Susan Larsen’s translation of The Hurdy-Gurdy (Sharmanka) was first published in Theater (the journal of the Yale School of Drama) in the fall of 1989. My translation of Fourteen Little Red Huts (14 Krasnykh izbushek) was first published in The Portable Platonov (Glas) in 1999, the centenary of Platonov’s birth. Both translations were made from inaccurate Russian texts and have now been revised in accord with the more accurate texts established during the past ten years.
Platonov’s language is extraordinarily rich and there are always more layers of meaning than are initially apparent. All the following have made invaluable contributions both to our understanding of the original and to the translations themselves: Anna Aizman, Maria Bloshteyn, Boris Dralyuk, Emily Laskin, Olga Meerson, Natasha Perova, Anna Pilkington, Anna Ponomareva, Julia Sutton-Mattocks. Jesse Irwin especially wishes to thank Nadja Berkovich and John Tabb DuVal. The contribution made by my wife, Elizabeth, has been invaluable. I have read all three plays aloud to her and we have discussed at length every phrase that seemed in any way dull or unconvincing; it was she who solved many of the most intractable problems.
Natalya Duzhina’s contribution to this volume has been no less crucial. Duzhina is one of the group of scholars, based in Moscow at the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences (IMLI RAN), who are currently, under the supervision of Natalya Kornienko, preparing a scholarly edition of Platonov’s complete works. The first volume, of juvenilia, was published in 2004 and the second volume, of work written in late 1926 and in 1927, was published in April 2016. Duzhina has already published, in Strana filosofov, two important articles about The Hurdy-Gurdy and will be editing the play for the complete works; she generously sent me an early draft of her detailed commentary to the play and gave me carte blanche to draw on it. She also replied patiently and in detail to the questions I e-mailed her almost daily during the last three months of this volume’s preparation. Many of the thoughts in section 4 of the introduction are hers—as is most of the material in the notes to The Hurdy-Gurdy. I am deeply grateful to her; without her help, we could not possibly have done justice to Platonov.
Robert Chandler