A hero suffering without an audience
Benjamin Yarde-Buller
THE RETURN AND OTHER STORIES by Andrey Platonov Harvill, £9.99, pp. 215 For a number of reasons, none of them relating to the quality of his writing, Andrey Platonov has, in comparison with some of his compatriots, received little attention from the non-Russian-speaking world. Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak were both brought to the notice of the West at the height of the Cold War, and their per- sonal experiences were symbolic in a grand, tragic .way of the injustices of the commu- nist system: Solzhenitsyn endured the Gulag and Pasternak was infamously for- bidden to accept the Nobel Prize for Dr Zhivago. The details of Platonov's life, no less tragic, never made it out of the Soviet Union onto the international stage; like many of his heroes, he suffered virtually without an audience.
Born in 1899, Platonov witnessed as a child the grotesque poverty of peasant Rus- sia, and he became convinced of the need for profound social reform. He began to write in 1918, and was initially successful. However, as Stalinist Russia took shape, the optimistic tone of his early writing darkened, and from 1930 he was unable to publish any of his serious work. During the second world war, he found employment as a correspondent, but in 1945 his 15-year- old son was removed to the Gulag. He returned a year later fatally ill with tuber- culosis, which Platonov subsequently con- tracted, dying himself in 1951.
Given the extreme violence and depriva- tion of the times in which he lived, it is not surprising that death is never far behind the scenes in Platonov's fiction. The stories in this selection are centrally concerned with the way in which ordinary people con- tinue to live in a world where death con- stantly deprives them of what they love, whether a person or an ideal. Suffering, in Platonov, is not noble and eloquent; it reduces humans to near beasts, to a state of inarticulate numbness where life has ebbed into mere existence. Nikita, hero of `The River Potudan' (described by one crit- ic as 'one of the finest stories about love in Russian literature'), leaves his wife because his impotence, the result of an excess of tenderness, is making her unhappy. He becomes a tramp and loses the ability to speak,
his sense of his own self ... weak and [think- ing] only thoughts which wandered into his mind at random. By autumn, most likely, he would have quite forgotten who he was.
Finally Nikita, discovered by his father, recovers his buried personality and returns to his wife to consummate their marriage, although by this time she is dangerously ill with consumption. It is characteristic of Platonov that the story finishes on a note, albeit thin, of hope; a degree of faith in the goodness of humanity, if not of fate, is asserted.
Perhaps the most powerful story in the selection, and the most representative, is `Rubbish Wind', ostensibly set in Nazi Ger- many, but depicting a world closer to the Soviet Union of the 1930s. The main char- acter, Lichtenburg, having left his wife because he feels that she is no longer human, relieves his outrage at the world which surrounds him by hitting a statue of Hitler with a stick. He is mutilated by Nazi thugs and left to die in a heap of rubbish. There he survives for an indefinite period, living on rotting morsels and rats before being taken to a concentration camp, by this stage so far removed from human life that he has grown hair all over his body and is described in the official report as 'a possibly new species of social animal'. The story ends with Lichtenburg, having some- how escaped, amputating and cooking his own leg in a futile attempt to save a dying mother, before dying himself. This ghastly allegory of humanity's struggle to survive against the odds is also a subtle critique of what was happening in Stalinist Russia. It is not the idea of communism which Platonov attacks, but its mutation, in the hands of a corrupt leadership, into the self- consuming idolatry and oppression of fas- cism. In the rubbish heap, Lichtenburg hallucinates his own version of commu- nism, 'a moist, cool country, covered with corn and flowers, and a serious, thoughtful man walking behind a heavy machine'.
Joseph Brodsky regarded • Platonov as heir to the Dostoevskian tradition in Rus- sian prose. These visionary and moving stories amply illustrate what he meant, and should be read by anyone interested in Russian literature, or literature in general.
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