Andrey Platonov

Andrey Platonov (1899–1951) was a Soviet Russian writer, regarded as one of the most original and profound imaginations of the twentieth century. His novel Chevengur — the story of a search for a perfect communist city in the rural steppe — was suppressed for decades, and his stories and the great The Foundation Pit present his singular, tender-brutal vision of the Soviet earth and its people.

An engineer turned writer, Platonov lived crushed by censorship and poverty, yet his prose — grammatical but estranged, filled with gentleness for the defeated — influenced generations. First published in full only in the 1980s, Chevengur is now ranked by many with the works of Kafka and Beckett.