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Thu., January 10, 2008 Shvat 3, 5768

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Last update - 19:56 10/01/2008

Wild joy on the edge of devastation

By Ronit Matalon

Tags: Israel, Andrei Platonov

The Fierce and Beautiful World by Andrei Platonov (translated from Russian to Hebrew by Nili Mirsky), Am Oved / Hasifria La'am, 403 pages, NIS 88

The first and last impression one has of Andrei Platonov's wonderful stories is simple astonishment. This astonishment - a combination of complete suddenness, wonder and shock - remains in the reader's mind long after he has finished reading this collection, and attests to the fact that something in the world of these stories and the way they were written is still happening and coming into being, has not yet found its form and its place, if in fact it has one distinct and identifiable place.

How, for example, can one accurately describe Platonov's diction, with its savage and breathtaking cruelty, the sharp right and left turns of the steering wheel, the lyricism, the gentleness and the crazy humor, as evident in the opening sentences of the novella "A Dear Man?"

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This is how it looks in translation: ?Poma Pochov had not been graced with a surfeit of sensitivity: On his wife's coffin he spread out slices of cooked sausage, because he had become hungry in the absence of the woman of the house. "Nature makes its own demands!" was Pochov's pronouncement on this issue. After they buried his wife, he lay down to sleep, since he had run around until he was exhausted and become very tired. When he awoke, he felt like drinking kvass, but the kvass had all run out during his wife's illness [...] so Pochov lit a cigarette to get rid of the thirst. But even before he had finished smoking, someone knocked loudly on the door, with an authoritative hand that brooked no questions: "What's that?" Pochov called out, stretching out his body one last time. "Won't they let me mourn a little, the scoundrels'?"

Like the weather, the amazement aroused by Platonov's prose envelops all these stories, on all their levels " the world, the language, the narrator?s viewpoint, the ideological repertoire, the characters and the metaphors " and the reader finds himself thrown into them, not really "entering" in a properly cushioned manner. Almost everything in these stories is "unimaginable," and not due to the frequent incursions of the supernatural "(although there is the appearance of an elderly bear in the guise of an exploited proletarian in the satirical-surrealistic novella "Digging Foundations," but it is exceptional in its extremism), but because the solutions for survival and methods of survival that this prose and its heroes find for themselves from the syntactical structure of the sentence and the language of the dialogues to the unfolding of the plot really are like one-of-a-kind packages.

The combining of the uncombinable, the grafting together of things that seem to have no connection, are clear characteristics of poetry; and thus, the way these stories treat reality and their link to it is more reminiscent of poetry than it is of prose: Platonov's stories attempt to create an impression of reality and not necessarily a "representation" or reflection of it.

How, for example, are we to understand the temporary blindness, caused by lightning, of the locomotive engineer who causes a train accident in the title story, "The Fierce and Beautiful World," and the attempts by the assistant engineer, the narrator, to "save" him from a criminal conviction and from prison, an attempt that ends by the assistant blinding him for the rest of his life? What is "blindness" in this story, in which there is so much love and kindness - vis-a-vis both the locomotive and the man- and who is it that is really blind?

The outlines of this plot and its characters are not entirely realistic, but neither are they allegorical: They dwell in the middle realm between a realistic presentation of reality and its symbolic dimension, a realm where the mysterious foundation of things germinates - and strikes in the same way the lighting strikes the locomotive driver, who at the height of his blindness thinks that he sees most clearly, or vice versa.

This Platonovic intention of creating a profound metaphor about reality is occasionally actually truly brilliant. The stories contain various incarnations and states, linguistic and ideological, but their effect is almost always the same: Something erupts suddenly from the fabric of the world of the story, cuts diagonally across the straight lines of the story's internal logic, crushes it and replaces it with a different logic that geometrically multiplies the emotional and intellectual scope of the story.

The moment of the appearance of that other narrative logic in Platonov seems to be an existential, survival-related need, not some luxury of a self-satisfied game with narrative possibilities: This is exactly the place in which the suffering and hungry heroes of this prose are forced to invent their own inspired solutions for survival, with nonexistent conditions and under the real fire of the bullets of "life," along with the narrative strategy.

