Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays

Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) was a Soviet writer of poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and journalism. Robert Chandler has translated widely from Russian. He is also the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (2006) and coeditor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015).

Part horror story, part ideological stand-up comedy, Platonov's plays depict an absurd, nightmarish world in which hope and cynicism are inextricable. Their publication in this appropriately clever and meticulously annotated translation serves as an important contribution to our understanding of one of the twentieth century's most tragic chapters. Platonov, whose complex prose has already established him as Russia's closest equivalent to Faulkner, here emerges as a dramatist who can easily enter into conversation with Beckett. -- Eric Naiman, author of Nabokov, Perversely Absurd, grotesque and seemingly surreal, the topsy-turvy world of Platonov's plays captures the disturbing reality of Stalin's Russia in the 1930's with precision, irreverence and verbal virtuosity! The stunning translation offers a unique opportunity for English-speaking readers and audiences to encounter one of the most uncompromising and visionary Russian writers of the last century. -- Irina Brown, Opera and Theatre Director This collection of three plays by Andrei Platonov brings still more of his remarkable output to the attention of an English-language readership. Marginalized by Soviet literary officialdom, Platonov was an instinctive modernist who produced a series of prose works that are by turns hauntingly disturbing and beautiful. So too in the handful of works he wrote for the stage: in response to the grotesque Stalinist reality around him, his deformative instincts produced plays that anticipate Kharms, Becket, and Ionesco. These translations by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen deftly render them in idiomatic English. -- Thomas Seifrid, author of A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit 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, Andrei Platonov and Samuel Beckett... They are summits in the literary landscape of our century... What's more, they don't lose an inch of their status when compared to the giants of fiction from the previous century. -- Joseph Brodsky In Russia it is Platonov who is increasingly described as the best writer of the post-revolutionary epoch. -- Victor Erofeyev, Times Literary Supplement

• Introduction The Hurdy-Gurdy Fourteen Little Red Huts Grandmother's Little Hut Afterword Acknowledgments A Note on Names Notes Further Reading