FOURTEEN LITTLE RED HUTS
AND OTHER PLAYS
RUSSIAN LIBRARY
The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.
Editorial Board:
Vsevolod Bagno
Dmitry Bak
Rosamund Bartlett
Caryl Emerson
Peter B. Kaufman
Mark Lipovetsky
Oliver Ready
Stephanie Sandler
Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski
Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia
Andrei Platonov’s Russian texts copyright © by Anton Martynenko, 2011
English publishing rights are acquired via FTM Agency, Ltd., Russia, 2016
Translation copyright © 2017 Susan Larsen for The Hurdy-Gurdy; Robert Chandler for Fourteen Little Red Huts and additional scene, The Hurdy-Gurdy; Jesse Irwin for Grandmother’s Little Hut
Introduction and notes copyright © Robert Chandler
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EISBN 978-0-231-54353-8
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress
A Columbia University Press E-book.
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Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Book design: Lisa Hamm
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Hurdy-Gurdy
Additional Scene
Fourteen Little Red Huts
Grandmother’s Little Hut
Afterword
Acknowledgments
A Note on Names
Notes
Further Reading
INTRODUCTION
1
Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) wrote novels, short stories, plays, and film scripts. He wrote mainly between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s, but he was subject to vicious criticism throughout his career, and much of his work was first published only several decades after his death. He has been acclaimed by many Russian writers and critics as the greatest Russian prose writer of the twentieth century, but he has yet to enjoy the international reputation that is his due—in part, perhaps, because his idiosyncratic style makes him difficult to translate. He is also unusually difficult to categorize. His language is stunningly innovative, yet he had little in common with most modernists. He was almost certainly an atheist, yet his work is dense with religious symbolism and imbued with deep religious feeling. He was a passionate supporter of the 1917 Revolution and remained sympathetic to the dream that gave birth to it, yet few people have written more searingly of its disastrous consequences. And he worked in many different genres. His early Chevengur is a long, picaresque, sometimes surreal novel that deserves comparison with Don Quixote and Dead Souls. His late “The Return,” a short story chosen in 1999 by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of her “three great Russian works of the last millennium,” is a wise, tender, and entirely realistic evocation of family life, firmly embedded in a particular historical moment. His versions of traditional Russian magic tales—his last major publication—were republished in countless Soviet school textbooks, often without acknowledgment of his authorship. And there are still aspects of his work that have hardly been explored at all. His six film scripts are almost unknown; his eight finished and two unfinished plays are still seldom staged, even in Russia. At least two of these plays, however, are masterpieces. The Hurdy-Gurdy (1930) and Fourteen Little Red Huts (1933) anticipate the work of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. They are as bold in their political satire as Bertolt Brecht at his most biting. And they are also important as documents of historical witness. Along with the short novel The Foundation Pit, they constitute Platonov’s most impassioned, and penetrating, response to Stalin’s assault on the Soviet peasantry—the catastrophes of the collectivization of agriculture (1930) and the ensuing Terror Famine (1932–1933).
2
Platonov was brought up on the outskirts of Voronezh, the main city of the Black Earth region. Born in 1899, he came of age with the Revolution, which he supported passionately. Between 1918 and 1921 he published numerous articles on political, philosophical, and scientific themes in the local press as well as a collection of poems, The Blue Depth. In 1921, however, shocked by the terrible drought and famine, he abandoned literature in order to work as a land reclamation expert. “Being someone technically qualified,” he wrote, “I was unable to continue to engage in contemplative work such as literature.”1 During the mid-1920s he supervised the digging of no fewer than 763 ponds and 331 wells, as well as the draining of 2,400 acres of swamps and the building of three small rural power stations.2 In late 1926 he returned to writing, though continuing to work in other capacities. Between 1929 and 1932, along with other writers, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia.3 Unlike nearly all his colleagues, he wrote honestly about what he saw.
In August 1931, for example, Platonov was asked to report on the progress of collectivization in the central Volga and North Caucasus regions. The following entry from his notebooks is only one of many, all equally direct: “State Farm no. 22, ‘The Swineherd.’ Building work—25% of the plan has been carried out. There are no nails, iron, timber…milkmaids have been running away, men have been sent after them on horseback, and the women have been forced to work. This has led to cases of suicide…Loss of livestock—89–90%.”4 It is astonishing that Platonov dared to write such lines, even in a private notebook, at a time when the official press was reporting only ever greater success.
These journeys served as the inspiration for a number of works about collectivization and the Terror Famine. As well as The Foundation Pit and the short novels For Future Use and Sea of Youth, these include two film scripts and the two full-length plays in the present volume. None of these works was published in Platonov’s lifetime except For Future Use—which was immediately, and fiercely, criticized by Stalin himself. To a reader unversed in Soviet history, these works seem surreal. In reality, they contain barely an incident or passage of dialogue that does not directly relate to some real event or publication from these years. Platonov’s focus is not on some private dream world but on a political and historical reality so extraordinary as to be barely credible.
