“I am convinced that proletarian art when it comes will be outrageous. We grow out of the earth, out of all its dirt, and everything there is on this earth is in us. But don’t be afraid—we’ll clean ourselves; we hate our own squalor and we move stubbornly out of the mud. This is our main idea. Out of our ugliness will grow the world’s heart…”
One of Platonov’s heroes says: “Without me, the country’s not complete.”
Andrei Platonov had the right to say this about himself.
Translator’s Note
BEFORE HIS DEATH last year, the late Konstantin Paustovsky asked in print (Novy Mir, 1967): “How could it have happened that books whose artistic merit was negligible and which at most revealed the sharpness and cunning of their authors were presented as masterpieces of our literature, whereas excellent works… lay hidden and only saw the light of day a quarter of a century after they were written…? The damage done is irreparable. Had for instance the works of Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Bulgakov appeared when they were written, our contemporaries would have been immeasurably richer in spirit.”
This selection of Andrei Platonov’s stories includes material written both before the war against Nazi Germany and after it, the first three stories dating from the 1920s and 1930s, the last four from the years after the war. But all of them belong among those stories that were published infrequently or not at all until literary controls began to be relaxed in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953.
“Dzhan,” for example, was unknown to Soviet readers until 1966 although it was written after Platonov made a trip to Turkmenistan in Soviet Central Asia in the mid-1930s. The story takes place in the valley of the Amu-Darya River, better known to non-Russians as the Oxus River and as the setting of Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum.” The places named are all real places, including the Sari-Kamish depression, forty-four meters below sea level, which lies to the west of the Khivan delta of the Amu-Darya River. The problems connected with introducing into the modern world the small nomadic tribes living in this region of Central Asia are also real ones, shared by Iran and Afghanistan.
Some of the unidentified Platonov sentences quoted in the Introduction, including the quotation from the imaginary book, are from the novel Chevengur, of which as Yevtushenko says only one part has yet been published in Russian; the youthful declaration about beauty is from the foreword to The Blue Deep, the book of Platonov’s poems which was issued in 1922. The stories in this book have all been translated from two recent selections of Platonov’s works, one published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1965 in a printing of 50,000 copies and the other by Moskovski Rabochi in 1966 in a printing of 100,000 copies.
DZHAN1
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NAZAR CHAGATAYEV, a young man, not a Russian, walked into the courtyard of the Moscow Institute of Economics. He looked wonderingly around him. He had been walking through this courtyard for several years, it was here his youth had gone, but he did not regret it. He had climbed high now, high up the mountain of his own mind from which could be seen all this summer world warmed by the setting evening sun.
Patches of grass grew in the courtyard, a rubbish can stood in one corner, farther back there was a dilapidated wooden shed, and next to this lived a single old apple tree uncared for by anyone. Near this tree lay a stone weighing, probably, a half a ton, brought from nobody knew where; still farther back the iron wheel of a nineteenth-century locomotive was half-buried in the ground.
The courtyard was empty. The young man sat down on the threshold of the shed, and pondered. In the office of the institute he had received confirmation of the acceptance of his thesis, and the diploma itself would be sent to him later by mail. He would not be coming back here any longer. He walked around all the useless things in the courtyard and touched them with his hand; for some reason, he wished that these things would remember him, and love him. But he didn’t believe they would. From childhood memories he knew how strange and sad it is after a long absence to see a familiar place again, for these unmoving objects have no memory and do not recognize the stirrings of a stranger’s heart.
An old garden grew behind the shed. They had set up tables, strung temporary lights, and arranged various decorations. The director of the institute had picked this date for an evening celebration of the graduation of Soviet economists and engineers. Nazar Chagatayev walked out of the courtyard of his institute to his dormitory, to rest and to change for the evening. He lay on his bed and unexpectedly fell asleep, with that sensation of sudden physical happiness which comes only to the young.
Later, in the evening, Chagatayev went back to the garden of the Institute of Economics. He had put on his good gray suit, saved through long years of study, and had shaved himself in front of a hand mirror. Everything he owned was either under his pillow or in the nightstand next to his bed. As he went out for the evening, Chagatayev looked with regret into the darkness of his cupboard; soon it would forget him, and the smell of Chagatayev’s clothes and of his body would disappear forever from this wooden box.
The dormitory was lived in by students of other institutes, so Chagatayev went back to the institute alone. An orchestra invited from the movie theater was playing in the garden, the tables had been arranged in one long row, and above them were the bright lights that the electricians had wired between the trees. The summer night stood like a dome over the heads of those who had gathered for the celebration, to see each other for the last time, and all the fascination of this night was in the open, warm spaciousness, in the silence of the sky and of the garden.
The music played. The young people who were finishing at the institute sat at the tables, ready to go out into the land around them, to build their own happiness. The musician’s violin died away like a voice fading away in the distance.
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