Soul http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Soul-Audrey-Platonov/9781590172544

By Audrey Platonov

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About the Author

ANDREY PLATONOV (1899--1951), the son of a metalworker and the eldest of ten children, was born in a village near the Russian town of Voronezh. He began to publish poems and stories in the 1920s and worked as a land reclamation expert in central Russia, where he was a witness to the ravages of the Great Famine. In the 1930s Platonov fell into disfavor with the Soviet government and his writing disappeared from sight.
JOHN BERGER is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including "To the Wedding," the "Into their Labours" trilogy, "About Looking, Ways of Seeing, and G.", for which he won the Booker Prize. His most recent book is "Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistanc"e. He lives in a small rural community in France.
ROBERT CHANDLER has translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire and is the editor of "Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida." His translations from Russian include Pushkin's "Dubrovsky" and "The Captain's Daughter," Leskov's "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate" and Hamid Ismailo's "The Railway." His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes in the UK and the US. His "Alexander Pushkin" is published by Hesperus in their series of Brief Lives. He teaches part time at Queen Mary, University of London.
ELIZABETH CHANDLER is a co-translator of several volumes of Platonov and of Pushkin's "The Captain's Daughter."
OLGA MEERSON teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of "Dostoevsky's Taboos" (in English) and" Platonov's Poetic of Re-Familiarization "(in Russian"). "She is a co-translator of Platonov's "The Foundation Pit "and" Soul and Other Stories," which, in 2004, was awarded the AATSEEL prize for best translation from a Slavonic language.

Reviews

"I squint back on our century and I see six writers I think it will be remembered for. They are Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, William Faulkner, Andrey Platonov and Samuel Beckett.... They are summits in the literary landscape of our century ... What's more, they don't lose an inch of their status when compared to the giants of fiction from the previous century."--Joseph Brodsky

""Soul" ( New York Review Books ) gathered eight works from another Slavic giant, Andrei Platonov. Works of great tenderness and insight in the face of oppression, they're brilliantly rendered by one of the great translators of our time, Robert Chandler, and his team. It features a striking afterword by John Berger..." --"The Guardian "

"Andrey Platonov has not yet received the attention he richly deserves here...[he] turns out to be one of the finest writers of the 20th century, worthy to stand alongside Kafka and Joyce. So thanks to NYRB Classics for publishing the Platonov collection "Soul," which contains an informatively polemical introduction by Chandler, a smattering of stories ('Among Animals and Plants' appeared last year in "The New Yorker"), and the short novels 'Soul' and 'The Return.'" --The Arts Fuse

"In Russia it is Platonov who is increasingly described as the best writer of the post-revolutionary epoch." -Victor Erofeyev, "The Times Literary Supplement"

"Andrey Platonov is increasingly being recognized, in Russia and elsewhere, as one of the greatest writers of the Soviet period."" -The Spectator"

"Platonov is a realist as only the Russians can be realists, unsparing and utterly without any literary device except the exact and telling detail. The result seems. . .more myth than reality, as Platonov's Russia is incredibly strange." -Guy Davenport

"Reading Platonov is always an exhilarating, depressing and moving experience." -"Slavonica"

"The most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Uni