A Different Stripe

A Letter from the Editor on Andrey Platonov (and a sale)

T.J. Clark and Michael Ondaatje discuss the work of Andrey Platonov as part of the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival. See more photos from the event here.

There are certain writers who feature in a large way in the NYRB Classics series—some, like Simenon and Victor Serge, I've written about in the past; others, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, perhaps the most purely original of modern English storytellers, I mean to. Here I want to say a little bit about Andrey Platonov, whose Soul and Other Stories we published last year and whose great and harrowing novel The Foundation Pit we have just put out in a striking new translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, the first translation of the book in English to be based on the recently established definitive Russian text.

As a plaudit, "recently established definitive Russian text" may sound like a pedantic mouthful, but Platonov is anything but a writer of merely academic interest. He is the twentieth century Russian novelist who, more than any other (more than Pasternak, more than Solzhenitsyn, more even than Bulgakov), Russians will tell you has added to and transformed the great tradition of Russian literature. Russians may also tell you that if you are one of those unfortunates who doesn't read Russian, just how great Platonov is you'll never know. I'm one of those unfortunates, I confess, but then I'm confident that, as a rule—a rule to which Platonov is no exception—great literature translates. I first encountered this extraordinary writer's work in an old and uncertain translation based on a censored text, a book given to me by a friend of my father's who I later learned was an agent for the CIA. Even so, I knew I was hearing a voice as distinct and powerful as any to emerge in the twentieth century, a writer who not only reflected the unimaginable realities of modern history, but actively shifted reality, staggering us, making us see the world in a strange and disorienting new light. At last, with this new translation, the greatness of Platonov, the difference that he makes, become unmistakable for readers of English.

Platonov was born into a working-class family in 1899 and grew up with the Russian Revolution, which he initially embraced with enthusiasm and never disavowed. For better or for worse, Platonov's world is the world after the Revolution, with which a new reality begins. Platonov, however, is hardly a conventionally realistic writer, since the nature of the post-Revolutionary world is that history has ended and reality has been upended, replaced by a heady brew of utopian anticipations and nightmarish premonitions. This is the paradoxical regime of progress—appearing no doubt in an extreme form under Communism, but common to all modern societies—under which everything is understood to exist on the condition that it is to be replaced by something better, and so may be judged as already obsolescent; a bipolar world in which exterior and internal realities become weirdly intermixed and people seesaw between irrational exuberance (it wasn't a Communist who coined that phrase) and boundless melancholy. In The Foundation Pit a character feels himself "hurtling forwards into the distance of history, towards the summit of universal and unprecedented times." Another remarks dolefully, "Everybody dies of life. In the end there's just bones."

Written in the early thirties, The Foundation Pit is Platonov's most direct reckoning with Revolutionary terror. The novel describes the devastation caused in the late 1920s by Stalin's twin policies of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture—a Revolution from Above that was no less important and traumatic than the Revolution of 1917. The story begins when Voshchev, a classic Chekhovian luftmensch, is fired from his job for excessive "thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor." Voshchev wanders out into the country where he happens upon a group of workers engaged in constructing a grand new All-Proletarian Home, a title which is meant entirely literally. Among them is Zhachev, a bitter, irascible, scabrous, mutilated veteran, who hauls himself around on a little cart, a freak, in his own words. Also there is Chiklin, the hardworking single-minded earnest proletarian, determined to get things right, though not entirely sure what that means. Voshchev joins this oddly assorted group which soon adopts an orphan girl in whom they place all their hopes for the future. Nastya is a strange waif:

"Now who might you be, my little girl?" asked Safronov [a Revolutionary zealot]. "What did your dear mama and papa do?"

"I'm nobody," said the little girl.

"How can you be nobody? Some kind of principle of the female sex must have been pleased to oblige you, if you got yourself born under Soviet power?"

"But I didn't want to get myself born—I was afraid my mother would be a bourgeois.... When only bourgeoisie lived, I couldn't be born, because I didn't want to be born. But now that Stalin's become, I've become too!"

Soon it becomes clear that the task of digging the pit is unending—almost by definition, since it must accommodate the whole (no pun intended) of the future: the pit is a inverted tower of Babel or, as it eventually turns out, an immense grave. Because after the mysterious death of the zealot Safronov, digging the pit takes second place to making sure that construction will not be sabotaged by "counter-revolutionary elements." The peasantry in particular must be purified. But purification also turns out to be an unending task, and in an extraordinary scene, at once savagely satirical and disconcertingly moving, in the midst of a simultaneous blizzard of snow and flies, pro-revolutionary workers and condemned peasants, doomed to die, gather in the yard of a collective farm as in a church to kiss and forgive each other:

"All right now, comrades?" asked Chiklin.

