Soul and Other Stories (review)

The “Soul” of the title is not the celebrated Russian soul. It is dzhan, a word of Turkish origin, meaning “a soul seeking happiness.” In that novella, a native son educated in Moscow is sent home to Turkmenistan to find his lost people; the hero discovers there a world so vast, poor, pale, and devoid of organized energy that he loses track of time as he loses himself in unmarked space. Andrey Platonov (1899–1951) is that rare Russian writer who owes nothing to cities. Born into a poor family, trained as a metalworker and land surveyor, he was sent into the steppe in the 1920s and 1930s and wrote of what he felt and saw. He was not a peasant writer full of nostalgia for the preindustrial village, nor was he a Slavophile like Solzhenitsyn. Platonov knew machines and admired them. One of the tales in this collection concerns a young man’s commission to repair an electricity station in the desert. But communication and materials are forever thwarted. Far from being concentrated or accelerated by civilization, the energy of human beings escapes and dissipates in open space. A war that rips fathers from their families cannot deliver them home intact. The best machine cannot keep that starving family alive. Platonov’s great themes are the unforgiving immensity of Central Asian space and the weariness of the working body. His language in Russian is slow, lyrical, thoughtful, cautious, richly embroidered and interwoven, as if fearful to spill a drop. The Chandler translations achieve an equivalently miraculous texture; the stories simply cannot be skimmed. But there are moments when things speed up, and then one can hardly breathe with excitement. One such occurs in the volume’s most beautiful story, “The Return.” A soldier back from the front is displeased with his wife and family, who had waited for him as best they could; he is about to abandon them but at the last minute sees his son and daughter running after the train. His world opens up, he jumps down, and allows himself to go home.