasure. Often he even delayed a chance commission; he might, say, have been asked to rehoop a barrel, but he would be busy fashioning a wooden clock, thinking it should work without a mechanism, from the earth’s turning.
Dismayed by the unexpected death of a temporary companion, Zakhar Pavlovich settles in Voronezh and is taken on as a cleaner in the locomotive maintenance depot. Briefly, he is entranced: “Before him lay a new world of appealing ingenuity – a world he had loved for so long it seemed he had always known of it – and he resolved to stand his ground there forever.” Eventually, however, Pavlovich is disillusioned. An encounter with a young beggar makes him realise that no machine will ever solve the problem of human suffering.
As a young man, Platonov worked briefly as an assistant engine driver. He loved watching trains until the end of his life. I doubt if any writer has captured the excitement of the early days of the railway age so vividly, yet with such sober understanding.
One of Platonov’s most lyrical works is Soul, a short novel set for the main part in Soviet Turkmenistan in the 1920s. In the third chapter we meet little Nazar, aged about five. It is a time of famine and he has been abandoned by his mother, who cannot bear the thought of watching him slowly die of hunger.
Nazar stood on the edge of this dark land that fell away beneath him. Beyond him began the sandy desert, […] where an inconsequential wind was looking for shelter among the quiet, sandy mounds, wandering about and crying, exiled from somewhere far distant. The boy listened to this wind, following it with his eyes, wanting to catch sight of it and be close to it, but he saw nothing – and then he cried out. The wind had disappeared from him; no one answered. […] A wandering plant, the rough bush known as “roll-over-fields” or “tumbleweed,” had curled up and was rolling along the sand without any wind, off on its way past. The bush was dusty and tired, almost dead from the labour of its own life and movement; it had no one, no family, no one close, and it was always moving away into the distance. Nazar touched it with the palm of his hand and said to it: “I’ll go with you, I feel sad on my own. You think things about me and I’ll think things about you.” […] Nazar set off after the tumbleweed and didn’t stop until he reached dark. In the dark he lay down and fell asleep from weakness, touching the plant with his hand so it would stay with him. In the morning he woke up and at once felt afraid. The bush wasn’t there with him; it had rolled off on its own during the night. Nazar was about to cry, but he saw the plant on top of a nearby sand dune, barely moving. The little boy caught up with it. […] That day the wandering bush led Nazar to a shepherd, and the shepherd gave the boy food and drink and tied his bush to the stick, so the bush would rest too. For a long time Nazar walked about with the shepherd […] The shepherd set off with the boy and, in the city, handed him over to Soviet power, since nobody else wanted the boy. Soviet power is always gathering up everyone unneeded and forgotten…
This passage means all the more to me because of a long-ago conversation with a psychoanalyst friend, Rosemary Davies. She saw it as a perfect illustration of Freud’s principle of “free association”. If you are emotionally lost, it is best to follow the first thought that comes to mind, as Nazar followed the tumbleweed. Follow your thoughts, no matter how seemingly random or silly—and in time they will lead you to where you need to go. In the last half of Soul, Nazar grows in stature, becoming an epic hero, a 20th-century Moses. Like Moses, who was also abandoned by his mother, Nazar ends up leading his lost nation back towards their homeland. Reading Soul for the first time during my year in Voronezh, I felt as if I were reading an ancient religious text—part epic, part prayer, part philosophy.
For several decades, both Soviet dissidents and western scholars took it for granted that Platonov’s greatest works were Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, the early novels that contain his sharpest satire and most challenging play with language. Only recently has it become accepted that the gentler and seemingly simpler work of his last 15 years is no less profound—and perhaps even subtler. One of Platonov’s masterpieces is the short story “The Return”. On its publication in 1946, this account of an army captain’s troubled homecoming at the end of the war was fiercely denounced in the Soviet press. The story may not seem controversial today; it may appear to adhere to the tenets of Soviet socialist realism, but it lacks the tone of heroic optimism that was obligatory during the years following Stalin’s supreme triumph.
On his return home, Captain Ivanov feels bewildered and angry. After quarrelling with his wife Lyuba during the night, he decides to leave his family and begin a new life with Masha, a young woman he met during his journey home. In the morning, he gets on a train; as it begins to move, however, he sees two small children running towards the railway line. Though he is slow to take in that these are his own children, something changes in his heart and he jumps off the train. Like Zakhar Pavlovich and several other of Platonov’s heroes, Ivanov abandons the hope that the railway will transport him to a new and more perfect life. He understands that nothing can be more precious than his actual life.
In part, “The Return” is about the fear of exclusion. Each character in turn feels excluded. First, we are told that Ivanov felt “orphaned” without the army. On entering his home, Ivanov embraces Lyuba for too long, frightening his five-year-old daughter. Then he again feels excluded himself: Lyuba—he thinks—may have been unfaithful to him, and 11-year-old Petya has usurped his role around the house. During the night, Petya overhears his parents quarrelling; he criticises them, feels rejected—and then he too breaks down. This string of rejections and exclusions culminates in Ivanov’s setting off to the railway station.
