A New York Review Books Classic.
Like so many Soviet writers, Andrei Platonov saw his work suppressed in his lifetime. Since then, however, it has established itself, both at home and abroad, as an extraordinary and haunting achievement of twentieth-century literature. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual ravages of Soviet life. For a new generation of experimental Russian writers he figures as a remarkable linguistic innovator, the master of what has been called "alternative realism". Lyrical, strange, yet sharply concrete, Platonov's fiction is that of a wanderer in an all-too-real Utopia, a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime.
This collection of Platonov's short fiction brings together seven works drawn from the whole of his career. It includes the harrowing, and long-unavailable, novella 'Dzahn', in which a young man returns to his Asian birthplace to find his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech, and 'The Potudan River', Platonov's most celebrated story.
