Russian Literature: 'We are not going to allow unhappiness any longer." A terrifying interdict. A dream as morally problematic in the Stalinist era as in today's war-torn world. With these words Chagataev, the zealous hero of Andrei Platonov's novel, Soul, sets out on his state-sponsored mission to the Sary-Kamysh desert in Soviet Central Asia. Reviewed by Sarah Smyth.
Chagataev, abandoned by his mother as a child and subsequently nurtured by the Fatherhood of the Stalinist State, journeys back through time and space to the primeval wasteland of his origins. This is a world denuded of all attachment, memory and hope, a landscape inhabited by souls lost even to themselves. He dreams of transforming this arid, barren hell - a dream no less worthy than any dream of regime change - and of liberating his nation from the oppression of mere subsistence. This prototypical hero of a socialist realist novel believes himself truly endowed with supreme power. He is convinced that he will fill the desert with the happiness of a new order.
The reader travels with Chagataev into this stark and harrowing world, stripped of all the comfort zones that cocoon us from our frailty. There, with the hero, we hesitate, stumble and weep when confronted with the barely audible vestiges of life that populate his homeland: a nation of some 40 souls who survive on roots and suck the sand dry to quench their thirst, whose bones rattle when they move; of a toothless dog whose silent bark fills the emptiness; of feral sheep ever circling the desert in search of a shepherd; of a single camel, parched and despairing.
The desert in this novel is a geographical space, populated by wizened and empty ghosts. It was the dwelling place of Ahriman, the God of Darkness, who all his life had sought without success to enjoy the fruits of paradise in the neighbouring kingdom of Ormzud. It is also a mental and spiritual locus characterised by a people who have grown used to dying and who embrace death with indifference.
Chagataev's struggle to create paradise ex nihilo turns into a struggle against indifference and non-being. It is also a struggle that threatens to deprive his nation of the only blessing left to it - its freedom. For the nation of the Dzhan death is preferable to enslavement. This is the painful lesson for the hard-working hero whose destiny is to engineer human souls: the souls don't want to be engineered. The most deprived and marginalised, the barely existing, subvert the Stalinist great dream. They dismissively shrug off Chagataev's role as epic hero. They reject the "one true path" in favour of the unwritten and untrodden pathways through the wasteland and into the sunset.
In this novel the seed of hope is not sown by Chagataev or his dream, but rather by the child, Aidym, who, in defiance of the adage "blessed is she who died in her mother's womb", blossoms in the wasteland.
This novel, which dates from 1934-5 and both espouses and then confounds the tenets of socialist realism, was not published in uncensored form until 1999, the centenary year of the author's birth. Not surprisingly. As with so many of his contemporaries, Andrei Platonov's questioning of the socialist utopian dream earned him the sanction of silence. Reaching maturity as the new Soviet state was taking shape, he was initially committed to the project of rebuilding Russian society through his writing and through his professional involvement in the land improvement and electrification projects.
Having triggered Stalin's personal ire, and consequently the ire of the literary establishment, he found it increasingly difficult to be published, but continued writing undaunted. Most of his works of the late 1920s and 1930s only saw the light of day during the glasnost period, long after his death in 1951. The celebration of the centenary of his birth accelerated his rehabilitation and Platonov is now belatedly, but justifiably, joining the ranks of Russian writers of world stature.
Robert and Elizabeth Chandler's latest translation of Platonov's work captures beautifully the resonances of his language; the reader is compelled to read, just as the characters are compelled to survive. Robert Chandler prefaces the translation with two articles, one charting Platonov's experience of Central Asia and the other discussing his approach to translation. He concludes the edition with notes and a recollection of the first reading of this novel in the 1960s by one of Russia's leading Platonov specialists.
This excellent translation is a very welcome addition to the range of Russian classics available in the English language. Today's readership will find in Platonov's oeuvre as profound a challenge as did Stalin's ideologues.
Sarah Smyth is a lecturer in Russian at Trinity College Dublin
Soul. By Andrei Platonov. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and
Olga Meerson, with Jane Chamberlain, Olga Kouznetsova and Eric Naiman
The Harvill Press, 161pp, £11.99