What will the eponymous child hero - who is responsible for young siblings who are dying of hunger and a totally broken-down father - of the amazing story "Semyon," which begins the anthology, do after their sick mother dies in childbirth? What will he do after his first idea, of getting a goat in place of the dead mother, is rejected for some reason by his father? "It's a mother they need, not a goat," said the father. "After all, you're the only one who?s grown up already, Semyon, while they are all still young... " Semyon was wearing only his shirt, because from the time he awoke he had not had time to put on pants. He looked up at his father and said: "I'll be their mother, there is nobody else? [...]. Semyon took his mother's dress from the stool and put it on from the top, over his head. The dress was too long, but Semyon arranged it a little on his body and said: "Never mind, I'll cut it and I'll put in a few stitches."

Semyon's tremendous and childish leap here over the hurdle of sexual identity, and his becoming a "mother" blossoms suddenly on the petri dish of existential danger. Semyon's "solution" for confronting the horror that is trying to erase him, is simply to erase himself voluntarily, to give up his identity, to move away from it. Underlying the solution that Semyon finds is a considerable portion of Platonov's spiritual agenda regarding the human being and his options for confronting the history that is trying to destroy or erase him.

Against the boot of the collective that crushes the individual, Platonov presents as an option not the "ego" or the "soul" as a redeeming essence, but rather the surrendering of the "ego," the circus of identity and the inventiveness that reveal the circus-like dimensions of evil itself, of history. Thus the inventive power of identity, which leaps over its own head, establishes its destiny as an alternative history to that which takes place "from above."

Perhaps this is the source of the great amazement aroused by Platonov's prose: It fights for its life with a type of unrestrained and wild joy of inventiveness on the edge of devastation. This devastation has a first name in Platonov's stories: hunger, cruelty, death and terror during the years of the civil war in Russia in the early 20th century, and the coming into being of "Homo Sovieticus" as a state of awareness and a situation in the world. These are in effect both the events of Platonov's time and the materials of his stories.

With Babel and Bulgakov

Platonov (1899-1951), who along with Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov is one of the three great Russian writers of the 20th century, is not as famous in the West as the latter two, perhaps because Platonov is a "writer for 'advanced readers,'" as Mirsky points out in her afterword. Many of his works, which did not suit the spirit of socialist realism, were not published in his lifetime, or were published and disappeared after being condemned by official critics, who called him "a class enemy." In the end his works were totally banned from publication and the reading audience in the Soviet Union discovered him only in the early 1960s, about a decade after his death.

In any case, it is fascinating to compare Platonov?s prose to that of Babel, whose writing is more similar in spirit to his, if only to see to how far and how Platonov takes his ideological and aesthetic conclusions, and how he takes Babel's lyrical-cruel sobriety regarding that same "Homo Sovieticus" one step further.

Where Babel, mainly in his "Red Cavalry" stories, leaves what is human whole in the end - broken, full of ironic and theological pathos regarding the horror and still preserving some distinction between good and evil and the possibility of a belief in the "good," which runs like a thin gold vein through an ugly quarry - Platonov celebrates the almost total disintegration of the humanistic version of what is human, and paints a portrait composed entirely of the clipping together and welding and momentary improvisations of fragments of soul and fragments of texts, of history and of itself. Not only does nothing remain whole in Platonov's human being, but nothing remains of the idea of the human either.

And thus, while Gedalia in Babel's eponymous story desires with all his heart a "sweet revolution" and "an internationale of good people, I want every single soul to be registered in the public property lists and receive a portion of Grade A food,"" Platonov's Pochov declares angrily: "All right, I'm also getting up and leaving here!" Pochov decided [...] He set out alone, just as he had arrived here alone. His heart longed for the homeland, for his place of birth, and he wondered how it would be possible to establish the internationale among human beings, if it was the homeland that nestles in the heart, and not the entire world."

Pochov the widower, the incredible hero of the brilliant novella "A Dear Man," proceeds from one horrifying incident of the Russian civil war to another, hungry, wallowing in the horror, homeless, and yet with a lot to say. He has something to say all the time, and about everything, and with a kind of childish stubbornness, lacking moralistic fervor, which nothing ever stops - neither the cannon fire of the Cossack army nor that of the "Reds" in whose ranks he is fighting.

