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Andrey Platonov (1899-1951), author of many stories, plays, and novels, spent years in gulags and ended his .

Andrey Platonov (1899-1951), author of many stories, plays, and novels, spent years in gulags and ended his days in poverty. His novel The Foundation Pit was published by Harvill in 1997. Best of all, perhaps, are "The River Potudan" and "The Return", both, asthe translator puts it, finely balanced between triumph and tragedy, and both dealing with the importance of accepting humanity for what it is: Platonov was a socialist, but no utopian. These two stories especially I found wonderfully moving.

FREE shipping on qualifying offers. People are on the move in all ten stories in this collection-coming home as in The Return.

Start by marking The Return and Other Stories as Want to Read .

Start by marking The Return and Other Stories as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read. Their journeys are accompanied by two motives, which characterize the writing of Andrey Platonov: optimism and faith in the goodness of humanity, and abject despair at the cruelty and apparent senselessness of our existence. The protagonists are torn between these poles and sometimes a synthesis shines through the blackness of despair-the hope against hope that a better life is still possible.

In the meantime, if you know any books with non-binary main characters you think we should include, please let us know. Success against the odds. Ten stories of people on the move, fleeing from cruelty and poverty, yearning for death or a better life. Gruesome descriptions of want and pain make this a harrowing read.

Listen to books in audio format. The story exposes the ways of thinking promulgated by the Communist propaganda in 1920s and 1930s and throws in quite a few realistic facts of everyday Soviet life in those times. It includes the harrowing novella Dzahn ( Soul ), 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.

Platonov served as a war correspondent during World War II and wrote The Return upon his own homecoming. Russian writers struggle to describe to non-Russian readers the strangeness of Platonov's prose. The story was vilified; the author died five years later in obscurity and poverty. His work did not appear widely in Russia until the late 1980s. Platonov writes as though no one before him had ever written anything, as if he were the first person to take pen to paper, writes Tatiana Tolstaya.

Second, Platonov is hard to translate: in the early 1990s we were working in the dark . During the last 15 years, however, I have regularly attended Platonov seminars and conferences in Moscow and Petersburg. You've argued that Russians will eventually come to recognise Platonov as their greatest prose writer. Given that he's up against titans such as Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov this is quite a claim. The Return was viciously criticised, but it was published in a journal with a huge circulation and may well have been read by hundreds of thousands of people. And there is no knowing how important Platonov's example was to younger writers.

Combining scientific realism with a poetic vision and elements of folk tale, this text of ten stories presents the dreams of the builders of socialism.

Select Format: Paperback. Combining scientific realism with a poetic vision and elements of folk tale, this text of ten stories presents the dreams of the builders of socialism. ISBN13:9781860465161. Release Date:May 1999.