Another remarkable Russian novel finally made it into English last year, Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur, written in 1929 but not published until 1972, in Paris. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have been translating Platonov for decades now, and this novel and the apparatus they include with it are a triumph.  The Foundation Pit (1930) is a better novel, more focused and inventive, but this one is an event for English-language readers.  By current standards, Chevengur is at least the fourth best book published in the last twenty-five years. Platonov was, to reiterate my distant last post, not just a writer but an engineer, somehow a scientist but also a mystic who deeply believed in communism but also in its inevitable failure.  In Chevengur, his first novel, this is all as clear as fiction can make it.  A character theorizes about “the possibility of destroying night for the sake of an increase in harvests” (141) – you know, keep the sun out perpetually, by means of science or collective Leninist willpower or something – and although Platonov recognizes that the idea is crazy he, and not just his character, also kind of means it.  It is like, a descendant of, Charles Fourier turning the sea into lemonade.  It is like a communist Atlas Shrugged, if you can imagine that book continually undermining its own ideas, which in a sense it does, but I guess I mean knowingly. The novel begins in pre-Soviet crisis: famine, typhus, war.  An orphan theme runs through the whole book.  “Horselessness had set in” (91).  “Horselessness” is a fine piece of Platonov, a screwy word that accurately describes the disaster.  There is also hopelessness, of course: “Where are we going”? said one old man, , who had begun to grow shorter from the hopelessness of life.  “We’re going any which way, till someone curbs us. Turn us around – and we’ll come back again.” (92) Yet the novel is also a comedy in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky, full of hysterical laughter, as well as Gogol’s tendency for anything to come alive.  The mechanic Zakhar Pavlovich “began to live with resignation, no longer counting on universal radical improvement” (62), a sad condition in a Platonov novel, but he can still talk to the locomotives he repairs: “I know,” the locomotive sympathized in a deep voice – and sank further into the dark of its cooling strength. “That’s what I say!” Zakhar Pavlovich agreed.  (64) The comical catastrophes turn into a long picaresque section, characters wandering through the ruins of the Revolution, bumping into Dostoevsky – “The lame man was called Fyodor Dostoevsky” (140) – and a crazy man named God – “Dvanov set off, along with God” (99).  One of the wanderers is openly a Don Quixote-figure, horse and all, although unlike Quixote he has a strong socialist horse.  Then later there is a second Don Quixote, this time with a suit of armor and a pile of disarmed grenades. In the second half of the novel, the characters concentrate in the steppe village of Chevengur where perfect communism has been established by the usual bloody methods, but where the great joke is that none of the surviving peasants and rural villagers have any idea what Marxist-Leninist communism is.  They are just making it all up, based on, more than anything, Old Believer Russian Orthodoxy.  How did Platonov think this could be published?  Anyway, things end pretty much as they have to end. The Chevengur half of the novel is full of heightened Soviet revolutionary language so bizarre that it was soon abandoned.  This makes for a challenge for the translators which they often solve by means of notes.  It is all, unfortunately, not much fun.  Somehow the bleak but lively picaresque half of the novel is a lot of fun, but the static, dialectical village half is not. “But communism’s about to set in!” Chepurny quietly puzzled in the darkness of his agitation.  “Why am I finding everything so hard?” (290) Exactly.  Languagehat read Chevengur in Russian fifteen years ago and had a similar experience with the switch between the first half and the second.  And here are two useful posts about reviews of the Chandler translation.  Chevengur got some attention last year. I will tack on some funny bits about books and reading: Dostoevsky’s home housed a library of books, but he already knew them by heart.  They brought him no consolation and he now had to do his own personal thinking.  (141) My worst nightmare!  A few pages later, in “a grove of concentrated, sad trees” we meet a forester who studies his father’s “library of cheap books by the least read, least important, and most forgotten of authors… life’s decisive truths exist secretly in abandoned books”  (150).  “Boring books had their origin in boring readers…” (151).  Chevengur was tough going at times but never boring.