"Yes," came the word from the whole of the OrgYard. "Now we feel nothing at all—only dust and ashes remain in us."

Voshchev was lying a little way apart and he was quite unable to fall asleep without the peace of truth inside his own life—he got up from the snow and entered into the midst of people.

"Greetings!" he said, rejoicing, to the collective farm. Now you've become like me. I'm nothing too."

"Greetings!" The entire collective farm rejoiced at this one man....

All that could be heard was a dog barking in some alien village—just as in olden times, as if it existed in a constant eternity.

I mentioned the Tower of Babel above, and as even these brief excerpts from The Foundation Pit must suggest, there is no discussing the book without considering its strange language, a mixture of political groupspeak, biblical allusion, slapstick, and bereft lyricism, a kind of language of unlikeness. It is a made-up language and a traumatized one—made dead, you could say. It is at once the babble of infancy, the lying cant of corruption, an outcry of desperation, and the voice, against all odds, of hope. Part of the fascination of the work is that the reader is perpetually unsure which register it is pitched in.

Platonov, as much as Beckett and Kafka, is a major writer of the twentieth century and, like them, he is a writer in extremis. Kafka's statement that "hope is infinite, but not for us" might come from Platonov. These are all writers who in different ways recognize the terror, tedium, and sheer contingency of the modern world. And yet in the later stories collected in Soul, Platonov shows us something else, something more in tune with Chekhov: people trying to rescue from the flux of life and the disaster of history some memorable and sustaining moment of true feeling. In "The Return," a story beloved by the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald, a man returns from World War II to wife and family and—and almost leaves. The art of the story is to capture in that prolonged moment of hesitation the entirety of life. And in the nightmarish world of The Foundation Pit, too, a similar tenderness, however bare-knuckled, can be discerned. As Zhachev remarks, "It's best to love something small and living and do yourselves in with labor! Exist, you bastards, for now!"

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

Listen to T.J. Clark read from The Foundation Pit
The Foundation Pit is currently on sale for 30% off the cover price.
Read why Elise Blackwell thinks that Platonov "will soon take his place on the shortest list of Russian-language literary giants."

"The reader is the ghost": The Rider on the White Horse by Theodor Storm

 

A letter from the editor of NYRB Classics
The Rider on the White Horse is currently available from www.nyrb.com at 30% off the cover price.

Everything's up in the air at the start of Theodor Storm's novella The Rider on the White Horse, written in 1888 when Storm, who was not only a celebrated author but also a distinguished jurist, was on his deathbed. The story begins—begins almost reluctantly—with a strange confusion of voices. First we hear what we take to be the author—only he disclaims authorship. He tells us that we are about to read a story that he read maybe a half century ago in a magazine, a magazine that in the years since he has never been able to track down, a story, he somewhat puzzlingly adds, of which "nothing external" has ever reminded him. The story follows: its narrator, traveling along the coast of the North Sea, is caught in a terrible storm; battered by wind and waves, he repeatedly glimpses a spectral horseman galloping furiously and soundlessly past him. Taking shelter at an inn, the traveler mentions the apparition, and now the local schoolmaster steps in. It is he who tells what you might call the story proper—a ghost story, yes, but also, as these overlapping voices might suggest, a story that has a ghostly life of its own.

At first, however, there is nothing uncanny about the story the schoolmaster tells, about a young man making his way in the world sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century. Hauke Heien is a boy from a modest farming background who, with a talent for numbers and a fascination with the ways of water, apprentices himself to the local dikemaster and soon makes himself indispensable. When the dikemaster dies, his mantle falls upon Hauke, who also marries, very happily, his daughter. It is a success story.

Hauke's story is set, as I mentioned, on the edge of the North Sea, in Frisia, where the proper construction and maintenance of dikes is crucial not only to the safety but also to the well-being of the community: as the network of dikes expands, so does the availability of land for grazing or cultivation. To open new fields, Hauke orders the construction of a new dike, built on new principles. Content with things as they are, the villagers grumble about the project. The dikemaster, however, is not lightly disobeyed, and they undertake it. They are—and this is where the story begins to grow unsettling—truly horrified when, after two years, the work approaches conclusion, and the dikemaster intervenes to prevent a step without which it will all have been in vain. "Something living has got to go into it," one man tells Hauke, "Even our grandfathers knew that much...."

Hauke ordains that no sacrifice will take place. The dike is built and holds. The new land is cleared. Reason trumps superstition. Progress is made. So it appears, and yet Hauke remains a lonely figure, with only wife and child for company, distrusted by the larger community. He has done his job, neglecting nothing, except perhaps something about the human. He rides on his white horse along his dike and feels himself to be "at the center of all the Frisians alive and dead....[towering] above them all."

