Reviews

1. “It is his way with language which gives Platonov’s works their special force. His style can seem naive or awkward at first, because he is forcing the language to do things it is not used to doing. So we find odd combinations of abstract and concrete, an unexpected physicality and the vision of a world which has lost its familiarity, as when we meet a procession led by a priest ‘singing something in the hot silence of nature’. [The translators,] Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone, have risen splendidly to the task.”

Peter France, The Scotsman, 8th May 1999

2.  “. . . it is hard to think of another writer who so expertly animated the sadness and unease of the Soviet period. [Platonov’s] fiction, at its best, has the timeless quality of parable or folklore.”

Adam Newey, New Statesman. 22nd January, 2001

3. “Reading Platonov is always an exhilarating, depressing and moving experience . . . We have here a difficult and demanding Russian writer, [who] should be read carefully by everyone interested in the trials and tribulations of Russia, Russians and Russian literature, especially – but not only – in the twentieth century.”

Martin Dewhirst, Slavonica, vol 7, no, 1, 2001