The evening is also a black parody of the Last Supper—the supreme example of a “trial of new forms of food.” Instead of the body and blood of Christ, the guests eat bird droppings, black earth cutlets, lard from dead bones, and other “stuff that is cheap and eternal” (emphasis added). Platonov does, incidentally, directly ask his audience—or readers—to search his texts for hidden meanings. In a stage direction that appears to be addressed more to readers than to actors or directors, he writes of the cooperative loudspeaker system, “The tube on the table repeats these same words a few seconds later in an entirely different voice—one that is more muffled, with a different expression and even a different meaning.” And in the story “Among Animals and Plants” (1936) he tells us about a young railwayman who always read books “in all kinds of interesting ways, taking pleasure in the lofty thoughts of others and his own supplementary imagination…. He preferred to choose pages at random—now page 50, now page 214. And although every book is interesting, reading this way makes it even better, and still more interesting, because you have to imagine for yourself everything you have skipped, and you have to compose anew passages that don’t make sense or are badly written, just as if you too are an author, a member of the Soviet Union’s Union of Writers”11
The play’s title—Sharmanka—could also be translated as “barrel organ.” We chose to translate it as “hurdy-gurdy” because this seemed more evocative. Originally the word “hurdy-gurdy” was used only of stringed instruments sounded by turning a wheel, but it came to be used more loosely of any instrument played by turning a handle, including a barrel organ. The Russian idiom “to turn the sharmanka” means “to grind away at something,” “to keep harping on the same theme.” During the the Evening of the Experimental Trial of New Forms of Food, the sharmanka is used to help convey their new, propaganda-filled diet to the members of the cooperative. The word “hurdy-gurdy,” with its thumping rhyme, conveys something of the appropriate monotony.
Platonov’s symbols, however, are always complex. Like the cooperative loudspeaker system, Platonov elicits different meanings from the same thing. Left to itself, Alyosha’s hurdy-gurdy seems to generate curiously old-fashioned tunes, some of them probably religious in origin. Shchoev and Yevsei evidently find this a source of comfort. However dangerous the effects of propaganda, the foundations of a people’s life are resistant to change.
5
A famine that struck the grain-producing areas of European Russia and—still more severely—Ukraine and Kazakhstan, reached a climax in the summer of 1933. Weather conditions may have played a part, but this famine was, for the main part, a direct result of government policy. Collectivization—in effect, the extermination of many of the most hardworking peasants and the enslavement of the rest—had led to a huge drop in yields. The authorities, however, still needed to procure grain to feed workers in the cities. More than that, they were determined to export grain in order to purchase foreign equipment required for industrialization.
Despite repeated protests from officials at a local level, the central authorities maintained that the collapse in agricultural yields resulted only from the obstinacy and dishonesty of the peasants—who they alleged to be hiding their grain. Activists were sent out into the villages to search for nonexistent hidden stores. Like all Soviet workers, these activists had to fulfill their quota—and so they seized every grain they could find, even the seed corn for the following year. By the autumn of 1932, if not long before then, a catastrophe was inevitable. During the first half of the following year about three to five million peasants died in Ukraine (perhaps a fifth of the republic’s population) and about one and a half million peasants in Kazakhstan (nearly 38 percent of the population)—and there were serious food shortages throughout the entire Soviet Union.12
It is this famine that constitutes the central theme of Fourteen Little Red Huts, the only one of his ten plays that Platonov himself termed a tragedy. When Platonov conceived the play, in 1931, he intended to write a comedy, but by the summer of 1933, when he wrote both a complete draft and his final version, his vision had darkened. In a marginal note to the draft of the fourth act he wrote, “Develop famine throughout.”13 The play ends with a discussion of how best the members of the kolkhoz might be able to catch fish. A small, recently constructed wattle “prison hut” is to serve as a trap, and the bait will be either Futilla’s baby, who has starved to death, or Interhom, the young foreign visitor who has just been murdered in this same hut. The last words of all are spoken by Anton Endov, the most ideologically impeccable of the kolkhoz workers. He collapses, jumps up to his full height to shout “Forward now!!!” and then collapses again. Earlier in the act, another of the workers, Vershkov, has come out with the memorable line, “No, what keeps me alive is consciousness. You can’t stay alive here from food, can you?”
