The River Potudan | Andrei Platonov | Granta Magazine

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The River Potudan

Andrei Platonov

Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler & Angela Livingstone

‘Grass had grown back on the trodden-down dirt tracks of the civil war, because the war had stopped.’

Essays & Memoir
The Online Edition
22nd December 1998
Essays & Memoir
The Online Edition
22nd December 1998

Andrei Platonov

Andrei Platonov was born in 1899 in a Russian village and died in obscurity in 1951. Though his literary career began with the blessing of Gorky, it was soon blighted when his writing fell under Stalin’s critical eye. He worked for a while as a land-reclamation and electrical engineer and then as a war correspondent in World War II. Platonov is known and admired for his sharp sense of human suffering and his strong conviction about the futility of Soviet style communism, and his extraordinarily innovative use of language.

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Translated by Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian include many works by Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov. He has also compiled three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales and, with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He is a co-translator of three volumes of memoirs and stories by Teffi and has published a short biography of Pushkin. His recent co-translation of Vasily Grossman’s STALINGRAD received the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award for translations from any language and has been shortlisted for four other prizes. Teaching is increasingly important to him, and – in normal times – he runs a monthly translation workshop at Pushkin House (Bloomsbury).

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Translated by Elizabeth Chandler

Elizabeth Chandler has worked with her husband, Robert Chandler, on translations of Alexander Pushkin, Teffi, Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman.

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Translated by Angela Livingstone

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