The Return and Other Stories

183 Pages·2016·0.88 MB·English

by  Andrey Platonov

CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Andrey Platonov
Title Page
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Motherland of Electricity
The Epifan Locks
Rubbish Wind
Lobskaya Hill
The River Potudan
The Cow
The Seventh Man
Nikita
The Return
Two Crumbs
A Note on Translating Platonov
A Note on the Peasant Hut
Notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book People are on the move in all ten stories
in this collection, coming home as in “The Return”,
leaving home as in “Rubbish Wind”, travelling far away
from their country as in “The Locks of Epiphan”, trying
to improve their lives and those of others, running away,
searching, 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, randomness,
and apparent senselessness of our existence. The
protagonists are torn between these poles and sometimes
a synthesis shines through the mists of the apparent
naivety of faith and the blackness of despair: the hope
against hope that a better life is still possible.
Though Russian readers and critics have come to look on Platonov as among
their greatest prose writers of this century, he has yet to enjoy a parallel
international reputation – mainly because much of his best writing was
suppressed for more than 60 years. Combining a realism inspired by his work as
an engineer with poetic vision and the deceptively simple language of folk tales,
Platonov sets his stories alight by using language in a way that renders it
unfamiliar, makes the ordinary seem unusual and the extraordinary logical. This
new translation is the first to present the full range of 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.
About the Author
ANDREY PLATONOVITCH PLATONOV (1899–1951), the son of a railway-worker, was
born near Voronzeh. He fought in the Red Army during the civil war, and then
became an electrical engineer and land-reclamation specialist. From 1918 he
published articles, verse and essays, passing from the optimistic vision of the
pamphlet Electrification (1921), through a science-fiction trilogy, to the stories
that began to appear, from 1926 on, in the “thick” Moscow journals. His talent
was spotted early by Maxim Gorky, but after initial success, tales such as
“Doubting Makar” (1929) and “For Future Use” (1931) were strongly criticized.
Stalin is reputed to have written “scum” in the margin of the latter, and to have
said to Fadeev (later to be Secretary of the Writes’ Union) “Give him a good
belting – ‘for future use’”. During the Great Patriotic War (1941–5) Palatonov
worked as a war correspondent and once more began to receive some measure of
official recognition. However, like Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, he came under
attack again in the post-war clamp-down, and died of consumption caught from
his teenage son whom he had nursed on his return from the Gulag in 1946.
Although Platonov’s stories began to be republished in the late 1950s, his major
writings of the late 1920s and early ’30s, including his two great novels, The
Foundation Pit and Chevengur, remained unpublished in Russia until the late
1980s. When the KGB’s “literary archive” was partially opened in the early
1990s, the draft of a previously unknown Platonov work, The Technical Novel,
was discovered in his file.
ROBERT CHANDLER has translated a number of books from Russian, including
Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (co-translated with Geoffrey Smith), and Vasily
Grossman’s epic novel, Life and Fate.
ELIZABETH CHANDLER has over the years made an increasing contribution to her
husband’s translations.
ANGELA LIVINGSTONE has been a professor of Russian Literature at the University
of Essex since 1992. She has published books on Pasternak and Lou Andreas-
Salomé, and is the translator of Marina Tsvetaeva’s essays on poetry.
Also by Andrey Platonov in English translation
THE FOUNDATION PIT
Andrey Platonov
THE RETURN
and Other Stories
Translated from the Russian by
Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
and Angela Livingstone
INTRODUCTION
Andrey Platonov’s father, Platon Klimentov, was a metal worker and a self-
taught inventor. It was in homage to him and to the Greek philosopher alike that
Andrey, as a young writer, adopted the pseudonym Platonov. The eldest of
eleven children, Andrey began work at the age of fifteen, also as a metal-worker
and assistant engine-driver. A passionate, even fanatical believer in the new
world to be constructed by Science and Socialism, he began publishing poems
and articles in the Voronezh press in 1918, at the same time as beginning his
studies in the electrical science department of the railway polytechnic. Whether
he took part in active fighting during the Civil War is not entirely clear; we
know that at one point he was attached to the Red Army as a journalist and sent
to Novokhopersk, where he witnessed six changes of power in the course of a
month.
Shocked by the terrible drought and famine of 1921, Platonov abandoned
literature for work in land reclamation. His reasons would have been understood
by Tolstoy: “being someone technically qualified,” he wrote, “I was unable to
continue to engage in contemplative work such as literature.”1 The first of the
stories in this volume, “The Motherland of Electricity”, is clearly based on his
own experiences during the following years. Two sides of the young Platonov –
the visionary poet and the practical engineer – are embodied in the two main
characters: Zharyonov, the village-soviet chairman who speaks and writes letters
in verse, and the engineer-narrator. The heart of this compassionate and
humorous story lies in the conversation between the old peasant woman and the
