Happy Moscow (New York Review Books Classics)

A great novel by a recently discovered Russian genius for English readers. While The Foundation Pit is considered Platonov's masterpiece, I think this is a much more accessible novel. Happy Moscow is a excellent introduction to a writer of strangely beautiful prose.

First, let's break down this book into its components. The longest section is HAPPY MOSCOW, a 110-page novella written by Platonov in the 1930s, but published posthumously only in 1991; more on this in a moment. The remaining 150 pages are essentially supportive materials, appendices, and footnotes. There are three essays by the principal translator, Robert Chandler, which are both scholarly and helpful. Then there are two short stories, an essay, and a screenplay, each of which explores similar themes to the novella, uses the same symbols, or features some of the same characters; the longest of them, "The Moscow Violin," is especially interesting in that it recycles almost identical passages, but in a different order and to different effect. The book ends with thirty pages of scholarly notes set in small type, and a bibliography. So rather than being a collection of stories, this is more like a complete kit for understanding the title novella and placing it in historical and scholarly context. While the novella itself is relatively approachable, the volume as a whole is not for the casual reader. Reading HAPPY MOSCOW itself, I could only think of words beginning with the letter S: symbolic, surrealistic, satirical. None of these terms entirely fits, but in combination they do. Moscow, of course, is the name of the city; it is also the first name of the principal female character, Moscow Ivanova Chestnova. An orphan, brought up in a state children's home, she is sponsored by an idealistic apparatchik to train as a pilot and parachutist, reaching fame and notoriety when her parachute catches fire and she descends on the city like a sparkling firework. Numerous men fall in love with her, and the book follows her as she moves from one to the other, even as her own life symbolically descends from the skies to under the earth, when she becomes a construction worker on the new Moscow metro. In a helpful stroke early in his introduction, the translator quotes a visitor to Moscow in 1935 complaining that the only maps available of the city portrayed either Moscow's past or its future, but not its present. There were maps from 1924, showing buildings that had since been torn down and roads rerouted. There were maps showing what the city would look like following the Ten Year Reconstruction Plan. But people were so intent on looking at the great leap forward that they had no interest in the temporary state of the city under their feet. Platonov's book is full of a similar idealism. This is most clearly shown by the men who help the heroine. We have the civil servant Bozhko, who uses Esperanto to correspond all over the world, in the hope of recruiting others to Socialist ideals. We have the engineer Sartorius, who is convinced that the problems of collectivization can be solved by the invention of a more perfect balance beam for weighing produce. We have the surgeon Sambikin, who has located the precise site of the soul in the large intestine, and claims to have found the essence of eternal life released in the bodies of the newly dead. Symbolism, surrealism, satire. Moscow the person is clearly in part a symbol for Moscow the city, but not all her actions are easily translatable. Many of Platonov's descriptions verge on surrealism, but then I suspect that Soviet Russia had more than a little surrealism of its own. And while Platonov's writing seems satirical, Chandler suggests that he may initially have been trying to win the approval of his political masters, whose own propaganda was scarcely less fantastic. In short, this is a unique and often brilliant book, but a perplexing one -- and there is far more here that any but the most serious student could want.

This is a superb translation of Teffi's experience in fleeing the revolution from Moscow to eventually Constantinople. It's a unique mixture of humor, terror and near escapes from death. Not to be missed.

intriguing read

This is an easy book to recommend and a hard book to review. Happy Moscow is a relatively late and unfinished novel by Andrey Platonov, now considered one of the masters of twentieth-century Russian prose. This edition is a revised version of an earlier translation by Robert Chandler and his associates, now with introduction, annotations, and a number of other related works (the beautiful essay "On the First Socialist Tragedy" alone is almost worth the price of the book, warning about the consequences of "messing around" with nature). Happy Moscow is considerably less jaunty (though sometimes biting or funny-odd) than the title might indicate--the heroine (a parachutist) descends from the air to take on the job of building the Moscow metro, where she loses a leg. The other main protagonist, Sartorius, also moves from being a celebrated engineer to a man who in all humility goes in search of another identity. Moscow is the name of the heroine and the name of a city undergoing rapid change under Stalin: a fiddler plays by an decrepit apartment building, right next to where a rather alarming experimental medical institute is brightly under construction. Reading Platonov can become almost addictive. Everything adds to and complicates your sense of this astonishing and elusive writer. The man is deeply sincere and truthful; he is on the side of the widows and the orphans and things that other people throw away. That being said, I would suggest that as a first approach to Platonov's world you might first read Soul: And Other Stories (New York Review Books Classics) (especially "The Return"--but really, the whole volume is wonderful) or The Foundation Pit (New York Review Books Classics) . But any route will do. Just read him. Happy Moscow is another gift from Chandler and his co-translators in service of an indispensable author.

hard to read, couldn't finish it

Moscow is a young Muscovite lady who passes effortlessly through a series of short lived romances with a range of helpless and hapless characters- scientists, dropouts and intellectuals. Using a range of Soviet slogans from the Stalin era Platonov creates a haunting atmosphere of despair, the reasons for which are never explicit but always close to the surface. The cheerful world of Socialism has a veneer with a very unhappy underbelly constantly struggling to deceive itself. The slogans in this respect not unlike Mantras. Platonov's prose is haunting, poetic and rich in intellectual content requiring rereading on frequent occasions, a reflection i think of multilayered meanings allegorical, and for the times, concealed political protest. This is a book that ranks as one of the best of Russian literature that I have read. Rich in meaning explicit and implicit with a cadence and rhythm that gives it a poetic majesty. In this respect it is also a work of love by its translater R Chandler who has captured splendidly a style and content that touches the reader deeply with the lightest of touches.

The most original genius of my lifetime of reading. So different to his later work which was forced into a more generic soviet style. I love this book. Unique in all literature.