Андрей Платонов — один из самых ярких представителей русской литературы XX столетия. Как сказал о писателе А.Н. Варламов: «Гениальность Платонова сомнению или обсуждению не подлежит. Платонов — не просто фигура, личность: это — явление». Его необыкновенные произведения расширяют рамки языка и сознания, позволяют взглянуть на Россию и личный трагический мир человека с неожиданной стороны и, главное, обладают особым очарованием увлекательной прозы. В настоящее издание вошли два главных романа писателя — «Чевенгур» и «Котлован», а также лучшие рассказы.

This title is translated and with an introduction by Robert And Elizabeth Chandler. 'For the mind, everthing is in the future' Platonov once wrote; 'for the heart, everything is in the past'. The protagonist of Soul is a young man torn between these opposing desires, sent as a kind of missionary to bring the values of modern Russia to his childhood home town in Central Asia. In this strange, haunting novella, as well as in the seven stories that accompany it, a rediscovered master of twentieth century Russian literature is shown at his wisest and most humane. It comes with an afterword by John Berger.

Moscow in the 1930s is a symbol of Soviet paradise, a fairy-tale capital where, in Stalin's words life has become better, life has become merrier. Moscow Chestnova bears her captial's name, and seeks the happiness it promises. She flits from man to man, fascinated by the brave new world around her. In an age of spin and soundbites, this anarchic satire retains its bite.

In the mid-1930s Stalin announced that life has become better, life has become merrier; these words were endlessly repeated on the radio, in newspapers, on posters and placards. In Happy Moscow Andrey Platonov exposes the gulf between Stalin's rhetoric and the reality of the time. The heroine, Moscow Chestnova, is an orphaned girl who has been named after the fairy-tale Soviet capital. A bold, gifted, and glamorous parachutist, she joins the Soviet elite, but a parachuting accident is only the beginning of her fall... and it is not only she who falls. In styles ranging from the grotesque to the mock sentimental to the absurd, Platonov shows how language itself is being debased. At some point Platonov evidently realized that his novel was unpublishable and abandoned work on it. The Russian text was first published only in 1991. This present collection contains not only a revised translation of Happy Moscow but also some closely related works in different genres: a film script, a remarkably prescient essay about ecological catastrophe, and two short stories. The appearance of the same characters and motifs in different works creates a strange effect — as if the characters are truly alive and we are being granted unexpected glimpses of them from different vantage points.