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“Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.”

— Marcel Proust (tr. Lydia Davis)

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An end-note from Platonov’s beloved translators, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, as found in the NYRB publication of Soul.

Locomotives and trains appear frequently in Platonov's work, and are often connected to the theme of revolution. In 1922, in a letter to his wife, Platonov described an experience from the time of the Civil War: "Even though I had not yet completed technical school, I was hurriedly put on a locomotive to help the driver. The remark about the revolution being the locomotive of history was transformed inside me into a feeling that was strange and good: remembering this sentence, I worked very diligently on the locomotive..."

The sentence the young Platonov remembers is from Karl Marx: "Revolutions are the locomotives of history." " By 1927, however, Platonov had grown disenchanted: towards the end of Chevengur, Sasha Dvanov remarks, "I used to think that the revolution was a locomotive, but now I can see that it isn't." Earlier in the novel, there is a head-on collision between two trains. And several of Platonov's heroes, including Sasha Dvanov in Chevengur and Nazar Chagataev in "Soul," descend from trains and choose instead to walk long distances, apparently renouncing their belief in any quick and easy journey to a new world. By the mid-1930s the struggles of the Revolution were in the past, and utopia—according to the official Soviet position–was in the present.

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A. Gurvich’s political denunciation of Platonov was based on his being anti-narodny (against the people). In an article, G. argued that Platonov's worldview had not changed since the late 1920s and that he had learned nothing from his many mistakes. Tremendous scorn was reserved for Platonov's indulgence in the un-Bolshevik emotion of pity or sympathy for the downtrodden. What G. calls Platonov's "pity-intoxicated heart" served as a warning to writers who believed that ‘realism’ should include any sense or sensibility of the Other. There was no Other in Stalin’s Russia: there was only the Enemy.

To quote G’s (fairly accurate) denunciation of Platonov (as found in the Chandlers’ endnotes):

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And finally: "Dream of Lust" by Louise Glück, as published in The Kenyon Review, New Series, Winter 2001, Vol. XXIII, No. 1:

After one of those nights, a day:
the mind dutiful, waking, putting on its slippers,
and the spirit restive, muttering
I’d rather, I’d rather—

Where did it come from,
so sudden, so fierce,
an unexpected animal? Who
was the mysterious figure? You are ridiculously young, I told him.

The day tranquil, beautiful, expecting attention.
The night distracting and barred—
and I cannot return
not even for information.

Roses in bloom, penstemon, the squirrels
preoccupied for the moment.
And suddenly I don’t live here, I live in a mystery.

He had an odd lumbering gaucheness
that became erotic grace.

It is what I thought and not what I thought:
the world is not my world, the human body
makes an impasse, an obstacle.

Clumsy, in jeans, then suddenly
doing the most amazing things
as though they were entirely his idea—

But the afterward at the end of the timeless:
coffee, dark bread, the sustaining rituals
going on now so far away—

the human body a compulsion, a magnet,
the dream itself obstinately
clinging, the spirit
helpless to let it go—

it is still not worth losing the world.