'Svobodnaia veshch": poetika neostraneniia u Andreia Platonova by Ol'ga Meerson (review)

Abstract

732 SEER, 79, 4, 200 I Tsvetaeva. Yet the majority of translations 'worked' for me and many are wholly free of such blemishes. Both translators,particularlyTerras, have a feeling for the beauty and weight of words, the mystery and music, the importance of intonation. There are, unfortunately,only three translationsby Terras's late friend, Ants Oras. These lines from Mandelstam's 'To the memory of Andrei Bely' give an impression of their quality: 'Alunatic's cap you were given for mitre and crown, / You, our teacher and torturer,radiant ruler and clown ... // A mere fluke, a mere flurry in Moscow, too easily stirred, / Too whimsical, flimsy and nebulous, tangled and blurred. // A skateroutskatingyour age, you escaped fromitsmesh / Withyour silverydust of inflections,deflected and fresh.. .' (p. 2 I I). This unprecedented book should be in every poetry-lover'slibraryand on the 'essentialreading'list of everyRussian Studiescourse. Ustinov Institute AVRIL PYMAN University ofDurham Meerson, Ol'ga. 'Svobodnaia veshch". poetikaneostraneniia u AndreiaPlatonova. Berkeley Slavic Specialties. University of Berkeley,Berkeley, CA, I997. I37 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $I4.00 (paperback). Tins book, published four years ago, is a bright star in the constellation of recent books devoted to Andrei Platonov. I shallmention some of these at the end of my review. The notorious 'strangeness'of Platonov'smaturestylehas been the focus of many scholarlyworks. Olga Meerson's originalitylies in her discerning at the heart of this strange style a governing device of 'non-estrangement' (paradoxically extending, not denying, Shklovsky's 'estrangement' theory). While many have registered oddities, solecisms, lacunae; discussed ambivalences , polyphony, what Iablokov calls the 'principle of reversibility';speculated about an authorial 'unconsciousness'; uncovered 'ontological' profundities Meerson sets the whole debate in a new perspective by brilliantlyexamining Platonov'seffectupon his reader.Shefindsthat, through regular and deliberate (and that it is deliberate is an important part of her thesis) non-estrangement of the strange, refamiliarizationof the unfamiliar, Platonov annihilatesnotjust the distance between charactersand narratoror implied author, but the distance between all those and the reader.This investigationof a styleis also an aetiology of reader-anxiety. The peculiar unease felt by readers of Platonov has been discussed by Valerii Podoroga 'We do not notice how this pain enters deeply into us' (Voprosy filosofii,3, I989, p. 33) and by Joseph Brodsky who wrote that, reading Platonov, you get 'marooned in blind proximity to the meaninglessnessof the phenomenon this or that word denotes [. . .] throughyour own verbal carelessness' (LessthanOne,Harmondsworth, I986, P. 287). Meerson now delves very much deeper into the vulneral/moral predicament and its literary-technical causation. With tireless lucidity analysing passages from Chevengur and Kotlovan aswell asfromten otherworks,she showshow Platonov, 'catching us in a snare' (p. 32), makes us read about weird or horrificmatters REVIEWS 733 unquestioningly because, again and again, his only slightly extraordinary language (about the weird, the horrific)bringsto mind the ordinary(colloquial, etc.) languagewhich he has avoided, so that, thinkinghe has used it, we swiftly read on. By failing to take in the non-ordinary words, automatically 'correcting' them, we become co-responsible for the abnormalities we have not reacted against. Only on re-readingdo we graspwhat has happened. An example of a verbally based non-estrangement is when we imagine we have read:'Sovietpower can be establishedwhen thereexistsan impoverished class and when the White Guard is out of the way'. Yet what is written is not Iimpoverishedclass' (bednota) but 'poverty' (bednost'), and the phrase 'somewhere far off' is placed before, not after, 'the White Guard': 'Soviet power requirespeople to sufferpovertyand needs an enemy in the vicinity.'Platonov begins to seem a magician whose tricks seem all the cleverer once they are exposed. But Meerson is looking for far more than skill:for values and wisdom; she calls her approach 'axiological' and 'sophiological'.A frequentlyused form of narrative-basednon-estrangementoccurswhen the fictionalcharactersaccept the surprisingwithout surprise, whereby the reader is lured into a similar acceptance. Like Chevengur's bolsheviks,we too are undismayed when a voice is heard singing from inside a stray round tank rolling unpropelled through deserted countryside, and when they push it over a ravine-edge neither they nor we knowwhetherthey whetherwe areguiltyof a murder.No longer may we 'divide people up into "I" and "they", or even...