Happy Moscow (edition 2001)

Written between 1932 and 1936, Happy Moscow (Schastlivaia Moskva) remained unpublished until 1991. This work, certainly Platonov's most ambiguous and complex work from the 1930s, tends to be forgotten when put aside his earlier novels, Kotlovan and Chevengur] Perhaps this is for its ambiguous and even conciliatory message regarding socialist realism (the contemporary paradigm in art and literature) and Stalinism itself. Rather than representing an exhausted, failed utopia on the edge of nowhere, Platonov's Happy Moscow is set in the dizzying, euphoric atmosphere in Moscow in the early 1930s.

I find this work so compelling precisely because it looks face to face with his contemporaries; here Platonov is trying to work things out, and it is no less dys (or anti) utopian for this fact. Again, Platonov cautions the reader that massive, transformative social engineering is likely to come at a great cost; moreover, he gives us the cost in the form of the novel's heroine, Moscow Chestnova. It is through her dizzying identity changes, and her eventual mutilation, that we see the almost desperate and paranoid self-mutilation of this Muscovite culture.

The translation is of Robert Chandler, and again he shows himself to be peerless when it comes to Platonov. The introduction and explanatory notes help to put Platonov's writing in context, and offer some very interesting readings of the novel in their own right. Unlike translations of Platonov from the 1970s and 80s (Ardis, etc), you get a sense that this is a text that Platonov would have been happy with, had he spoken English. Ironic, fantastical and absurd in equal measure.