Pochov is exactly, says Mirsky, "either the double of Ivan the Fool from the Russia folktales (who always turns out to be smarter than anyone else), or of Good Soldier Schweik [...] swept along with the flow of events and wandering among them, at one time tending to believe in the justice of the Soviet regime and at one time tending to have doubts about it, but always only 'tending to.'"

Pochov, who is bombarded with revolutionary posters hanging in train stations and printed in propaganda brochures, walks around the bloody, starving and suffering human arena with some kind of powerful cement mixer in his consciousness that crushes the official political texts together with "his" texts, as he creates a kind of totally private political language, which wavers on the hysterically funny borderline between nonsense and genius.

Pochov?s shredding of the texts of "Homo-Sovieticus" and turning them into some third type of linguistic creation, a combination of many "languages" that are absorbed by one other but disturb one another as well, involves sharp observation on the part of Platonov, not only of the "emotional" structure of "Homo-Sovieticus" but of the ideology itself. The work of dismantling that is taking place here is two-way, not only one-way: History itself appears confused, cracked, absurd, cruel, incomprehensible, just as like the human being it is trying to shape. Pochov shapes Bolshevism no less than Bolshevism shapes him. Therefore there is no genuine significance to Pochov's being "for" or "against" the revolution: The circus tent is already standing, and inside it, even the most unrestrained and grotesque human coarseness contains an unbelievable delicacy under Platonov's touch, when he places a descriptive sentence or a retort in his hero's mouth.

The most moving moments in Platonov's stories, of which there are quite a few, are those in which the tremendous and vague cruelty at the heart of history's absurdity is revealed. Against this vague "evil" of history, Platonov's heroes are unwilling and unable to place "good" in its literal sense, because "in our times even evil is likely to assume an honest and inspired face, since violence and force have planted evil deep in the heart of man [...] both good and evil are liable to seem inspired, touching and capivated" (as the narrator says in the story "The Seventh"). And in a place in which both good and evil are liable to seem inspired, there is really nothing sacred according to Platonov: That may be the explanation of his iconoclastic passion, which incessantly smashes routine language and thought, and by dint of which he doesn't remain accountable to anything, not in the world and not in the language.

But here one has to include a restriction and say that Platonov incessantly shatters what he believes should be shattered, just because there is something sacred, even very sacred, in his eyes. What is the "sacred" thing? Perhaps the fear, the almost-religious awe, of happiness, of goodness, that a person feels.

'Is it all right now?'

In Platonov's heartbreaking story "The River Potudan," the hero Nikita Pirsov, after participating in the civil war, finds a woman whom he apparently loves very much. But he is unable to touch her because of his great love, for fear than he will hurt her. He flees from her, is thrown into the marketplaces of the big city, loses his identity and his power of speech and in the end is found by chance by his father. He returns to the family home on the banks of the Putodan River. When his wife asks: "'Is it all right now? You no longer mind living with me?' [...] 'No, I don't mind,' replied Nikita. 'I've already become accustomed to being happy with you' [...] She was now wearing only a threadbare nightgown, and her now gaunt flesh shivered in the cool darkness of the late hour."

The tremendous naturalness and vitality of the movement of the Hebrew language here, which is all sensitive antennae, and ranges from "Is it all right now?" to the sentence "her now gaunt flesh shivered in the cool darkness of the late hour" is a completely random example of Mirsky's exemplary translation of this exemplary writer. Although Mirsky claims, apparently justifiably, that the poetry unique to Platonov's writing, the unusual word combinations, the wealth of images, the rhythm and the love of sound, are all "not usually translatable at all," the Hebrew text that she has given us here disproves the untranslatability of Platonov: It has a been a very long time since I have read a page of Hebrew prose, the original or a translation, graced by such a degree of attention and sensitivity to the language, to its various rhythms and ranges, with such extraordinary flexibility and musicality, with the ability to invent linguistic "solutions" that seem to have been caught from the power of invention of Platonov's heroes themselves.

Ronit Matalon teaches in the department of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Haifa. Her latest novel, "Kol Tza'adeinu" (The Sound of Our Steps), will be published shortly by Am Oved

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