ANDREY PLATONOV (1899—1951), the son of a metalworker and
the eldest of ten children, was born in a village near the Russian
town of Voronezh. He began to publish poems and stories in the
1920s and worked as a land reclamation expert in central Russia,
where he was a witness to the ravages of the Great Famine. In the
1930s Platonov fell into disfavor with the Soviet government and
his writing disappeared from sight.
JOHN BERGER is the author of numerous works of fiction and
nonfiction, including To the Wedding, the Into their Labours
trilogy, About Looking, Ways of Seeing, and G., for which he won
the Booker Prize. His most recent book is Hold Everything Dear:
Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. He lives in a small rural
community in France.
ROBERT CHANDLER has translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire
and is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.
His translations from Russian include Pushkin's Dubrovsky and The
Captain's Daughter, Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Vasily
Grossman's Life and Fate and Hamid Ismailo's The Railway. His
co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes in the UK and
the US. His Alexander Pushkin is published by Hesperus in their
series of Brief Lives. He teaches part time at Queen Mary,
University of London.
ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator of several volumes of
Platonov and of Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter.
OLGA MEERSON teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of
Dostoevsky's Taboos (in English) and Platonov's Poetic of
Re-Familiarization (in Russian). She is a co-translator of
Platonov's The Foundation Pit and Soul and Other Stories, which, in
2004, was awarded the AATSEEL prize for best translation from a
Slavonic language.
"I squint back on our century and I see six writers I think it will
be remembered for. They are Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka,
Robert Musil, William Faulkner, Andrey Platonov and Samuel
Beckett.... They are summits in the literary landscape of our
century ... What's more, they don't lose an inch of their status
when compared to the giants of fiction from the previous
century."—Joseph Brodsky "Soul ( New York Review Books )
gathered eight works from another Slavic giant, Andrei Platonov.
Works of great tenderness and insight in the face of oppression,
they're brilliantly rendered by one of the great translators of our
time, Robert Chandler, and his team. It features a striking
afterword by John Berger..." --The Guardian "Andrey Platonov
has not yet received the attention he richly deserves here...[he]
turns out to be one of the finest writers of the 20th century,
worthy to stand alongside Kafka and Joyce. So thanks to NYRB
Classics for publishing the Platonov collection Soul, which
contains an informatively polemical introduction by Chandler, a
smattering of stories ('Among Animals and Plants' appeared last
year in The New Yorker), and the short novels 'Soul' and 'The
Return.'" --The Arts Fuse “In Russia it is Platonov who is
increasingly described as the best writer of the post-revolutionary
epoch.” –Victor Erofeyev, The Times Literary
Supplement "Andrey Platonov is increasingly being recognized,
in Russia and elsewhere, as one of the greatest writers of the
Soviet period." –The Spectator “Platonov is a realist as only
the Russians can be realists, unsparing and utterly without any
literary device except the exact and telling detail. The result
seems. . .more myth than reality, as Platonov’s Russia is
incredibly strange.” –Guy Davenport “Reading Platonov is
always an exhilarating, depressing and moving experience.”
–Slavonica"The most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered
since the end of the Soviet Union." –The Independent (UK) "In
Platonov's prose, it is impossible to find a single inelegant
sentence." –The Times (UK) "In this century the best Russian
prose has been written by our poets and Platonov, but he is an
exception...Platonov speaks of a nation which in a sense has become
a victim of its own language; or, more precisely, he speaks of this
language itself which turns out to be capable of generating a
fictive world and then falling into grammatical dependence on it."
–Joseph Brodsky “As his versions of Andrey Platonov prove,
Robert Chandler is the supreme translator of difficult Russian
rose.” –The Literary Review “Rarely does literture come this
close to music.” –The Observer (UK) "In Soul, Platonov weaves
together Sufi philosophy, Persian travelogue, socialist realism,
and the language of Soviet bureaucracy into a magical tissue with
the luminous, universal quality of myth. Soul is an unforgettably
weird retelling of a familiar story: the struggle of an educated
young man to assimilate his present with his past." –Elif
Batuman, The Daily Beast
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