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“... A long, melancholy, withdrawing roar seems to be what’s left of it, which would have saddened Andrei Platonov, chronicler of the Revolution – not that he wasn’t sad enough already. Platonov was a communist, but his attempts to celebrate the arrival of utopia fell somewhere between tragedy and black humour. The ...”

“... as her ‘dowry’. The Foundation Pit was written in 1930. It was never published during Platonov’s lifetime, and first appeared in print in the United States in 1978 (it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987). This edition is a new translation. The book is reminiscent of Gogol (Platonov has been ...”

“... has also included literary interpreters of the folktale tradition, both famous, like Pushkin and Platonov, and obscure, like the modernising émigré writer Nadezhda Teffi. (Her refreshingly sympathetic take on Baba Yaga anticipates Gregory Maguire’s Wicked by five decades.) Each writer or collector is given a biographical note: some of these are even more ...”

“... Ecclesiastes which is Arrowsmith’s guess, documented again here. Joseph Brodsky once remarked of Andrei Platonov: ‘To talk about his pedigree, trying to fit him into this or that tradition of literature is, essentially, to move in a direction exactly opposite to the one in which he himself was moving’. The same is true of Montale. I’m torn between ...”

“... where he’d been able to secure paid work. (The same is true of many Soviet writers, including Andrei Platonov.) After a few months in exile in Kursk, Kharms returned to Leningrad in late 1932, and spent the remaining ten years of his life there, struggling to earn a living writing nonsense rhymes for children. Poems such as ‘Ivan Ivanich ...”

“... and eating all the other characters. Subsequent works contain parodic imitations of Dostoevsky, Platonov, Tolstoy and Akhmatova. As with many writers of the Soviet counterculture, Sorokin’s work did not begin to appear in book form in Russia until the system that had been his main target collapsed. His first collection of stories, written in the early ...”

“... to literary works, most frequently Mayakovsky’s and Babel’s writing for the early years and Platonov’s and Leonov’s for the later ones. There are endnotes referencing secondary works, particularly those of intellectual historians who share Slezkine’s eschatological view of Bolshevism. The endnotes are no doubt to remind us that the book is, inter ...”

“... endorsement of the Russia that is now emerging. The leading exponent of this view, the economist Andrei Shleifer, helped – not coincidentally – to lay the foundations of the new order, working in Moscow as one of the drafters of Yeltsin’s privatisations, and beneficiaries of the proceeds. Project director of the Harvard Institute for International ...”