| Thursday, April 30, 2009 11:32PM | | | | A New Language | Posted By: Elise Blackwell
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| Tags: Andrey Platonov, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Wendy Lesser, T. J. Clark, Soviet literature, Faulkner, Russian novels, absurdism |
During the question-and-answer period of the panel on the work of Andrey Platonov, a member of the deeply engaged (if somewhat small) audience referenced Joseph Brodsky’s memorable claim that Dostoyevky’s literary descendent was Kafka, while Tolstoy’s line yielded Margaret Mitchell. Platonov belongs, if to either, to the Dostoevsky-Kafka line. Yet he is as distinct from Dostoevsky and Kafka as they are from each other. Even Brodsky—ever critical of Soviet atrocities against language—found much to celebrate in the language of Platonov, himself a supporter of the Russian revolution if often skeptical of its incarnation (and, certainly, its language) as well as a victim of its literary censors.
This evening’s panel was not merely a rehabilitation of Platonov but another sign that this writer who died in poverty will soon take his place on the shortest list of Russian-language literary giants. Moderating was Platonov champion Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review of Books Classics series, which has published Platonov’s stories in not one but two translations. He compared Platonov to Beckett and Kafka—who were also fed up with the bourgeois properties of the novel—but distinguishes Platonov from absurdism by his “desire to make the world whole.” Frank described Platonov’s language as “pressurized and contorted but also very lyrical.” This description is as accurate as any description could be of an author as tonally complex as Platonov—a writer described simultaneously as comic and heartbreaking, absurdist and emotionally moving.
And so the panel took the best approach: to present Platonov’s work rather than talking about it. Michael Ondaatje lent his mellifluous voice to a section of Platonov’s “fearless” 1936 story “The River Potudan,” first reading from John Berger’s beautiful and wise afterword to the collection Souls: And Other Stories on the function of stories for the poor. In its humane treatment of character and careful description, it was a perfect writer’s introduction to Platonov’s prose. I doubt I’m the only audience member who wanted to hear the whole story on the spot.
Ondaatje was followed by Wendy Lesser, who opened with the end of the short and very funny story “Fro” before backtracking and reading from an earlier portion of this tale about post-Revolution waiting for its new world to come. She chose the story not because it is Platonov’s best but because it is “typical of what is great and strange” about him. Art historian T.J. Clark—interested in Platonov as an idiosyncratic Modernist—read several pages from The Foundation Pit, Platonov’s comically tragic novel about collectivization and the horrible great Ukraine famine.
The readings paused briefly to offer a bit of the translation history. The stories were initially published by New York Review of Books Classics as The Fierce and Beautiful World, but criticisms of the translation (which was based on Soviet-tampered texts) combined with the new availability of more accurate source texts led to Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s new translation and the release of the stories under the titled Souls: And Other Stories.
Former PEN American Center president Francine Prose closed out the readings with the opening from the title story “Souls,” which many writers believe to be Platonov’s most moving and finest story. Strange and, well, animist, it offers a world in which animals and objects are imbued with cognition and feeling. As Prose noted, it suspends our rules of narrative and causation, and yet its observations of human behavior and motivation seem wholly accurate. They seem true. In his refusal to write social realism, Platonov does not really become fantastic, much less absurdist. He is dreamy but beautiful even when comic, and this story about the meaning of happiness insists on speaking of language and of sadness. The final line Prose read (a perfect choice that gave roundness if not closure to the excerpt) was this: “and thus it is that bliss often lives beside us unnoticed.”
The question-and-answer session produced an honorary panelist: a woman who had read Platonov extensively in the original Russian. She spoke to the unusual nature of the writer’s word choices, and the panelist considered the daunting task of translating Platonov’s complex mix of dictions into English. Noting the frequency with which the words strange and weird were mouthed by panelist and audience members alike, one man asked for an explanation of Platonov’s peculiarity, and Francine Prose compare his weirdness to a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
Platonov’s literary moment was also discussed, including the waiting/expectation/disappointment that followed the Revolution and the sudden upheaval of social arrangements between the sexes. To those who might reject Platonov because of his moment (and his commitments to it), T. J. Clark noted that those reading Platonov with absolutely no sympathy for that moment or sense of the tragedy of the Soviet experiment's failure may find the experience much like reading Faulkner with no sense that there is anything to regret in the defeat and passing of the American South. Whether or not this will an obstacle to Platonov’s canon-ization isn’t yet known but this evening’s program suggests that Platonov, like Faulkner, may soon be recognized as one of his language’s greatest experimenters and practitioners. Do not all writers chronicle a passing moment or even a dying culture? And are not all moments worth comment? | | | |
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