The Fierce and Beautiful World

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.