David Bergelson's Yiddish novel, Judgment, reminds me of Platonov's beautiful but profoundly sad book, Soul. Bergelson resembles Plotonov in his capacity for deploying metaphors and similes to make everyday life feel exceedingly unfamiliar and strange. Like Platonov, Bergelson's prose is powerfully original, and derives much of its poignancy from its systematic conflation of the animate and inanimate worlds. In Soul, Platonov describes the emotional condition of his protagonist by projecting that protagonist's desperate loneliness and existential isolation onto the animals he encounters in his travels. For Platonov, every camel, vulture, or dog, is actively reflecting the ongoing tragedy of earthly existence. Here, for example, is a description of homes in a local Jewish village: "The houses were buried deep in the snow. Like wrestlers in the ring too exhausted to throw their opponents, they remained hunched over in their corners." For Bergelson, every cloud, gust of wind, forest, or home is alive with a kind of ominous and willful intensity. Thus, abandoned buildings "peer" out of dark corners, storms are "measured and coldblooded," and the moon has the "face of a cadaver." Bergelson's depicts the physical world as dark, threatening, and unsafe, but also curiously magical and furiously alive. Probably the greatest similarity between Bergelson and Platonov is that they each somehow manage to demonstrate that the world can be both sad beyond recoking and simultaneously beautiful. Take, for example, Bergelson's bleak depiction of characters who are both tragic and magnificently unique. One character was "gypsy dark with gold hoops in her ears, with a pair of eyes that always looked exhausted, worn out from her own beauty." Another character was a "deaf-mute" but still had enough vitality to "flood the whole world with pancakes" if he wasn't told to stop cooking.
If Bergelson's novel resembles the mood and style of Platonov's Judgment, its plot or subject matter more closely resembles Babel's Red Cavalry short stories. For both books deal with the chaotic period immediately following the Revolution. While Babel's Red Cavalry follows the Bolsheviks' ultimately unsuccessful campaign against non-communist Poland, Bergelson's novel depicts a border region in which the communists are still working to more fully exert their influence. In Bergelson's world, revolutionaries are still rounding up enemies, patrolling the border areas, and suppressing Social Revolutionary plots. A doctor waits to see if the revolution will be overturned. As Bergelson writes, "Every time he put a piece of gauze in a patient's mouth, he would run to the window to check whether the current regime had been abolished."
Bergelson's view of the Revolution is complex and multifaceted. To be sure, the revolution is violent. In the new revolutionary climate, you could grab and whip you "just the same as if you'd done nothing." It was best "not to get in the revolution's way." And many were "given the authority from the revolution to reduce everyone standing here to ashes..." The revolution is also a monumental force of change, capable of rupturing both time and space. In terms of time, the revolution has created a clear divide between past and present. New types of people had emerged in its wake. "In the past men like Filopov didn't exist," writes Bergelson. The world had been overturned by revolution. As the narrator laments, "People just didn't know how to live in times like these." Bergelson's characters agree with the narrator. One says that "if you knew somebody yesterday, that doesn't mean you know who he is today," and another exclaims that "life got rerouted onto a strange and crooked path." In terms of space, the revolution was someone akin to Tarkovsky's alien zones in the film Roadside Picnic. Where the revolution existed, life operated according to one set of almost physical laws; where the revolution did not exist, life operated in entirely different ways. As one characters declares, a "journey of a mere four or five hours gets you to a place where the revolution is over" and this meant that one could encounter a "different kind of snow, whiter and freer..." Just across Russia's border there was a "city at the seashore" where "music will be playing--just music, without speeches." The revolution's defenders agreed with this sentiment and saw the revolution as a sack. "We keep on patching it up, but you here at the border are like mice, nibling away." The fear was that the revolutionary zone would spill into the non-revolutionary zone, or vice versa. "You are eating out a hole at the edge of the sack and everything's going to spill out," declared the local communist boss.
"
"'
Showing posts with label Soul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soul. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Friday, June 2, 2017
Platonov's Soul
In the translator's introduction to Andrei Platonov's novella, Soul, Robert Chandler makes the bold claim that Platonov will one day become known as Russia's greatest prose stylist, the analog to Pushkin's role in the world of Russian poetry. The claim is bold but I read Chandler's introduction only after I had completed the work itself and come to the same conclusion. In the past couple of years, I have encountered several of Platonov's works almost haphazardly, but each time my appreciation for the Soviet author has deepened immeasurably. Only several weeks ago I read several of Platonov's plays. This time I was left wondering why Platonov hadn't received more credit as a forerunner to many of the twentieth century's many other brilliant European modernists. The plays were funny, sardonic, and strangely futuristic. They also seemed to capture the essential absurdity of Soviet ideology and language while somehow indicting the whole of modern European civilization.
Even so, I left the plays thinking that perhaps Platonov was a wonderfully talented niche writer who, sadly, hadn't been productive enough, or free enough, to really make his mark in modern letters. I had read the Foundation Pit and been deeply impressed by the author's intentionally elliptical style, which somehow reminded me of Joseph Conrad, who always wanted to tell you something about the limits of language. But again, I thought the work was perhaps too short to justify any grandiloquent claims on the author's behalf. Platonov could have been a major writer, I thought, if only he had lived in a society that recognized and encouraged his talent, or if only he had a more human subject matter than Soviet bureaucratic violence. I suppose deep down I thought that socialist realism had killed genius in Soviet Russia, or that the scale of violence in Russia permitted no truly humane literary treatments of Soviet life.