The variety of tone—the shifts between tragedy and black, absurdist humor—may seem bewildering. There seems, on first reading, to be little emotional connection between the agonizingly painful last act and the lightly satirical first act about an encounter, in a Moscow railway terminus, between two visiting foreigners and a group of Soviet writers. This split may be part of the reason for the often repeated view that the play is “unstageable.” The absoluteness of this split, however, is precisely what Platonov wants to emphasize. The Soviet writers live in one world; the Soviet peasants live in another. Bos, the visiting foreign dignitary, understands this; when he is told that two of the writers wish to be introduced to him, he replies, “Yes, but be quick about it. I need reality, not literature.” The first act is Platonov’s reproach to his colleagues for choosing—despite their lip service to realism—not to write about reality.
The real-life prototypes for the three writers are easily recognizable. Glutonov is modeled on Alexei Tolstoy, a gifted but opportunistic figure, nicknamed the “Comrade Count” and famed as a bon viveur. In the Russian original he is called Zhovov; since most names in the play have a clear meaning—in this case, “Chewer”—we have chosen to re-create them rather than simply to transliterate them. Alexei Tolstoy was on the organizing committee of the Union of Soviet Writers, and in early 1933, when he was celebrating his fiftieth birthday, he had received a great deal of favorable attention in the Soviet press. Like Glutonov, he had a large extended family to support. This—Bos is informed—is why he keeps his mouth shut. His name may also be intended to evoke the dialect word zhovka, which means “dummy.”
A second writer, Latrinov (Ubornyak in Russian—from ubornaya, meaning “toilet”) is modeled on Boris Pilnyak, with whom Platonov had twice collaborated in the late 1920s. Pilnyak was subjected to fierce criticism in 1929–1930, but in 1932 he reestablished his Soviet credentials—if only temporarily—with the publication of The Volga Falls into the Caspian Sea; the title of one of Latrinov’s books, Eternally Soviet, probably alludes to this attempt on Pilnyak’s part to win back his place in the literary establishment. Pilnyak was a gifted writer, and he and Platonov have something in common; it is possible that he represents Platonov’s alter ego—some fear on Platonov’s part that he too might one day be terrified into capitulation. The third writer, Fushenko, is modeled on Pyotr Pavlenko, a talentless and ultraorthodox writer who seems to have been a particular enemy of Platonov’s. In February 1932 Pavlenko had chaired a Writers’ Union meeting that was, in effect, a show trial of Platonov. He and Platonov, both born in 1899, continued to mock and criticize each other till they both died in 1951; here Platonov has conflated Pavlenko’s name with that of a nineteenth-century French police minister, Joseph Fouché.
From 1929 there had been a huge increase in the number of foreigners visiting the USSR. Among the reasons for this were the need for foreign engineers at new industrial enterprises being established as a part of the first Five-Year Plan and increasing foreign interest, on account of the economic crisis in Europe and America, in the potential of a centrally planned economy. All this is reflected in both The Hurdy-Gurdy and F
ourteen Little Red Huts. Both plays feature a foreign couple—a father and daughter in The Hurdy-Gurdy and an improbably ancient man with a flighty young mistress in Fourteen Little Red Huts. In the later play, the ancient man—“Bos” in English, “Khoz” in Russian—is a complex and enigmatic figure. Like his twin in the earlier play, he bears a long list of names, taken from several languages; both old men are generic West European figures. There is little doubt, however, that Bos embodies something of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw had celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in the Soviet Union in 1931 and had asserted afterward that the world’s only hope lay in the success of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. He had ridiculed the idea that there might be famine in the Soviet Union, saying that he had never dined so well or so sumptuously as during his travels there. Bos is, among other things, a George Bernard Shaw who has chosen to discover the reality of the Terror Famine.