Had I been more clever or alert I might have heard and recorded my brother’s last words before he died last August in hospice. A reader asks about this, and I admit I blew it. For the last week or so of his life, Ken was unconscious, occasionally moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed. It’s customary to focus on last words. Perhaps we expect wisdom, reassurance, a lifetime’s lesson pithily expressed. There is precedent. William Hazlitt, not the happiest of men, is reported to have said while dying, “Well, I've had a happy life.” Assuming its accuracy, I find that enormously touching. And there’s Gerard Manley Hopkins, dying of typhoid fever: “I am so happy, so happy.” Delusion or gratitude? I prefer to avoid the cynical interpretation.  I’ve just finished reading Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth, 1993) by Theresa Whistler. I’ve grown deeply interested in de la Mare and his work in the last several years. The poet would die on June 22, 1956 at age eighty-three. He had been ailing for several years. On the evening of June 21, Whistler reports de la Mare told his nurse: “Oh, N [Sister Natalie Saxton], I do feel seedy!” To the end, interesting word choice. He had suffered another coronary thrombosis, was given oxygen and repeatedly pulled off the mask. He slept intermittently. Sir Russell Brain, the eminent neurologist and close friend of de la Mare, visited. “He was bright, even happy,” Whistler writes, “and joked: ‘I think we shall cheat them yet.’”   To a pretty nurse, de la Mare said, “It’s a long time since me met – you must have come out of a dream.” With prompting, de la Mare recited his poem “Fare Well.” Whistler writes:   “The longest day drew in quietly, and the short night fell. N had gone out of the room for a brief rest. The nurse who had taken her place tucked him in – it was 2 a.m. – and bent over him. She asked if he was quite comfortable. ‘Yes, I’m perfectly all right,’ he answered – then he caught his breath in one gasp and died. There was no time to fetch N or the others. The nurse could only wake them and tell them he was gone.”

It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing. But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The ancient Greeks, in their pioneering effort to order the chaos of the cosmos, neatly taxonomized them into filial love… read article

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Here I pause to remember a forgotten poet who remembered a slightly less forgotten poet – a reminder that all of us are eminently forgettable, regardless of our purported virtues. Walter de la Mare died on June 22, 1956, at age eighty-three. The journal Poetry assigned William Burford to write a remembrance of the English writer, “Master of Silences,” which was published in the November 1957 issue.  Scrap that.   As I was reading “Burford’s” commemoration, it seemed familiar. I dug around and realized I had written about the same piece almost two years ago, under its true byline: William Jay Smith. In the same issue of Poetry, the piece after Smith’s remembrance is a review by Burford (I trust) of a Hart Crane biography. Someone at some time, whether in 1957 or last week, switched bylines -- which, of course, bolsters my observations above about forgettability. Smith’s piece on de la Mare remains definitive:   “When a poet of stature dies, a silence settles upon language. One becomes suddenly aware that words will never again be handled as they have been by this particular man. All that can be said or heard resides in his poems: the rest is silence.”   So, what about Burford? I don’t think I had ever heard of him. I see he died in Dallas in 2004 at age seventy-seven. He had a long academic career and published at least three collections of poems. His work appeared prolifically in Poetry, especially in the nineteen-fifties. In 1967, he translated and published with Christopher Middleton The Poet’s Vocation: Selections from Letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, & Hart Crane. He translated minor work by Proust. I would love to say his poems are unforgettable, or even memorably funny and incisive, and that I have salvaged a forgotten genius. Here is “Local God,” published in the Summer 1953 issue of Southwest Review:   “There stands a man in Texas, can grab the rattlers by the tail and crack them like a whip, snapping the vertebrae. He is the curse of all the snakes; milks the venom out of their mouths and wraps them round his arms for bracelets. Strange to say how the little children all steal away from his loving fingers.”