Soul and Other Stories Author:Andrey Platonov, Andrei Platonov, Robert Chandler (Translator), Olga Meerson (Translator) Soul offers a selection of the great Soviet writer Andrey Platonov’s finest stories—works that show him at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest—together with a prizewinning new translation of the extraordinary title novella, about which George Szirtes has written: “The yearning is so intense it glows through the la... more »nguage. Maybe that glow is what we think of as soul.” These stories bring out the tensions between everyday life and the ideal. In “The River Potudan” the hero finds himself unable to make love to his wife for fear of hurting her. In “Among Animals and Plants” the disssatisified family of a railway worker watches the splendid express trains rushing by and imagines that utopia already exists in Stalin’s Soviet Union—everywhere, that is, except in their own remote hamlet. “The Return,” chosen by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of “three great works of Russian literature of the millennium,” is about a Soviet officer’s difficult adjustment to family life at the end of the World War II: Should he start a new life with a young woman he met on the journey or accept an imperfect life with his damaged family?« less