At any rate, with all this in mind, Platonov's Soul came as a shock to me. The short novel is a depiction of a lonely Soviet hero in search of his mother, his wandering Central Asian nation, and meaning itself. The work is overwhelming tragic. In fact, I think I have never read a sadder book. Soul does have something to say about Soviet life. It mentions Stalin from time to time, and always juxtaposes Moscow's modernity with the almost neolithic life of his wandering kind fold in Central Asia. In a sense, the book could perhaps be seen as replicating a kind of postcolonial logic, with Communist Russians representing progress, and his protagonist's "nation" of misfit individuals from desperate ethnicities representing a primitive past. However, Platonov's empathy for his protagonist and all of his characters is almost supernatural. Someone once said that Tolstoy was such a brilliant novelist because he had so much empathy he could basically cry for the fate of a horse he encountered.
The quote applies to Tolstoy but also points to why Platonov was also a truly brilliant novelist. Platonov not only affords us the opportunity of understanding his desperately poor and downtrodden characters, he does this by forcing us over and over again to get to know and feel the sad plight of all living things, including many dozens of animals. I thought of the Tolstoy quote many times as Platonov forced me to think deeply, and feel deeply, about a long series of animals in the desolate landscape, including birds of prey, dogs, and sheep. In fact, it's almost impossible not to cry when Platonov describes the inner life of a camel his protagonist encounters. The author's extended interest in animals is no accidental literary device. The point of the repeated exercise in uncanny empathy must be that he intends all of his readers to understand life at his deepest, most primordial, almost animalistic level: we live, we suffer, and we die. Soul is a deep meditation on the nature of suffering, but somehow it isn't really merely tragic. In fact, I would say that Platonov wants us to suffer so much with his characters that we somehow come through with him to the other side, and see that joy is somehow the other side of tragedy, that life itself is too profound to be treated in any simple or one-dimensional way.
The translator tells us that Platonov was full of ironies or dichotomies, and that his secularism was strangely religious. This seems to be an apt description of his project in Soul, to make us look at ordinary life through the eye of a Jesus, Muhammad, or Buddha. There is no sharp distinction between life and death Platonov seems to say, or even between different people, or perhaps between people and animals. We exist. We are connected. Platonov's says the same thing in almost a hundred different but equally profoundly novel ways, but his description of people who are essentially dead already ultimately makes the point that there really isn't all that much difference between being dead and being alive: even in a Soviet Russia--or perhaps especially in a Soviet Russia--everything is, and remains, Soul.
Even so, I left the plays thinking that perhaps Platonov was a wonderfully talented niche writer who, sadly, hadn't been productive enough, or free enough, to really make his mark in modern letters. I had read the Foundation Pit and been deeply impressed by the author's intentionally elliptical style, which somehow reminded me of Joseph Conrad, who always wanted to tell you something about the limits of language. But again, I thought the work was perhaps too short to justify any grandiloquent claims on the author's behalf. Platonov could have been a major writer, I thought, if only he had lived in a society that recognized and encouraged his talent, or if only he had a more human subject matter than Soviet bureaucratic violence. I suppose deep down I thought that socialist realism had killed genius in Soviet Russia, or that the scale of violence in Russia permitted no truly humane literary treatments of Soviet life.
At any rate, with all this in mind, Platonov's Soul came as a shock to me. The short novel is a depiction of a lonely Soviet hero in search of his mother, his wandering Central Asian nation, and meaning itself. The work is overwhelming tragic. In fact, I think I have never read a sadder book. Soul does have something to say about Soviet life. It mentions Stalin from time to time, and always juxtaposes Moscow's modernity with the almost neolithic life of his wandering kind fold in Central Asia. In a sense, the book could perhaps be seen as replicating a kind of postcolonial logic, with Communist Russians representing progress, and his protagonist's "nation" of misfit individuals from desperate ethnicities representing a primitive past. However, Platonov's empathy for his protagonist and all of his characters is almost supernatural. Someone once said that Tolstoy was such a brilliant novelist because he had so much empathy he could basically cry for the fate of a horse he encountered.
The quote applies to Tolstoy but also points to why Platonov was also a truly brilliant novelist. Platonov not only affords us the opportunity of understanding his desperately poor and downtrodden characters, he does this by forcing us over and over again to get to know and feel the sad plight of all living things, including many dozens of animals. I thought of the Tolstoy quote many times as Platonov forced me to think deeply, and feel deeply, about a long series of animals in the desolate landscape, including birds of prey, dogs, and sheep. In fact, it's almost impossible not to cry when Platonov describes the inner life of a camel his protagonist encounters. The author's extended interest in animals is no accidental literary device. The point of the repeated exercise in uncanny empathy must be that he intends all of his readers to understand life at his deepest, most primordial, almost animalistic level: we live, we suffer, and we die. Soul is a deep meditation on the nature of suffering, but somehow it isn't really merely tragic. In fact, I would say that Platonov wants us to suffer so much with his characters that we somehow come through with him to the other side, and see that joy is somehow the other side of tragedy, that life itself is too profound to be treated in any simple or one-dimensional way.
The translator tells us that Platonov was full of ironies or dichotomies, and that his secularism was strangely religious. This seems to be an apt description of his project in Soul, to make us look at ordinary life through the eye of a Jesus, Muhammad, or Buddha. There is no sharp distinction between life and death Platonov seems to say, or even between different people, or perhaps between people and animals. We exist. We are connected. Platonov's says the same thing in almost a hundred different but equally profoundly novel ways, but his description of people who are essentially dead already ultimately makes the point that there really isn't all that much difference between being dead and being alive: even in a Soviet Russia--or perhaps especially in a Soviet Russia--everything is, and remains, Soul.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)