There is an extraordinary moment in The Rider on the White Horse when Hauke's wife is sick, and Hauke, unusually, prays:

O God, don't take her away from me! I can't do without her and You know it!... I know You can't always do just what You want to do—not even You.... Speak to me! Just a breath!

Silence. A silence that is at the heart of Storm's story, where the natural world is prowled by supernatural apparitions, while the supernatural itself, the divine—even the poignantly limited God, able only to help a bit, that Hauke addresses—never appears. A world in which you cannot trust your eyes or anything, much less—Hauke will discover—know yourself.

I'm not going to reveal the end—you'll want to find it out yourself, I hope—and ruin the suspense, which mounts powerfully as the story proceeds. I will say that by the end we have been returned, in richer and stranger ways than we might have ever imagined, to the beginning: we are up in the air again. I began by noting the author's odd disclaimer about "nothing external" having ever reminded him of the story he happened upon long ago and now intends to tell again, and one thing that becomes clear in the course of that telling is that the landscape of the story is an interior landscape—the landscape of conscience, say, where the real and the unreal exist under continual threat of confusion, kept apart by only the most fragile and provisional barriers—though Storm's mud slicks, icy marshes, fog banks, crashing waves, and vulnerable dikes, not to mention Hauke and the villagers, never strike us as anything but unforgettably real.

And as to what I also mentioned to begin with, the strangely layered voices by which the story is relayed, by the end it is clear, I think, that the story we have heard is essentially choral: the story of any community and the sacrifices by which it ensures its survival; the story of the isolated souls that constitute all communities and of their deaths. Storm, as I said, was unsure he would live to complete it, and in the background of the story you can hear something like the dead saying to the living (as the living suppose), You are who we were and will be who we are. One of the mysterious effects of this extraordinary work is that at some point the modern reader realizes with a shock that he too is included—included already—in this ghostly chorus. It is ghost story in which, you could say, the reader is brought up short by his own apparition. The reader is the ghost.

The Rider on the White Horse is the title story and masterpiece in a selection of Storm's novellas and stories translated by the very fine American poet James Wright for the Signet Classics series, when it was edited by E.L. Doctorow. If I see a book from that series that I haven't read, I always pick it up, and in this case I was especially interested because of Wright's involvement. I'd always meant to read Storm, though more as a matter of duty, I suppose, than anticipated delight. It's not often that one starts a long story, finds oneself pulled irresistibly along through it, and finishes it both astonished and convinced that it is, in the strongest sense of the word, great—a work that will deepen with rereading, that matters. That was my experience with The Rider on the White Horse.

Early holiday gift catch-all

Some suggestions for a big-box free December:

Yes, we're independent, so you can buy books from us without breaking any of those pledges you've made. We have a whole bunch of Classics for kids and adults at very nice discounts. And we've just introduced a nifty, colorful new NYRB Classics tote bag. If you spend more than $75, you get one for free. The bags are also available for under $10.

Books on the Nightstand has just begun a gift ideas round up. They link to Librarything, not to a store, but searching for a book at Indiebound will point to a local bookseller who stocks it. Indiebound has also introduced a wishlist function, anyone try it yet?

The handmade pledge was set up by a consortium of crafty groups and publishers like Etsy, Craft  magazine, Interweave, and Design Sponge to encourage people to make holiday gifts, or to buy them from micro-producers. Etsy also has a local seller index. Enter the name of a town, and up pop producers in that area. Similar human-made gifts can be found at The Renegade Craft Fair, which holds several events around the country, as do Bazaar Bizarre and Maker Faire.

Our favorite holiday fair is the Small and Independent press fair in Manhattan. Every year the participating presses seem ever more diverse and interesting (if not for last year's fair, we wouldn't have known about Mark Batty publishers, for instance), and the speakers and events more impressive. This year the fair is being held on December 6th and 7th. Come say hello to staff members who should probably keep their days jobs and pick up some bargains.

Brooklyn Book Festival 2008

Image from Shawn I. via Flickr

If you're going to the third annual Brooklyn Book Fest held in downtown Brooklyn this weekend, be sure to stop by booths 9 & 10. NYRB and The Little Bookroom will be there with special sales on many many books from the whole range of imprints, and there will be a great rate on subscriptions on The New York Review of Books—which is just about to turn 45!

New York Review essayists Joan Didion, Mark Danner, Ronald Dworkin, and Darryl Pinckney will be on hand (at St. Francis Auditorium) to discuss the book The Consequences to Come: American Power after Bush at 5:30. The event is free, but tickets are required.

Also don't forget to have a look at the Reading the World display at the Words without Borders table—a selection of some of the best international literature being published in the US these days.

