Happy Moscow

In the mid-1930s Stalin announced that life has become better, life has become merrier; these words were endlessly repeated on the radio, in newspapers, on posters and placards. In Happy Moscow Andrey Platonov exposes the gulf between Stalin's rhetoric and the reality of the time. The heroine, Moscow Chestnova, is an orphaned girl who has been named after the fairy-tale Soviet capital. A bold, gifted, and glamorous parachutist, she joins the Soviet elite, but a parachuting accident is only the beginning of her fall... and it is not only she who falls. In styles ranging from the grotesque to the mock sentimental to the absurd, Platonov shows how language itself is being debased. At some point Platonov evidently realized that his novel was unpublishable and abandoned work on it. The Russian text was first published only in 1991. This present collection contains not only a revised translation of Happy Moscow but also some closely related works in different genres: a film script, a remarkably prescient essay about ecological catastrophe, and two short stories. The appearance of the same characters and motifs in different works creates a strange effect — as if the characters are truly alive and we are being granted unexpected glimpses of them from different vantage points.