Soul - Softcover

"I squint back on our century and I see six writers I think it will be remembered for.They are Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, William Faulkner, Andrey Platonov and Samuel Beckett...They are summits in the literary landscape of our century" (Joseph Brodsky)

"Rarely does literature come this close to music" (Observer)

"Soul towers above anything else I have read this year. Translated beautifully... It is dark, ascetic, innocent, humane and mystical" (George Szirtes Irish Times)

"Andrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union. Born in 1899, one of a railway worker's 10 children, he was an engineer, a party member and a model proletarian writer before doubts about Communism, and his literary imagination, landed him in trouble with Stalin. His work stopped being published in the early 1930s and only resurfaced 40 years after his death in 1951...The Foundation Pit will stand out as his masterpiece" (Independent)

"'The Chandlers have brilliantly dealt with the challenges of rendering into readable English the extraordinary quality of Platonov's prose... Overall it is hard to see how we could get a better English version of Platonov's prose-nor one more likely to win him the readers he deserves'" (New York Review of Books Orlando Figes)

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.

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JOHN BERGER