Platonov writes with such sensitivity that it is equally possible for a reader to identify with any of the three main characters. One colleague took it for granted that the central figure was Lyuba; she was impressed by Platonov’s understanding of “what it’s like for a woman to have to deal with an uncomprehending husband”. Many readers see Ivanov as the central figure and admire Platonov for his ability to evoke the difficulties faced by millions of soldiers in 1945 and 1946 as they struggled to find their bearings in a by-then unfamiliar world. And I know of a Jewish reader who, without hesitation, saw Petya as the main character. As a boy, this reader had survived the war in Poland, hiding in the forest; for him, the story was “about a boy who, like me, was forced into premature adulthood”.
Like his friend Vasily Grossman, Platonov did not believe in art for art’s sake. He wanted his work to be people’s daily bread; he wanted it to help them live their everyday lives. “The Return” is wise, tender and quietly optimistic; it is ironic that it led to Platonov’s almost-total exclusion from the Soviet literary world. After it came out, he was able to publish only one children’s story and his adaptations of traditional folk tales.
As a literary translator, one, in effect, lives with a writer for months or years. There are writers I admire but would not want to translate; were I to spend long in their world, I would find it oppressive. Platonov’s world, however, is a very open one, and the 1990s and early 2000s was an open and exciting time in the world of Platonov scholarship; I attended many seminars and conferences in Moscow, Petersburg and Voronezh, and several of the Russian scholars I met there have become friends. I am grateful to Platonov for bringing these people my way—and I am grateful, above all, for having been granted the opportunity to get close to Platonov himself; there is probably no way to know a writer more intimately than through the attentive, empathetic listening required of a translator.
One of Platonov’s most vivid self-portraits is in “The Motherland of Electricity” (1939). In 1921, shocked by the worst drought and famine in 30 years, Platonov abandoned literature to work as a land reclamation specialist. During 1923 and 1924 he managed, in chaotic conditions and with minimal funding, to plan and construct two small hydroelectric power stations and one turf-fired power station. He went on to supervise the reclamation of large areas of land and the construction of dozens of wells. “The Motherland of Electricity” is based on his experiences during those years. Different sides of Platonov are embodied in the two main characters: Zharionov, a visionary village-soviet chairman who both speaks and writes in impassioned verse—and the sensible, practically minded engineer who narrates the story.
“The Motherland of Electricity” presents a vivid picture of life in the Russian countryside at a time of great despair and great hope. It is full of humour, yet imbued with deep compassion, which extends to Zharionov, to an old woman who has been praying for rain to a God in whom she no longer believes, and to all the other inhabitants of the poverty-stricken village. Most touching, perhaps, is Platonov’s compassion towards his own younger self. The story ends, “The old woman got down from my arms beside one of the huts. I said goodbye to her, kissed her on the face and decided to dedicate my life to her, because in youth it always seems there is a great deal of life and that there will be enough of it to help every old woman.”
Russians often like to make out that Platonov is untranslatable. I myself believe that his genius is so overwhelming that an Anglophone reader can sense it after reading only a few sentences in translation. Here is a brief passage from “Takyr” (1934)—another story set in Soviet Turkmenistan—which I have read aloud at several public events:
Zarrin-Tadzh sat on one of the plane tree’s roots. [...] and noticed that stones were growing high on the trunk. During its spring floods the river must have flung mountain stones at the very heart of the plane, but the tree had consumed these vast stones into its body, encircled them with patient bark, made them something it could live with, endured them into its own self, and gone on growing further, meekly lifting up as it grew taller what should have destroyed it.
This image now seems like a self-portrait; I doubt it was intended as such, but it well captures Platonov’s tenacity and enduring vitality. Like the plane tree, he was able to take in whatever was flung at him and go on “growing further”.
As I conclude, I wonder how Platonov would have responded to the current war. I recall a wry paragraph from “No-Arms”: “No-Arms’s son grew up among good people, but the war where his father was fighting had still not finished. In those days wars lasted for many years.”
Then I remember one of his stories for children, “Two Crumbs”. A breadcrumb and a crumb of gunpowder, both caught in a hunter’s beard, argue about which is the stronger. The breadcrumb eventually wins the argument; it nourishes the hunter and so becomes part of a human being, while the crumb of gunpowder merely explodes inside an unfortunate sparrow. The “roast sparrow” then falls to the ground, to be eaten by the hunter’s dog.
This was Platonov’s last lifetime publication. After the story appeared in the children’s newspaper Pioneer Pravda in January 1948, he was attacked in Pravda, the most important newspaper of the time, for his “cheap pacifism”.
