Andrei Platonov

It would be hard to imagine a writer who better embodied the ambitions and ambiguities, energies and tensions, of the first three decades of Soviet literature than Andrei Platonov. His achievements are many, but a commonplace shared by almost all critics and readers is that he is a difficult writer (Joseph Brodsky famously compared him to Joyce, Kafka and Musil). This difficulty is encountered first of all at the level of Platonov's language, a disorientating concatenation of registers, causalities and points of view. Fusing the intonations of Russian modernism with keenly overheard fragments of everyday speech and the clamour of Soviet sloganeering, he created a language fatally fit for his fateful age.

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