Chevengur - Andrey Platonov, Robert Chandler (trans)
I am proud to say my name appears in the acknowledgments- I read the whole manuscript in Russian and English and gave comments on it for one long, beautiful summer. I have studied Russian Lit and language in college, and been avid in Slavic lit since I discovered Gogol at age 13. That's my attempted credibility. All the same there was always a gap in my Soviet literature shelf... Bulgakov is great, the poets are powerful, Gorky ruled in college, and does Nabokov count? Don't let the Soviets have him! Then Platonov came to me after the age of 30, and I devoured his work, just stared into it from cover to cover. It is up there with Gogol and all the greats of any age. If you haven't read his work, it is an utterly different approach to reality; an inscrutable sense of humor; a signature clarity that is dissolved into paradox, a deadpan joke about a political idea the size of the universe, an idea that ended up looking like it would kill the universe to succeed, ...