On his way home from war, the soldier in the title story of Andrey Platonov's The Return, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone (Harvill, £9.99 in UK) delays returning to his wife and children in order to spend a couple of days with a young woman. When he does arrive home, he finds his wife an exhausted, nervous wreck while the 12-year-old son he barely recognises has, through responsibility and concern, become domineeringly fussy beyond his years. Suspecting his wife has been unfaithful, the soldier decides to go back to the young woman. His children change his mind.
In `The River Potudan', another soldier returns home and eventually finds love with a woman he had known as a child, yet the prospect of failing her drives him into bizarre self-exile during which he becomes a mute and mindless down-and-out. Only news of his wife's attempted suicide forces him to return to a life of happiness.
Elsewhere a young boy witnesses the tragedy which occurs when the family cow has her calf taken from her. The shortest piece concerns an Aesop-like battle of wills between a bread crumb and a crumb of gunpowder. None of these stories was published during Platonov's lifetime but most of them, through their thematic diversity, energy and pathos, confirm his status as one of the finest Russian writers of the 20th century and an obvious heir to Maxim Gorky, who was to prove a valuable mentor. In Platonov, the best of the 19th-century Russian tradition meets with the playful, satirical and exasperated voice of its 20th-century literary self.
The son of a railway worker Platonov, author of the dazzling absurdist parable The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, was born 100 years ago this year, joined the Red Army as a 17-year-old and saw action during the Civil War. Later he worked as an engineer and by the mid-1920s had begun to emerge as a writer. He is a fascinating figure for many reasons, not least because he is one of the few major Russian writers of working class origins. His first collection, The Gates of Epiphany, appeared in 1927.
Although a war correspondent during the Great Patriotic War, he was often out of favour. Finally silenced, he spent some of the war in various camps. On release from the Gulag in 1946, he worked as a janitor in the House of Writers in Moscow. His final years were spent tending his teenage son who died from the tuberculosis, which in turn killed Platonov in 1951.
Being suppressed as a writer at home had the usual effect; 60 years of silence left Platonov unknown in the West. However, in death he was to find a wonderful champion in Joseph Brodsky. According to the 1987 Nobel Laureate Platonov "simply had a tendency to see his words to their logical - that is, absurd, that is totally paralysing - end. In other words, like no other Russian writer before or after him, Platonov was able to reveal a self-destructive, eschatological element within the language itself."
The publication in an English translation in 1996 of The Foundation Pit, a Russian Waiting for Godot with echoes of Lewis Carroll and Gorky, proved how right Brodsky's assessment was. Begun in 1929 and completed the following year, The Foundation Pit remained unpublished until 1973, when a Russian-language edition was printed in Ann Arbour, Michigan, more than 20 years after Platonov's death. It was finally published in Russia in 1987 through the pages of the literary journal, Novy Mir.
There can be no doubt The Foundation Pit is a classic of passionate subversion. In that novel, in which a crazy group of misfits gathered in an unspecified provincial landscape somewhere in Russia, is busily engaged in digging a vast foundation pit for a shining, many-storeyed building called "socialism" he creates a surreal atmosphere of low-key, topsy-turvy confusions. Any time Pashkin, the chairman of the Regional Trades Union Council, is faced with a problem, his response is predictable: `History says happiness is inevitable". Another character announces "I used to be a priest, but now I've renounced my soul and got myself a jazzy haircut." One of the main players, a strange, young girl called Nastya, who cheerfully witnesses her mother's death, asks: "Why are you dying, Mummy? Is it because you are a bourgeois, or it is just death?" Symbolising the fledging USSR, prophetically, she sickens and dies.
Platonov, the socialist with a genius for exposing the absurdities of Soviet jargon with its self-imploding array of rhetoric, cliches and colloquialisms, is also capable of calm, reflective passages - as seen in The Return. "Grass had grown again on the trodden-down dirt-tracks of the civil war, because the war had stopped . . . Some had died in the fighting, many were being treated for their wounds . . . while some of the demobilised men were still making their way home in their old greatcoats . . . they walked with faint, astonished hearts . . . Their souls had changed in the torment of war." Several of the characters consciously choose to drop out of life. One old man, having lost two sons during the Imperialist war, and aware his remaining boy is involved in the civil conflict, has taken to sleeping from dusk to dawn, "otherwise, if he didn't sleep . . . his heart would ache with longing for his lost sons, and with sorrow for his life that had passed so dismally".
An English engineer drawn to Peter the Great's Russia loses his intended, and his life, working on a daring, ill-fated project.
Nor are the stories without the wonderful, black humour which is so vital to Russian literature. The mood-shifts throughout the pieces are subtle. Platonov's characters are not heroes but victims of life. Overall, it is a gentle work offering yet another side to him.
Optimism and despair walk hand-in-hand through Platonov's world and these stories should not only intrigue readers, but also add to a growing reputation already established in the West by The Foundation Pit.