narrator. He tells her there is no point in praying to God for rain. She agrees,
surprisingly, and continues:
You’re right – we cross ourselves in vain! What haven’t I prayed about?
I’ve prayed for my husband, I’ve prayed for my children – and not one of
them’s been spared, they’re all dead now. If I keep going, my dear, it’s
from habit – do you think I choose to live? My heart doesn’t ask me, it
breathes by itself, and my hand’s just the same – it makes the sign of the
cross by itself: God’s our curse. [ . . . ] Don’t think it’s just God we bow
down to – we’re frightened by the wind and by the ice beneath our feet,
and by downpours, by drought, by our neighbours, by passers-by, and we
cross ourselves before all of them! Do you think we pray out of love?
There isn’t anything left of us to love with!
After parting from this old woman the narrator says wryly: “I decided to
dedicate my life to her, because in youth it always seems that there is a great
deal of life and that there will be enough of it to help every old woman.”
*
“The Motherland of Electricity”, written in 1926,2 contains all the elements of
the mature Platonov except tragedy. The next story, “The Epifan Locks”, is
unremittingly doom-laden; the hero is aware, almost from the first pages, of
impending disaster, but can do nothing to avert it. Platonov’s change of tone
most probably reflects a crisis he underwent during the years 1926–27. Repeated
problems with the security organs and with his colleagues in Tambov, where he
was director of the land-reclamation bureau, appear to have set off some
profound disillusion, perhaps to have reawoken doubts that Platonov had
suppressed since witnessing the violence of the Civil War. In any case Platonov
left Tambov and returned to Moscow to pursue a vocation as a writer. And it was
during the next four years that he was to write much of his most important and
subversive work.
“The Epifan Locks” is about an English engineer, Bertrand Perry, who is
commissioned by Peter the Great to build an ambitious system of locks and
canals. He is sentenced to death when the project fails; eventually – though this
is not spelled out – he is strangled by a sadistic homosexual of an executioner.
This complex story can perhaps best be understood in the light of a prescient
article Platonov was to write several years later, “About Socialist Tragedy”.3 In
this article Platonov insists, heretically, that neither socialism nor technology can
alter the fundamentally tragic nature of life. At the same time, apparently
contradicting himself, he insists that socialism must resolve the tragic encounter
between man and nature.
[Nature] is not great and is not abundant.4 Or her disposition is so severe
that she has never yielded her greatness and her abundance to anyone.
This is a good thing; otherwise [ . . . ] we would long ago have got drunk
on nature, we would have looted, squandered and devoured her to the
bone. [ . . . ] The tragic encounter between man, armed with machine and
heart, and the dialectic of nature must in our country be resolved through
Socialism. But it must be understood that this task is an extremely
serious one. Ancient life on the “surface” of nature was able to obtain
what was essential to it from the waste products and excretions of
elemental forces and substances. But we climb inside the world, and in
return the world crushes us with an equivalent strength.5
“The Epifan Locks” is in some respects as autobiographical as “The
Motherland of Electricity”. Platonov had himself been in charge of projects not
so very different from Perry’s; by early 1926 he had apparently been responsible
for the digging of 763 ponds and 331 wells, in addition to draining 2,400 acres
of swamp land.6 And he had himself received death-threats from colleagues
during his months in Tambov; we can only guess at the reasons for this hostility
– did Platonov upset the locals by being excessively zealous? – but it is clear that
Platonov felt as alien and endangered there as Bertrand Perry in Epifan. Nor is
the story any less relevant to the concerns of 1920s Russia for being set in the
eighteenth century. Platonov was keenly aware of similarities between his own
time and that of Peter the Great. He had even written newspaper articles about
the possibility of improving communications in Central Russia through a
programme of canal-building very similar to that abandoned by Peter.7 But, as so
often with Platonov, there is a gulf between the rationalist, positivist, utopian
tone of the journalism and the deeper perspectives revealed by his fiction.
“The Epifan Locks” describes an arrogant attempt to force both nature
herself, and the life of the people, into a different channel, to cajole nature and
the people to yield more than they wish. At one level the story can be read as a
warning: grand schemes thought up by ambitious rulers will fail unless they take
into account the practical wisdom of the people. One of the finest sections of the
story describes the tortuous journey from Petersburg to Epifan; it is as if
Petersburg and Epifan represent different worlds, between which one can move
only with difficulty. The work Perry does in Petersburg is clearly of a high
calibre, and Platonov explicitly points out that he avoids “the reefs and shoals of
theory”; nevertheless Perry is aghast when he first sees the Don: “In Saint
Petersburg, on plans, [Peter’s venture] had seemed clear and practicable, but
now, in their noon passage towards the Don, it seemed devilish, arduous and
overwhelming.”
A second failure of communication is between Perry’s reason and his
feelings. While still in Petersburg, Perry learns that his fiancée has married
another man. In his speechless fury he bites so tightly on his pipe that his gums