I read Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1929) not too long ago and the collection of stories Soul (1935-46) last month.  Here we will have some notes.  These are the Robert and Elizabeth Chandler translations (four additional translators assist with Soul).  Those dates are for the completion of the writing; publication was always a complex story for poor Platonov. Platonov was a rationalist and engineer but also a mystic.  He was a true believer in the, or let’s say a, Soviet experiment, but also fully understood, for rationalist and mystical reasons, that the experiment would always fail.  He had a great writer’s imagination but – no, this should be “and” – had lifelong trouble adapting himself to Soviet censorship.  He was hardly alone there. I think I will stick with the Soul collection today, and quote from the novella “Soul,” “published” in a single proof copy in 1935, in censored form in 1966, and finally complete in 1999. Which is also when the Chandlers published their English version. “Soul,” like much of Platonov, is mercilessly grim: He foresaw that it would probably be his lot to die here and that his nation would be lost, too, ending up as corpses in the desert.  Chagataev felt no regret for himself: Stalin was alive and would bring about the universal happiness of the unhappy anyway, but it was a shame that the Dzhan nation, who had a greater need for life and happiness than any other nation of the Soviet Union, would by then be dead.  (75) Ambiguous phrase there, "the univeersal happiness of the unhappy."  Chagataev is a young engineer, tasked with leading his “nation,” a nomadic tribe subsisting, barely, in the deserts and marshes between the Caspian and Aral Seas, to Soviet civilization.  Which he does, eventually – happy ending! The entire Dzhan nation was now living without an everyday sense of its death, working at finding food for itself in the desert, lake and the Ust-Yurt Mountains, just as most of humanity normally lives in the world.  (108) An unconvincing happy ending given what happens along the way.  Platonov foreshadows the environmental destruction of the Aral Sea and the demographic decline of Russia (the nomads, by the time Chagataev returns to them, are almost all elderly, somehow living off grass and hot water).  Horrible things happen to everyone for many pages.  Chagataev is almost eaten by carrion birds.  But only almost! Chagataev felt the pain of his sorrow: his nation did not need communism.  It needed oblivion – until the wind had chilled its body and slowly squandered it in space.  (“Soul,” 102) Animals are treated terribly in “Soul,” and in other stories, no worse than the human animals, but still, the reader sensitive to such things should beware, and in particular get nowhere near the story “The Cow” (written 1938, published 1958) which is like an entry in a “saddest story ever written” contest.  Possibly my favorite thing in “Soul” is a few pages on a flock of feral sheep: And for several years the sheep had lived in the desert with their sheep dogs; the dogs had taken to eating the sheep, but then the dogs had all died or run away in melancholy yearning, and the sheep had been left on their own, gradually dying of old age, or being killed by wild beasts, or straying into waterless sands.  (62) “[D]ying of old age” is remarkable; the “melancholy yearning” of the absent dogs is a superb Gogolian touch. The other stories in the Soul collection are also good if you have the emotional strength to read them. Chevengur tomorrow.

“Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? -- that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque?”  The Battle of Shiloh started in southwestern Tennessee on this date, April 6, in 1862. Casualty estimates total almost 24,000 in two days of fighting – the bloodiest engagement on American soil up to that time. Union forces, though victorious, lost more men than the Confederates.     Among the combatants was Ambrose Bierce, a first lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. He was nineteen years old. In 1881, Bierce published his nonfiction account of the battle, “What I Saw at Shiloh,” from which the passage at the top is drawn. It’s the source of the title of an excellent volume, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (eds. Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster, 2002).   Bierce’s account is typical of his prose, fiction and otherwise – terse, utterly unsentimental and often witty. His eye, as usual, is focused on the odd detail, not the wide-angle scene:    “There was, I remember, no elephant on the boat that passed us across that evening, nor, I think, any hippopotamus. These would have been out of place. We had, however, a woman. Whether the baby was somewhere on board I did not learn. She was a fine creature, this woman; somebody’s wife. Her mission, as she understood it, was to inspire the failing heart with courage; and when she selected mine I felt less flattered by her preference than astonished by her penetration. How did she learn? She stood on the upper deck with the red blaze of battle bathing her beautiful face, the twinkle of a thousand rifles mirrored in her eyes; and displaying a small ivory-handled pistol, she told me in a sentence punctuated by the thunder of great guns that if it came to the worst she would do her duty like a man! I am proud to remember that I took off my hat to this little fool.”   Bierce romanticizes nothing and sounds remarkably modern, almost contemporary: “At Shiloh, during the first day’s fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave to go down into the valley of death and gratify a reprehensible curiosity.” Bierce served for four years during the war and saw action at Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Kenesaw Mountain (where he was severely wounded), Franklin and Nashville. I shared my appreciation for Bierce with R.L. Barth, a poet and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, who replied: “‘What I Saw at Shiloh’ is indeed a great piece of nonfiction. I think he’s one of America’s greatest writers on the subject of war, but he doesn’t seem to have much of a reputation as one. For the most part, if I see him mentioned it’s for his life, his attitude toward life, his spooky stories, or of course The Devil’s Dictionary. And yet, the best of his Civil War stories are extraordinary explorations of aspects of war.”  For a strategic account of the battle, see what Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote about Shiloh in Chap. XXIV of his Personal Memoirs (1885-86):    “Ifs defeated the Confederates at Shiloh. There is little doubt that we would have been disgracefully beaten if the shells and bullets fired by us had passed harmlessly over the enemy and if all of theirs had taken effect. . . . There was, in fact, no hour during the day when I doubted the eventual defeat of the enemy, although I was disappointed that reinforcements so near at hand did not arrive at an earlier hour.”

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Left in a hefty anthology titled The Faber Book of War Poetry (ed. Kenneth Baker, 1996) was a postcard from O’Gara & Wilson, Ltd. Booksellers in Chicago. More than forty years ago I visited that shop near the University of Chicago and purchased a partial set of Conrad for a decent price. They bundled the books and I carried them back to Ohio on the train. The card suggests a seriousness of purpose often missing from bookstores today:   “Chicago’s Oldest Bookstore Established 1882 200,000 Titles in Stock Used Books Bought & Sold Small Collections or Complete Libraries No Quantity Too Large – House Calls Made”   Smaller copy says O’Gara & Wilson carries books “in almost all fields, but we are especially interested in American history, art, Balkan and Central European history, English and American literature, Greek and Latin classics, medieval history and literature, military history, philosophy, religion & theology.” In other words, a serious bookstore for serious readers. This is not Harlequin Romance country.   Joseph Epstein’s great friend, the late sociologist Edward Shils, who taught at the University of Chicago, published “The Bookshop in America” in the winter 1963 issue of Daedalus. In it, Shils calls bookshops “an almost indispensable part of life. Like libraries, one goes to them for what one knows and wants and to discover books one did not know before.” He continues:   “I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time just because I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.”   He speaks for me. I have gone to bookstores I knew from prior sad experience were lousy, just to wander among the shelves, hopelessly hoping for treasure. In such places, I have been tempted to buy books I already owned just to salvage something tangible out of disappointment. Shils formulates a theory of good bookstores contrary to conventional economic sense:    “A bookshop, in order to be good, must have a large stock of books for which there is not likely to be a great demand but for which there will be an occasional demand. This means, unlike the retail trade in groceries, or the practice in industry to produce on order, a bookshop must render its capital inert by putting a lot of it into slow-moving lines.”   Shils is writing, of course, long before the Age of Amazon. I looked online to see if O’Gara & Wilson is still in business. It is, but relocated to Chesterton, Ind., fifty miles southeast of Chicago. I wish I could visit. More power to the new owners Doug and Jill Wilson. Shils writes:     “The wonder is, given the unremunerativeness of the business, that bookshops exist at all. It takes a special kind of person, somewhat daft in a socially useful and quite pleasant way but nonetheless somewhat off his head, to give himself to bookselling. Why should anyone who has or who can obtain $10,000 or $20,000 invest it in a bookshop to sell serious books when, if he were an economically reasonable person, he would do better to open a beauty parlor or a hamburger and barbecue shop, or put his money into the stock market? The bookseller must be one of those odd people who just love the proximity of books.”

Italy's Matera as a case study for revitalizing small governments and creating a future of interconnected villages.