6
There are two words, or groups of words, that function as leitmotifs in The Hurdy-Gurdy and Fourteen Little Red Huts. One—which occurs three times in The Hurdy-Gurdy and fifteen times in Fourteen Little Red Huts—is pustyak. This is usually translated as “trifle” but is here translated as “piffle.” Platonov’s extreme emphasis on this word, which he places in the most unexpected contexts, made it seem better to choose a word that draws attention to itself. In many respects “piffle,” a colloquial, originally dialect, word works well. There is, however, one serious loss—probably unavoidable. Pustyak belongs to an entire family of words—all of them important to Platonov—that have to do with emptiness; pustoi means “empty,” pustota means “emptiness,” and pustynya is the standard word for both “wilderness” and “desert.” “Piffle” lacks these associations, and there is, of course, no equivalent family of words in English.
The other important leitmotif—still more problematic for a translator—is the word skuchno, most often translated as “boring” or “dreary.” Among the word’s cognates are skuka (“boredom” or “dreariness”) and the verb skuchat’ (to be bored), which is also commonly used to mean “to miss” or “to long for” someone or something. Throughout the two plays Platonov plays on all the different meanings of these words; as my colleague Maria Bloshteyn writes, “for Platonov’s characters life is dreary, they are frequently bored, and they long for something better or different.”14 This theme—of boredom and what it can drive people to—has deep roots in Russian literature. One of Gogol’s most famous stories, “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” concludes with a phrase that quickly became proverbial: “Yes, gentlemen, life in this world is boring.” And the heroine of Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is driven to commit a series of cold-blooded murders by what Leskov calls “that same Russian boredom…a boredom so profound that, as people say, it makes even the thought of hanging yourself seem like fun.”15 The theme of boredom is developed by Chekhov and many other writers of Russia’s “Silver Age,” and it is important throughout Platonov’s work; the desperation of his characters’ hopes and ambitions springs, above all, from an overwhelming need to escape from a profound, unrelieved boredom, from their sense that “all is vanity.”
The most shocking occurrence of the word “boring” is in the very last lines of Fourteen Little Red Huts. Numbed by all that has happened, Futilla can only say, “My baby isn’t breathing. Grandpa Bos has left. Soon it’ll be evening—how boring it gets on my own…” The effect is complex. On the face of it, these words are a heartrending understatement, yet their literary associations imbue them with a depth of a different kind. Since such associations are not readily available in English, I have compensated by introducing—in earlier passages of dialogue—such idioms as “bored to tears” and the all-too-appropriate “bored to death”; my hope is that, by the end of the play, “bored” and “boring” will have acquired the same depth of meaning in English as they have in Russian.
Linked to these themes of deathly boredom and emptiness is the theme of orphanhood; nearly all Platonov’s most important works have central characters who are orphans. Fourteen Little Red Huts is no exception; if no one in the play is explicitly referred to as an orphan, this is simply because all of these Soviet peasants have been orphaned. Their Mother—the Earth—has been taken away from them—and so has their God, their Father in Heaven. In Chevengur, written around five years earlier, a recalcitrant peasant complains to one of the Bolsheviks, “Very clever. You’ve given us the land, but you take away our every last grain of wheat. Well I hope you choke on this land. All us peasants have got left of it is the horizon. Who do you think you’re fooling?” Without earth and heaven, Platonov’s peasants do indeed have nothing left to them but the horizon—a distant hope, an ever receding line of distant light.