3
The Soviet Union had adopted as its emblem the hammer, symbolizing the workers, and the sickle, symbolizing the peasants. It claimed to be a Workers’ and Peasants’ State, and to this day many people continue to take this claim at face value, failing to recognize the depth of the Bolsheviks’ hostility to the peasantry. Most Bolsheviks saw the peasants as little better than the petty bourgeoisie; many probably felt much the same as Maxim Gorky, whom Kornei Chukovsky records as saying on one occasion that the Russian peasant “is our enemy, our enemy” and on another as saying, “You’ll pardon my sa
ying so, but the peasant is not yet human.”5 Gorky’s first sentence, at least, was accurate; the peasants’ whole way of life was indeed a threat to the Bolshevik project of a strong, centrally planned state.
In 1917, in order to destabilize the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks had encouraged the peasants to rise against their landlords and appropriate their estates. After seizing power themselves, the Bolsheviks found themselves having to reassert the power of central government. The peasants resisted the Bolshevik policy of “grain requisitioning”—of forcibly confiscating grain from the peasants in order to feed the cities—and peasant revolts continued on a massive scale until as late as 1924. After a few years of uneasy truce, there was another grain procurement crisis in 1927–1928. Ever more forcible measures were taken to compel the peasants to surrender their grain at the extremely low price offered them by government procurement agents. Collectivization and the Terror Famine were the last, most terrible battles of a war that had lasted over a decade.
The main tactic adopted by the Bolsheviks was the promotion of class struggle in the village. Peasants were officially classified as poor peasants (bednyaki), who had no property of their own, middle peasants (serednyaki), who owned property but did not employ hired labor, and rich peasants, or kulaks (kulaki), who not only owned property but also employed hired labor. Peasants opposed to collectivization but too poor to be called kulaks were categorized as “subkulaks” or “kulak hirelings” (podkulachniki). The kulaks were deported; since nearly all the middle peasants were opposed to collectivization, they were labeled kulaks or subkulaks and deported en masse, along with the kulaks; the poor peasants were allowed to join the collective farms. According to data from Soviet archives, over 1,800,000 “kulaks” and family members were deported in 1930 and 1931; it is likely that about a quarter of them died before reaching the “special settlements”—often just patches of Siberian forest—that were their destination. The historian Lynne Viola has written, “The liquidation of the kulak as a class—dekulakization for short…was Stalin’s first great purge…an endeavor to remove undesirable elements and to decapitate traditional village leadership and authority structures in order to break down village cohesion…and intimidate the mass of the peasantry into compliance.”6
Most Soviet writers of the time lived in the main cities, and few witnessed any of this directly. Mikhail Sholokhov knew what was happening and bravely protested to Stalin. A few writers—like Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak—sensed that something terrible was taking place and at least hinted at it in their work. Some writers—like Alexander Tvardovsky—came from peasant families and knew what had happened but chose, for the sake of self-preservation, to lie about it. Platonov and his friend Vasily Grossman were the only two members of their generation to write truthfully and in depth about the fate of the Soviet peasantry. Grossman was probably largely dependent on what he heard from others (perhaps including Platonov himself), but the chapters about the peasantry in his short novel Everything Flows are both accurate and heartbreakingly vivid. Much of Platonov’s account is firsthand; no Soviet writer of his generation had a better understanding of the life of the peasantry in the 1920s and early 1930s.
4
In 1921, faced by widespread opposition to the Bolshevik regime and a near-total breakdown of the system of food distribution, Lenin had instigated the somewhat more liberal New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed some measure of free trade. In 1928, wanting to reinstate central control of all aspects of economic and political life, Stalin rescinded the NEP and implemented the first of the many Soviet Five-Year Plans. This program of crash industrialization was accompanied by the promotion of the “shock-worker movement,” to which Platonov repeatedly alludes throughout both The Hurdy-Gurdy and Fourteen Little Red Huts. The term “shock worker” is one of many words and phrases in these plays that now require explanation—not only to foreign readers but even to younger Russians. It is the conventional translation of udarnik (literally, “one who strikes blows”). From May 1929 this originally military term was used of exemplary workers who overfulfilled their “norm” and so helped to accelerate the “tempo” (another key word of the time) of production. The First All-Union Conference of Shock Workers was held in December 1929 and its battle cry was the slogan “Fulfill the Five-Year Plan in Four!”
