topics: |  fiction-short | russian

Platonov was one of Russia's great prose geniuses; he was a literary star
in the 1920s, championed by Maxim Gorky, but then like most artists, he
fell on bad times in the Stalin era.  Many of his works were suppressed and
came out only after Perestroika in the 80s.  The stories have a dark side,
there is a sense of loss or tragedy, and reflect real events, like when
Platonov's son is taken away to the Gulag, he writes of a cow dying when
it's calf is butchered. Some stories like the "Epifan locks" are historical
- Peter the Great orders a canal built, all protests are to be swept aside.

blurb:
People are on the move in all ten stories in this collection—coming home as
in The Return, leaving home as in Rubbish Wind, traveling far away from their
country as in The Locks of Epiphan—trying to improve their lives and those of
others, searching and fleeing. Their journeys are accompanied by two motives,
which characterize the writing of Andrey Platonov: optimism and faith in the
goodness of humanity, and abject despair at the cruelty and apparent
senselessness of our existence. The protagonists are torn between these poles
and sometimes a synthesis shines through the blackness of despair—the hope
against hope that a better life is still possible. Combining realism with
poetic vision and the deceptively simple language of folktales, Platonov
lights up his stories by using language in a way that renders it unfamiliar,
making the ordinary seem unusual and the extraordinary logical. This new
translation is the first to present Platonov's gift as a short-story writer
to an English-language readership, showing why it is that Joseph Brodsky
regarded Platonov as the equal of Joyce, Kafka, and Proust.