The Return and Other Stories

Rating:
Summary: Excellence of Author Matched by Excellence of Translation
Review: I am a collector of Russian novelists and short story writers. I am a huge fan of Gogol, Bulgakov, Nabokov, and more recently Grossman. Platonov is another wonderful example of a unique Russian writer. These stories are not only precise and highly-visual, they are uniquely constructed and they somehow get to the emotional heart of things without sentimentality. You cannot read this collection without coming away from it with your world-view altered. The translation is excellent. I am frequently irritated by translations that are either too literal or take too many liberties. This translation is perfect, as far as I'm concerned.

Rating:
Summary: A fine introduction to a great writer
Review: In "The Epifan Locks", Peter the Great orders an English engineer to build a network of locks and canals across Russia: nothing, not even human lives, is to stand in the way. Another story ("Lobskaya Hill") focuses on a man who has lost all that he has valued, and now, grief-stricken, lives in a sort of limbo between life and death. "Rubbish Wind" is so black and horrifying that even the most jaded of modern readers may be shocked; while "The Cow", written when Platonov's own teenage son was in a labour camp, describes with some tenderness how a cow dies of grief after its calf is taken to the abattoir. Best of all, perhaps, are "The River Potudan" and "The Return", both, asthe translator puts it, finely balanced between triumph and tragedy, and both dealing with the importance of accepting humanity for what it is: Platonov was a socialist, but no utopian. These two stories especially I found wonderfully moving.

This varied collection of stories was, for me, an excellent introduction to a writer of clearly major importance. Written mainly during the darkest days of Stalinism, they are a testament to the heroism involved merely in maintaining one's humanity.

Rating:
Summary: The algebra of existence
Review: Platonov's stories are quite unique. They are apparently simple, but their simplicity is misleading.
In many ways they resemble Ovid's mythological tales which, apart from their obvious charm, encompass and represent  - symbolically speaking - the contours of experiences familiar to all of us in our own individual lives. In a sense Platonov has written the algebra of existence. His protagonist is a kind of Everyman.
Because stories like "The Return" or "The Potudan River"  are so remarkably original, most attempts to explain or interpret them are invariably reductive; that is, unhelpful. In other words, because  Platonov's scope transcends the ideas of those who preceded him, their terms become quite useless and obsolete  when applied to his artistic achievements.  
What is particularly attractive about Platonov is the manner in which he tackles common problems, without sacrificing in the process all aspects pertaining to our inner lives. On the contrary, our inner lives interest him and he is most revealing when writing about them.  

Rating:
Summary: compelling, troubled stories
Review: This is an excellent collection of varied stories by a deeply troubled storyteller. From an Englishman designing canals for Peter the Great to returning World War I veterans to a young engineer trying to keep a village supplied with electricity, the characters are richly and movingly drawn. In their pessimism or difficult optimism, the stories easily demonstrate why they would not be favorites of the Soviet authorities, in spite of the author's communist beliefs; they are about the farthest thing imaginable from "socialist realism." (One is reminded of the complaints of Shostakovich -- not exactly a traditional dissident, either -- in his autobiography, Testamony, that the authorities evaluated his music based on the percentage of measures set in major vs. minor keys.) Several of the stories are powerful and quite memorable. Still, in spite of the encomia of the translator/reviewer above, it is hard for me to see that Platonov belongs in the highest ranks of 20th century Russian writers. Perhaps he simply loses too much in translation. I find (the English translations of) a number of other modern Russians to be much more compelling: Aksyanov, Bulgakov, Eppel, Grossman, Pelevin, and Ulitskaya, for example.