The Fierce and Beautiful World Read online

  In his apartment on Tverskoy Boulevard, Platonov lived right next to Herzen’s house, and when the war began he received an instruction from the Writers Union: “Take care of Herzen’s house.” Platonov carried out the order with the conscientiousness characteristic of him, and during the Fascist bombings he put out sixteen fires on the roof of the building. Then he went to Ufa, where in the confusion of evacuation his manuscript Travels in Humanity was irretrievably lost. But he did not relax behind the lines. Platonov began to work as a war correspondent on the paper Red Star, which was the most popular of all at the front, writing sketches and stories, giving all his strength for the victory of his fatherland. For Platonov this was not just a geographical patriotism. He always hated Fascism, and even before the war he had mercilessly held it up to shame in his stories “An Angel Flew in the Midnight Sky” and “The Dusty Wind.”

  The war came to an end. It would have seemed that Platonov had showed his love for his country—although he didn’t need to prove it. He expected, of course, that a great deal would now change in his life. At that time a collection of Russian tales had already been published, worked up by him and protected by Sholokhov’s name as editor. From 1929 until 1941 Platonov had had only one thin little book of his own issued, in 1937!

  But after the publication of his short story “Homecoming” in 1946, criticism landed on Platonov again, and his name vanished from the pages of magazines and newspapers. When this story is reread now, it is hard to imagine why this most virtuous of stories was so attacked. For its gloominess, it seems, for its savoring of the darker aspects of the rear during the war…

  Platonov died in 1951 as a result of wounds he had received in fighting during the liberation of Czechoslovakia. He left behind him two unpublished novels, Chevengur and Kotlovan, nine un-produced plays, nine unproduced motion picture scenarios, and a great many stories, sketches, and articles which had either never seen the light of day or had not been collected in book form.

  Little by little justice has begun publicly to rehabilitate his talent. First one and then another magazine has discovered and still goes on discovering Platonov’s unknown writings for its readers. One of his collections was even printed in an edition of 100,000 copies. “Fro” has been made into a film, and an innumerable quantity of enthusiastic articles have been written about Platonov. I can state with certainty that there is not an educated reader in the U.S.S.R. who does not know Platonov, and not a single professional writer alive in this country who would not pay tribute to his mastery. It is true that he has been unknown abroad until now, because there have been no noisy scandals connected with his name and there are some so-called “specialists on Soviet literature” who have a weakness for just this kind of scandal.

  But I repeat—Platonov’s is a delayed-action talent, and it may be that his safety fuse has burned only halfway to the explosion. Why was he held back, throughout his whole life, to a lower rank?

  Because in the whole line of his creativity, which continued the great tradition of Russian literature, the tradition of “defense of the so-called little man,” the tradition of “guilt for all,” he was fundamentally contradicting the fashionable Stalinist theory of man as “a screw in the machine of government,” and the proverb which justifies everything: “If you chop wood, chips fly.” He loved locomotives, and he knew how to treat each screw gently so the locomotive would run well. He was concerned with screws and he humanized them; but to treat people as screws would have been intolerable to him. He loved trees, and he understood that every little chip by a merciless axe is a part of the murmuring green greatness. He realized that the theory of the inevitability of sacrificing chips can end up by destroying a whole forest. And although Platonov was disposed, like all men of good character, to forgive the times for blows against himself, he could not forgive them for blows against other people, against the humanity he loved so much, for whose sake he lived and wrote.

  It’s sad, of course, that he died so soon. Had he lived, he would have seen that much has changed for the better nonetheless, in the life of our people, although even now we are far from perfection. He would have rejoiced at the return to our people of many names which had been undeservedly slandered.

  He would have rejoiced over the flight of a Russian into space, although he probably would have reminded us that not everything has yet been put in order here on our sinful earth; after all, he was originally an organizer of the good exploitation of the land.

  He would have rejoiced over the success of the novel The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, and he would have rejoiced over the appearance of such new names in our literature as Aksyonov, Kazakov, Solzhenitsyn, Akhmadulina, Voznesensky, Okudzhava, Chukhontsev, Brodsky, and many others, just as he once was glad about V. Nekrassov’s first novel, In the Stalingrad Trenches. Some things, too, would have distressed him, and he would have said so openly in what he wrote, just as he did before he died.

  But he is no longer here, and it is up to a new generation of Russian writers to say what he has left unsaid.

  His declaration, made when he was young, can serve as a final answer to all his critics:

  “You talk about a great virtuous Beauty and her pure sons who know her, see her, and exalt her. You place me in the gang of her detractors and defamers, people unfit and powerless to look at her, as if I should leave the house of beautiful art, and not muss Beauty’s white clothing. There’s no place there for someone dirty, like me. All right. I’ve walked this earth for twenty years and I haven’t met the person you’re talking about—Beauty. This may be because she lives outside the earth, and only a few better people have seen her, not I. But I think this is not so: the reason why I haven’t met Beauty is that she doesn’t exist as someone separate, by herself. She is the property of all of us, and mine, too. Beauty is all the days and things there are, and not something elevated, unattainable, and proud. The reason why I’ve met but never thought about Beauty is that I’m used to her, as to my mother, whom I will remember very well when she dies, but whom I forget now because she’s always in my heart. I live and don’t think, while you, reasoning all the time, are not living, and you don’t see a thing, not even Beauty, which is as inseparable from man, and as true to him, as his bride. You love very little, and see little. I am a man. I was born on this wonderful living earth. What are you asking me about? About what Beauty? Only the dead can ask about her—for the living there is no ugliness. I know that I am one of the most insignificant of people. You have no doubt noticed this, but I also know another thing: the more insignificant a creature is, the more glad it is for life, because it is least deserving of it. The very smallest mosquito is the happiest spirit. You would not be capable of noticing this. You are legal and worthy people, while I only want to live as a man. For you being a man is just a habit— for me it is joy, a holiday…

  “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.

