Robert Chandler's name has long been deservedly associated with those who read and teach Russian literature in translation, particularly the work of Andrei Platonov. Either as an individual or in collaboration with other translators, Chandler has made it possible for those who do not read Russian to become acquainted with works far beyond The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), that mainstay of Russian literature classes. One of Chandler's most valuable contributions in expanding access to lesser-known works by Platonov is his translations of many of the great writer's late-career reinterpretations of Russian fairy tales, published in Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (2013). In that collection, Chandler does a thorough job introducing the general reader to Platonov through a brief biographical sketch, but also includes in the footnotes a great deal of material that will prove valuable to those who are reading these short tales within the context of longer, more famous works.
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays provides a service similar to that of Russian Magic Tales. In the fullest-to-date collected works of Platonov published by Vremia in 2011, the plays and screenplays take up an entire volume of more than seven hundred pages, almost all works that have until now been inaccessible to those who do not read Russian. The sole exception is The Hurdy-Gurdy (Sharmanka), from 1930, Susan Larsen's translation of which first appeared in the Yale journal Theater in the fall of 1989. The version here represents a collaboration with Chandler that is based on a more accurate Russian text. The third translated work is Grandmother's Little Hut (Izbushka babushki), a short, unfinished play from 1938. These are “deep cuts” within Platonov's body of work, and we should be grateful not only to Chandler and his collaborators for having translated them, but also to Columbia University Press for having published them because plays are a vanishingly small niche in the publishing world.
In his 2009 A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, Thomas Seifrid writes that “the typists who had to prepare Platonov's manuscripts for publication would request triple the normal rate of pay—not because of his handwriting, which was clear enough, but because it was impossible with his texts, as was possible for others writers, to remember an entire phrase by looking at its first few words. Every word had to be checked painstakingly to make sure the typescript followed what Platonov had written” (Seifrid, 171). It is instructive to keep this anecdote in mind when considering the “readability” of translations of Platonov. The best translation of his work will feature language that is bewildering and disorienting. Chandler, Irwin, and Larsen have succeeded in preserving this feature of Platonov's prose as much as possible. This feature is amplified in his plays, in which there is no narrative voice to cushion the blows of the characters’ dialogue. The three entries in Fourteen Little Red Huts are a challenge to reader, performer, and audience member alike—but this is appropriate and necessary. For example, in scene 1.3 of The Hurdy-Gurdy, Klokotov insists that the collective farm on which the play is set is following directives from above regarding crayfish: Мы уже взяли установку на организацию рачьих пучин—так бы и надо держать (Platonov 7: 73). Typical of Platonov's explorations of the contradictions of Collectivization, this phrase is a mutilated hybrid of misused official speech and unexpected, horrifying sources of “raw material.” The translation preserves this strange balance exceptionally well: “We adopted the Party line for the organization of fleshy crayfish deeps—and we should be guided by it” (25).
Although teachers of Russian literature and their students will no doubt make up the vast majority of this book's readership, Fourteen Little Red Huts need not be confined to the scholarly sphere. Chandler gives an account of his having staged and directed a Russian-language performance of Fourteen Little Red Huts at Queen Mary College, University of London in 2006. Now that this play and the two others in the volume are available in English, it would be laudable to see them performed. As Chandler writes, “I am confident that these plays live in English, and that they can be brought to life in theaters in the English-speaking world” (185). The English-language theater world would do well to move away from repeated revivals and reinterpretations of Chekhov's late plays and to move on to other deserving works of the Russian theater, including challenging material of the type that Chandler and his co-translators have made available.
A minor objection should be made to the decision to render in English some of the Russian “talking names” of the characters. For instance, in Fourteen Little Red Huts, the last name Zhovov (from zhevat΄, to chew) is rendered as “Glutonov”; Uborniak (from ubornaia, toilet) as Latrinov; and Suetina (from sueta, vanity, trifle) as Futilla. In his introduction, Chandler writes that “we have chosen to re-create [these names] rather than simply to transliterate them” (xxi). While this approach is interesting, the resulting “Russlish” blends—English words with Russian endings—are jarring to those who read both languages, akin to watching an English-language movie dubbed into Russian in which the original dialogue is still audible. Furthermore, this translation decision carries with it the implication that other talking names, from Nikolai Gogol΄s Chichikov to Fedor Dostoevskii's Raskol΄nikov, should undergo a similar treatment—an odd prospect, indeed. Still, we can thank the translators for having made this choice in that it will likely prove productive in classes in which the problems of literary translation are a topic of discussion.
This last criticism is minor. Chandler, Irwin, and Larsen have produced a volume that will prove valuable in both in the classroom and on stage. It helps place Platonov alongside Bulgakov and Maiakovskii as one of the key playwrights of the early Soviet period.
