Soul and other stories / Andrey Platonov ; afterword by John Berger ; translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Katia Grigoruk ... [and others].

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Platonov, Andreĭ Platonovich, 1899-1951.

Contributor:

Chandler, Robert, 1953-

Chandler, Elizabeth, 1947-

Series:

New York Review Books classics

Standardized Title:

Short stories. Selections. English

Language:

English

Russian

Subjects (All):

Platonov, Andreĭ Platonovich, 1899-1951--Translations into English.

Platonov, Andreĭ Platonovich.

Platonov, Andreĭ Platonovich, 1899-1951.

Soviet Union--Social life and customs--Fiction.

Soviet Union.

Manners and customs.

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

lvii, 335 pages : map ; 21 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York Review Books, [2008]

Summary:

The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov's vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called "alternative realism." Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka.

This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are "The Return," about an officer's difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of "three great works of Russian literature of the millennium"; "The River Potudan," a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech. This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov's short fiction.

Contents:

Soul

The third son

Among animals and plants

Fro

The river Potudan

The cow

The motherland of electricity

The return.

ISBN:

9781590172544

159017254X

OCLC:

153582650

Online:

Publisher description

Contributor biographical information