Wilder and a Darker Mirror

The other day I wrote that I’d been reading Little House on the Prairie. I might have added that after hours, I’ve been refracting it through a darker mirror. The darker mirror would be Dzhan—Soul, the dystopian novella by Andrei Platonov who just might be the greatest Russian writer of the communist era.

In Little House, Laura and her family venture forth onto the American frontier. In Soul, Nazar Chagataev ventures back to Central Asia, where he was born. Laura’s frontier is full of hazards and challenges, but a sense of civility and good order prevails. Chagataev’s is not so reassuring. He finds himself on the edge the Aral Sea—an area we know today as the center of one of the worst environmental calamities in human history. Apparently trouble is nothing new:

Looking out of the hut’s entrance, they could see the shadow of evening running towards the pit of Sary-Kamysh, the location in ancient times of the hell of the whole world. Chagataev had heard this tale in his childhood but only now did he understand is full meaning. In far-off Khorosan beyond the Koper-Dag mountains, among gardens and ploughed fields, lived the pure god of happiness, fruit and women—Ormuzd, protector agriculture and of human reproduction, love of peace in Iran. But to the north of Iran, beyond the mountains, lay empty sand: they stretched out in the direction of the middle of the night, where there was nothing but sparse, feeble grass—and even this grass was torn up by the wind and driven to the black places of Turan where the soul of man aches without respite. From there, unwilling to submit to despair and a hungry death, benighted people would flee to Iran. They broke into the hearts of the gardens, into the women’s quarters, into the ancient cities, and hurried to eat, to feast their eyes and forget themselves before they were cut down and any survivors were chased back into the depth of the sands. Then they would hide away where the desert comes to an end, in the empty hollow of Sary-Kamysh, languishing there until need and the memory of the translucent gardens of Iran made them rise up again.

—Andrey Platonov, Soul 32-3 (NYRB Paper back 2008)

I was going to say “you don’t get any darker than that,” but in fact you do: Chagataev travels with the people in this land where he was born and comes to understand them as people who have lost their identity and cohesion and their will to live.

Of course the true comparison to Prairie is not in the pioneers; it is in the Indians who are being driven out and broken by the pioneers’ advance. In fact, Wilder treats the Indians with respect and some understanding. But it isn’t their story she is telling. Platonov, by contrast, is telling the story of the vanquished, and it has rarely been so well told.