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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.’
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Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
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Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
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‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
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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.
More about the author →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).
More about the translator →Translated by Elizabeth Chandler
Elizabeth Chandler has worked with her husband, Robert Chandler, on translations of Alexander Pushkin, Teffi, Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman.
More about the translator →