In Fourteen Little Red Huts, Distant Light is the name of the kolkhoz fishing ship, which has been stolen—along with all the kolkhoz sheep, grain, and children. The play ends as Distant Light is about to be returned to the kolkhoz, but whether this represents any real hope is doubtful. There are scholars who consider Platonov to have been a secret Christian—and there is certainly no doubt that the play is dense with Christian symbolism, with references to sheep and shepherds, to bread and fish, to enlightenment and salvation. Futilla, the young chairman of the collective farm, is not only a shepherd but also a sacrificial lamb, offering her own body—her milk, her lymph, her blood, her bones—as food for the starving people. Nevertheless, her child is already dead, and many other adults and children have probably died too. It seems almost certain that this distant light is a mere will-o’-the-wisp, that the hope it represents is illusory.
The Terror Famine resulted in at least seven million deaths. Platonov wrote of it while it was happening; few writers after him have dared write about it at all. Fourteen Little Red Huts is an extraordinary work. It is hard to distinguish between the real and the surreal, and the tone shifts jarringly between farce and tragedy, between resigned alienation and furious satire. These dislocations serve a purpose; they are probably the only way to evoke catastrophes of this order without simply numbing the reader or listener. Platonov’s courage, fierce wit, and devotion to truth are, in the end, inspiring. In the words of John Berger, the poet, novelist, and critic who is one of Platonov’s most passionate admirers in the English-speaking world, “His stories do not add to the grief being lived; they save something.”16
7
Platonov is an enigmatic writer, and the Soviet Union of the 1930s remains hard to imagine; it is an alien world to us. This makes it all too tempting, when writing about Platonov, to focus excessively on the historical background and to forget that, like all great art, his stories and plays can speak to a reader who knows little or nothing about the author and his times. Platonov’s deepest concerns were, in fact, always universal—philosophical and psychological more than political.
Other than orphanhood, the most important of Platonov’s themes, central to all his mature work, are the loss of a child and the loss of a limb. All these are, in effect, one and the same theme; for a family to lose one of its members is the same, in Platonov’s understanding, as for an individual to suffer the loss of one of their limbs. And just as an individual can become disconnected from their family, so mankind as a whole can become disconnected from the greater family of Earth, Man, and Heaven.
The general tone of Platonov’s work between 1926 and 1935 is despairing. Chevengur (1927–1928) ends with Sasha Dvanov drowning himself in the lake where, when Sasha was a small child, his father had drowned himself. The Foundation Pit (1930) ends with the death of Nastya, the small child who embodies the workers’ hope for a bright future. The heroine of the unfinished novel Happy Moscow (1933–1936) loses one of her legs and proves incapable of sustaining a relationship with any of her gifted suitors. In 1935, however, with the short novel Soul, something changes; whereas Happy Moscow begins in hope and ends in despair, Soul begins in despair and ends on a note of cautious hope; the remnants of the Dzhan nation come back together and the
hero, Chagataev, seems ready to enter into a deeper relationship with another human being.
Soul—and the journey to Central Asia that inspired the novel—evidently marked a turning point in Platonov’s life. Everything that Platonov wrote after Soul can be read as a search for healing, for a way to restore the integrity of the broken individual and the broken family. This search, of course, proved difficult, and the answers only tentative; it was not until 1947, with the publication of “No Arms” (a free adaptation of a traditional magic tale), that Platonov felt able to bring all aspects of his central themes—orphanhood, the loss of a limb, the breakdown of a marriage—to an unambiguously optimistic conclusion. Nevertheless, almost everything he wrote after Soul is gentler in tone, and more hopeful, than his earlier work.
We have chosen to conclude this volume with a short, unfinished work, written in 1938 but first published only in 2010, that needs no historical commentary and that perfectly embodies this sense of timid hope. Dusya, an orphaned adolescent girl, befriends Mitya, a little orphaned boy who has given her a drink of water. Both children have been betrayed by the adults around them and they respond to this, albeit hesitantly, by deciding to take care of each other. The fragment ends with Dusya and Mitya setting out at night toward the distant—or possibly imaginary—light of what Mitya says is his grandmother’s hut.
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays Page 2