NYRB Summer Sale: Up to 40% off cover prices

The complete sale page

Special on Classics at Bookcourt

According to Hibernaculum, Bookcourt on Court Street in the Cobble Hill area of Brooklyn is currently offering a 3-for-1 3-for-2 deal on NYRB Classics. But this is all really just an excuse to post this gorgeous photograph of the books the site's author purchased. Oh, for a little of that golden light in our white box of an office!

Bookcourt's site also has a bunch of photographs of the construction of its welcome expansion.

Moving Sale: 40%–60% off cover prices

The sale includes books from all three imprints: Classics, New York Review Collections, and the Children's Collection—but it ends March 9th, so get a move on!

From the Editor: A few words about Victor Serge

What follows is the text of our most recent Classics newsletter. If you'd like to receive these twice-monthly offers, visit the subscription page.

Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years

A few words about Victor Serge, his too-long-delayed recognition as a great writer, and Unforgiving Years, Serge's last novel, completed before his death in 1946 but not published in the original French until 1971, and only now appearing in English translation. Serge's extraordinary life—as a youth, he was imprisoned in France for his anarchist connections; he fought in the Russian Revolution, only to denounce the Bolsheviks for their abuses of power; he was exiled by Stalin to Siberia, then miraculously released and deported from the USSR; he spent his last years as an increasingly lonely prophet of the anti-Communist left—all this has led to the neglect of Serge's no less extraordinary accomplishment as a novelist. He is one of the greatest of twentieth-century political novelists, and his work more than holds its own—I'd even say overshadows—that of contemporaries like Andre Malraux and Ignazio Silone, not to mention such fading Cold War relics as 1984 and Darkness at Noon. Serge's neglect can be attributed to various things: not only the fact that he was always and everywhere an outsider, but also, somewhat paradoxically, to his work's being imbued, even in the face of horror, with an irrepressible, almost incorrigible, vitality. Serge writes about people caught in the tightening vice of an unforgivingly political world, but he never succumbs to the belief that this is the only world there is—that politics is, much less should be, the be-all and end-all of existence—any more than he supposes that there is any way of simply opting out, hands clean, of the political world. He contemplates political realities unflinchingly, without allowing them to intimidate his imagination. He retains an expansive sense of possibility, a commitment to the boundless—one that finds particular expression in his love of the natural world. In The Case of Comrade Tulayev (reissued as an NYRB Classic with an introduction that is one of Susan Sontag's most ambitious and thoughtful late statements), an old Bolshevik returns from the Gulag to Moscow by sled—he is being summoned, he has no doubt, to his death—and Serge gives this trip an altogether unexpected turn, transforming it into an astonishing, beautifully specific meditation on the night sky and the immensity of the Russian taiga. The world, Serge never doubts, is bigger than what human beings make of it. There is a saving horizon beyond our ends and means.
    Unforgiving Years displays the same reach and the same richness, whether describing the rainy labyrinthine streets of a demoralized pre–World War II Paris, the siege of Leningrad, or the surreal ruins of a bombed-out German city on the verge of being overrun by the Allies. (It is a measure of Serge's imaginative range and sympathy that he should be the author of one of the first—and to this day one one of the most striking—literary descriptions of the German experience of defeat.) The last scenes are laid in Mexico, where those left standing are reunited in a landscape that is at once lush and severe, a prolific new world that, however, is still overshadowed by the old one, a place where the abiding truths of nature and the passing struggles of history converge in an uncanny perspective. The book has an epic scope—it is a picture of a planet in convulsion—without foregoing the detail of everyday life or a sense of the moment. It is a spy story and a war story and (several) love stories, gripping and terrifying, passionate and thoughtful, while the men and women in it—they include secret agents, true believers, philosophers, artists, and assassins—are at once larger than life and powerfully alive. I'm happy that this wonderful book should at last be seeing the light of the day in English as an NYRB Classic. I hope that it will introduce new readers to a major modern writer—who, as it just happens, was also a hero of our time.

Edwin Frank, Editor

P.S. One additional reason for Serge's neglect may be that, though he wrote in French, at heart he was a Russian novelist. His parents were Russian radicals in exile from the Tsarist regime. Serge himself was, as mentioned above, deeply involved in the Russian Revolution. If you're interested in Serge you might well want to look at these other NYRB Classics, too.

The offers below do expire so order soon...

Unforgiving Years
By Victor Serge
Translated and with an introduction by Richard Greeman

Retail: $15.95
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The Case of Comrade Tulayev
By Victor Serge
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Translated by Willard R. Trask

Retail: $14.95
Special Offer: $11.21
(25% off)

Life & Fate
Vasily Grossman
Retail price: $22.95
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Envy
Yuri Olesha
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Soul
Andrey Platonov
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Ice
Vladimir Sorokin
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White Walls
Tatyana Tolstaya
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The Slynx
Tatyana Tolstaya
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