A new translation of a brilliant Soviet stylist
PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK
CHEVENGUR ANDREY PLATONOV
Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler 592pp. Harvill Secker. £22.
BORN IN VORONEZH in 1899, Andrey Platonov emerged in the mid-1920s as one of the most original voices in the early Soviet avant-garde. It was for his stories that he was long known, as most of his longer fiction was banned during his lifetime. His novel Chevengur – written between 1927 and 1929 – was first published in Paris in 1972, just over two decades after his death in 1951. It did not appear in the Soviet Union until 1988. The same went for that other masterpiece, The Foundation Pit, which was published in the West in 1969, but not until 1987 in his homeland. And Platonov’s unfinished Happy Moscow appeared in the Soviet Union in August 1991, just as the architects of a hardline coup were trying to remove the president, Mikhail Gorbachev, from power.
Platonov was no dissident or fellow traveller, to use Leon Trotsky’s dismissive term for those who were neither entirely hostile to the revolution nor committed Bolsheviks. He had impeccable proletarian credentials and believed profoundly in the promise of communism. “I am so desperate to write artistically, with clarity, feeling, and class loyalty”, he confided in a notebook.
Why, then, was he vilified in the early 1930s, with Stalin himself condemning him as a “bastard”? The answer is at least in part because his brilliant, idiosyncratic literary style went against every convention of what would coalesce into socialist realism. It was also partly because his imaginative world is peopled by dreamers, wanderers and halfwits who spout ill-digested political slogans, half-remembered religious sentiments and visionary metaphysical truths.
So much was clear to Maxim Gorky, who read Chevengur in manuscript. Praising its “very distinctive language”, he nonetheless noted Platonov’s “anarchistic frame of mind”. “Whatever you may have wished”, he cautioned, “you have portrayed reality in a lyrico-satirical light that is, of course, unacceptable to our censorship.” It was not just Chevengur’s content that alarmed Gorky, though, but also Platonov’s disregard for novelistic form itself. “Its technical failings are its extreme prolixity”, he wrote, “an excess of conversation and the fading away of the novel’s ‘action’.”
Gorky’s objections have since come to be seen as Chevengur’s most characteristic virtues. Platonov had planned to write a novel illustrating “the complexity and depth of the