  —Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  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.

  —Joseph Barnes

  DZHAN1

  [1]

  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.

  It seemed to Chagatayev that this was some person crying beyond the horizon—maybe in that country known to no one where he had once upon a time been bora and where right now his mother either was living or had died.

  “Gulchatai!” he said out loud.

  “What’s that?” his neighbor asked, a technologist.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Chagatayev explained. “Gulchatai is my mother, and the word means a mountain flower. My people give themselves nicknames, when they’re young and good…”

  The violin played again, its voice was not only complaining but also calling—to go away and not come back, because music always plays for victory, even when it is sad.

  Soon the dancing started, with games and the usual festivities of young people. Chagatayev looked at the people, and into the world of night around them; he wished he could stay for a long time, working, and being happy.

  A young woman Chagatayev did not know sat opposite him, her eyes shining with black light. She wore a blue dress cut high under her chin, like an old woman’s dress, which gave her an awkward, sweet appearance. She was not dancing, either shy or not knowing how, and she looked at Chagatayev passionately. She was delighted by his round face, and its narrow, black eyes which looked steadily back at her with kindness and reserve, by his broad chest which hid his heart with all its secret feelings, and by his soft mouth, capable of both crying and laughing. She did not hide her interest, and smiled at Chagatayev; he did not respond. The general gaiety grew steadily. The students—economists, planners, and engineers—took the flowers from the tables and picked plants from the garden, making presents out of them for their girl friends or just strewing the greenery on their thick hair. The woman who had been sitting across from Chagatayev was now happily dancing on the garden path which was littered with little pieces of different-colored paper.

  Other women sitting at the tables were also made happy by the attentions of their friends, by nature all around them, and by this foretaste of their future, which seemed long and filled with hope of immortality. Only one woman was without either flowers or confetti on her head; no one leaned over her with joking words, and she was smiling wistfully to make it appear that she was taking part in the general celebration and that she belonged. Her eyes were sad and patient, like those of a big child whose feelings have been hurt. Sometimes she glanced shyly to one side, and then, convinced that no one wanted her, quickly swept up the flowers and colored paper from the chairs of her neighbors, and hid them furtively. Occasionally Chagatayev noticed this but couldn’t understand it; he was already growing bored by the long celebration and was getting ready to leave. The woman who had been picking up the flowers dropped by other people also went off somewhere—the evening was running out, the stars had grown big, night was beginning. Chagatayev got up from his place and bowed to the comrades near him—he would not soon be seeing them again.

  Chagatayev walked through the trees and he noticed the woman with the sad face hiding in the shadows; she did not see him, and she put the flowers and the ribbons on her hair and then walked back out of the trees to the lighted table. Chagatayev wanted to go back there: he wanted suddenly to topple over the tables, cut down the trees, and stop this enjoyment over which pitiful tears were being shed, but the woman
was happy now, laughing, with a rose stuck in her dark hair, although her eyes were still red from crying. Chagatayev stayed in the garden; he walked up to her and introduced hirnself. She turned out to be a graduate student in the Chemistry Institute. He asked her to dance although he did not know how, but she danced excellently and led him in time to the music. Her eyes dried quickly, her face grew prettier, and her body, used to a shy tearfulness, pressed against him now with trust, filled with innocence, smelling good and warm like bread. With her Chagatayev forgot himself, ease and happiness poured out of this strange woman whom he would probably never meet again; this is how bliss often exists unnoticed right next to us.

  The party and the gaiety went on until light began in the sky; then the garden emptied, only the plates and glasses were left, everyone departed. Chagatayev and his new friend Vera walked around Moscow, lighted up by dawn. The foreigner Chagatayev loved this city as his fatherland, and he was grateful that it was here that he had lived a long time, learned his science, and been fed and taken care of at no cost to him. He looked at his companion—her face had grown beautiful in the light from the sun rising far away.

  The moment came when the sky was high and clean, the sun was strenuously and steadily sending its goodness—light—down to the earth. Vera walked in silence. Chagatayev glanced at her from time to time and was amazed that she could seem unattractive to everyone when even her modest quiet reminded him of the hush of grass, the loyalty of a familiar friend. He could see closely now the wrinkles of fatigue on her cheeks, her eyes deep under their eyelids, her full lips—all the mysterious arousing of this woman, all that was good and strong, hidden in this living human being. And he was timid with tenderness toward her and could not have done a thing against her, and he felt ashamed even to wonder if she was beautiful or not.