Nobody writes like Andrei Platonov
Every one of his texts can be retold. Here, this is a dark grotesque about the period of collectivization in young Soviet Russia and all the horrors it brought with it, and at the same time it tells about the noblest and most sublime aspirations of communism, and about universal human suffering. But it simply cannot be clear until you pick up the book.
You read a sentence and say to yourself – oh my god, what did I read this? – then you think about it for a while, turn it over three pages, read it again, and at some point you are ready to continue. And then the next sentence is the same: confusing, confusing grammar, mismatched subject and subject, the language of the Soviet five-year-old girl broken and then reassembled, and something new shines from it.
Many solid and always acceptable writers write, somehow, automatically: they will never surprise you with an adjective (blue plums, green grass), by the time you get halfway through a sentence you already know the rest without much room for error, redundancy is their middle name so that everything is clear even to readers from the last line, and they run away from strangeness. And let’s not get into what is often called beautiful style and was previously more accurately and offensively called “purple patch”: piling up and stringing words together for pure effect.
There is none of that with Platonov. Every sentence betrays effort, every one moves with difficulty towards an unknown goal, just as his heroes suffer terribly, beyond all limits of physical and spiritual endurance. And yet. Reading Platonov provides a pure joy and light all the more unexpected when you look at what is happening in the text. Someone else would have made something dark and disgusting out of this, along the lines of Selino or Antunes. Not Platonov. Kornelija Ichin, who translated this book with much love and certainly a lot of effort, recently said passionately in response to a comment in this regard: “It’s because Plato CARES about man!” and that’s it, care and love are felt and radiate from every side, and only because of that can this story about workers who are dying digging the foundation for a building that will never be erected and about peasants who, due to collectivization, can only lie down in a pre-prepared coffin and wait for death (all the while pouring oil into the lamp above their heads) be endured.
“He was delighted and shaken by the almost eternal stay of the pebble in the clay environment, in the gathering place of darkness: so, he has a reason to be there, all the more so that man should live.”