Stalin’s twin programs of industrialization and collectivization were of incalculable importance; it is they that transformed the Soviet Union into the militaristic state it would always remain. Nevertheless, they were not the only aspects of life that required government intervention. Collectivization made it easier for the central authorities to extract grain and other foodstuffs from the peasantry and deliver them to the cities, but it was still necessary to supply the peasants with a modicum of essential goods. Now that almost all private trade had been banned, it was necessary to set up some kind of distribution system. This proved unexpectedly difficult, and for some time the system was in a state of almost constant reorganization. The Hurdy-Gurdy provides us with a clear picture of a particular “cooperative system”—a network of small stores, centered on a district town, and with several thousand full members (paishchiki, or “dues payers”)—that existed between August and December 1930. The density of realistic detail in the play is remarkable. In the words of the Moscow scholar Natalya Duzhina, “The Hurdy-Gurdy could be called an encyclopedia of the political and social life of the time when it was being written. It is a distinctive photograph of a reality that was…changing with extraordinary speed. Imprinted in the play are international events, internal Soviet political struggles, and phenomena unique to Soviet life.”7
The corruption and incompetence endemic to rural cooperatives were widely recognized; cooperatives were often criticized in the provincial and national press and were a safe target for satire; jokes about “cooperative matchsticks” that never caught fire seem to have been particularly widespread. Duzhina has established, from a study of the various drafts of The Hurdy-Gurdy, that Platonov began with the aim of writing a light comedy. Maxim Gorky had encouraged Platonov to “try his hand at comedy” and had discussed his work with one of the directors of the Moscow Art Theatre. In a letter to Platonov, Gorky had written, “Your language, spoken by intelligent actors, would sound excellent onstage. Your sense of humor—your very original, lyrical sense of humor—testifies to your ability to write a play…. As I see it, there is some kinship in your psyche with Gogol.” When he began work on The Hurdy-Gurdy, Platonov may well have hoped that the Moscow Art Theatre would agree to stage it.8
The capacity to respond to major social and political events both quickly and in depth has always been rare; most artists need time to meditate a response. Platonov is an exception; many of his works constitute an almost immediate response to events taking place while he was writing. This may be particularly true of The Hurdy-Gurdy. The autumn of 1930—the time he was at work on the play—saw not only the alleged discovery of a “counterrevolutionary organization” attempting to sabotage Soviet food supplies but also a show trial (November 25–December 7, 1930) during which a number of prominent Soviet economists and engineers were found guilty of forming an anti-Soviet “Industrial Party” and having plotted, during the previous four years, to wreck Soviet industry and transport. During the trial there were mass demonstrations by workers carrying banners with such slogans as “Death to the Saboteurs” and “May the Saboteurs Be Shot.” Platonov was an engineer himself and may well have spent more time with other engineers than he did with other writers. He evidently understood not only the absurdity of these accusations and appeals for vengeance but also the likelihood that more such trials would be held. While he was working, The Hurdy-Gurdy’s original theme—the corruption and incompetence of cooperatives—receded into the background; the theme of imaginary acts of sabotage and show trials became central.
The miniature show trial in the final scene is a tour de force. Platonov deftly captures the bewildering mixture of absurdity and
tragedy that characterized such trials. Just as Nikolai Bukharin notoriously confessed to plotting against the Soviet state eight years later, in the last of the Moscow Show Trials, so Platonov’s innocent and idealistic Alyosha confesses to ludicrous acts of sabotage. The spectators, for their part, respond in a variety of ways, though not one of them shows either common sense or understanding:
—Here within us rages a lofty hatred. And—above all—it rages within a common breast!
…
—Oh, Papa, this is an impetuous welling up of intrigue and machination.
—And all the time, you know, absolutely all the time, even when I was having the abortion—all the time I had a feeling that something at work wasn’t right…I even said this to the doctor during the operation—I was surprised at myself!
—Oh I love these moments of danger!
…
—Let none of you, ever, trust yourselves!
—Consider yourself a saboteur, for the sake of the work!
—Chastise yourselves on your days off!
—More torment, more gnawings of conscience, more anguish with regard to the class, comrades!
Here Platonov anticipates not only the historical reality of the 1930s but also much of the nonofficial Soviet literature of later decades—the work of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky in the 1930s and that of the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 1980s.
The Hurdy-Gurdy’s other climactic scene—the Evening of the Experimental Trial of New Forms of Food—is more complex in its symbolism. Most simply, it is a parody of the research into the potential of artificial foodstuffs then being carried out in a number of new institutes in Moscow and Leningrad with such titles as the Higher Institute of Nourishment; the difficulty of feeding the population was only too evident, and the authorities were hoping that science could provide a solution. Less obviously, Platonov is drawing attention to the danger that this new “diet” of conspiracy theories represented to the Soviet people.9 When the guests are offered kasha made from locusts, Serena (a visiting foreigner) says that if people eat “saboteur insects,” they will become saboteurs themselves. Behind her words lies a then well-known quotation from Ludwig Feuerbach—“A man is what he eats”10—and her assertion sounds all the more convincing because the Russian vreditel’ (saboteur) is equally applicable to human saboteurs and to such creatures as mice and locusts. Platonov is giving his country a warning; he is afraid that constant exposure to newspaper articles and radio broadcasts about saboteurs will corrupt people.
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays Page 1