Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov

Thanks to Himadri of The Argumentative Old Git. This was one of his Bah-Humbook recommendations for me.

Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov was written and is set in 1930’s Soviet Union. It manages to be both a dynamic and a somewhat hyperactive tale while at the same time delving into the depths of despair. Platonov’s short novel was not published until 1991. This is understandable, for had it been published during his lifetime in Stalin’s Soviet Union, it might have earned Platonov a trip to the Gulag.

The title character, Moscow Chestnova, is a young vibrant woman who becomes a parachutist in the Red Air Force. After being drummed out of military service when an unauthorized midair stunt almost kills her, she takes to hanging out with an assortment of Moscow intellectuals, artists, scientists and engineers. Among them is Dr. Sambikin, who is attempting to scientifically identify the human soul, and Sartorius, an engineer who falls deeply in love with Moscow.

After a night of passion Moscow leaves Sartorius to go explore the world. The remainder of the narrative explores the main characters’ descent into moral and psychological decay. Moscow, the once promising air force parachutist, becomes a laborer, loses her leg in an accident and eventually begins a liaison with Komyagin, another once promising individual whose life has fallen into meaninglessness and stagnation.

Sartorius falls deeper and deeper into a fugue and goes to work for the inglorious Department of Weights and Scales. Eventually losing that position also, he falls further and further. As blindness sets in he begins to lose even his identity and eventually marries an abusive woman.

This novel is full of symbolism and ideas. My version of the book was accompanied by a short but insightful summary of Happy Moscow’s themes by translator Robert Chandler.  Though Chandler sees the story as a balanced critique upon modernity, highlighting both the positive and negative aspects of the “New Humanity ”, I see this work as more of an indictment of a world going very wrong.

Moscow clearly represents the new age. She is initially filled with energy and optimism; she completely believes in the new industrial and scientific driven society and wants to protect and support it,

“What Moscow Chestnova wanted was not so much to experience this life as to safeguard it; she wanted to stand day and night by the brake lever of a locomotive taking people to meet one another; she wanted to repair water mains, to weigh out on pharmaceutical scales medicines for patients, to be a lamp that goes out at just the right moment, as others kiss, taking into itself the warmth that a moment before had been light.”

The narrative is filled with descriptions of busy industrial processes and amazing scientific discoveries. The scientist and engineers are franticly pushing the boundaries of knowledge as exemplified by Sambikin’s pursuit of the human soul; at one point he believes that he finds it in the intestines of a cadaver! People are seen to display a dynamic and hyperactive optimism.

But all is not well. Underneath it all there are still masses of people with barely enough food and who live in squalor. In addition, Moscow and her friends are losing their values and their souls. The new high technological and industrialized world is empty and wretched under the surface.

At one point Sartorius observes clothing on sale in the Krestov market,

“petty clothes prepared for infants who had been conceived, but then the mother must have thought twice about giving birth and had an abortion and now she was selling the tiny lamented – over garments of an unborn person along with a rattle purchased in advance”

In particular, Moscow and Sartorius go into a steep decline. In the end, all that they believed in is shown to be nothing and they both fall into a life of degeneration and despair.

Part of the problem is Socialism. This is illustrated in Sartorius’ loss of self as he begins to absorb the identity of people who he meets on the street. Eventually, he loses his entire identity. However, humankind’s relentless pursuit of science, industrialism, and mindless optimism are things that are also condemned here. I see Platonov’s criticism also applying to many aspects of our modern capitalistic industrial and post -industrial democracies.

The book displays many literary, mythological and philosophical influences, some that I picked up on myself and some pointed out in Chandler’s commentary. One inspiration not mentioned by Chandler that I found incredibly striking is that of D.H. Lawrence. My commentary of some of Lawrence’s ideas can be found in my posts on The Rainbow and Women in Love. In those pieces I described how Lawrence seemed to be presenting a warning about the ominous direction that humanity was moving in. Lawrence saw modernity, industrialism and collectivism as poisoning the human soul. A really interesting thing about Platonov’s book is that it seems to be an uncanny description of the nightmare future that Lawrence feared. I get the sense that if Lawrence could read Happy Moscow, written about seventeen years after the publication of The Rainbow, he would have said “I told you so.”

 

I cannot help to wonder what a conversation would be like between Moscow Chestnova and Lawrence’s heroine, Ursula Brangwen, who achieves what we would today call self-actualization when she frees herself from the pressures and concerns of conformity and modernity.

 It seems to me that both Platonov and Lawrence had some brilliant insights. We would still do very well to heed some of their warnings. However, both authors are too hard on the modern world. Moral degeneracy, dissociation from the positive aspects of nature, vacuity of self, etc. are not as new to recent times as these authors’ worldviews would lead one to believe. In many ways, an individual has more freedoms to resist such things in our world than they ever did in centuries past. I cut Platonov a lot more slack, as he lived in what was a brutal dictatorship. Surprisingly, however, for the most part his characters do not seem to be very oppressed by the government and seem to be living very free lifestyles of their choice. This may have been to protect himself, as Chandler indicates that Platonov actually hoped to get this book published. However, it seems to me that the story of an oppressive dictatorship was just not the one that Platonov was looking to tell in this novel.

Happy Moscow is considered unfinished. As per Chandler, it is likely mostly finished and Platonov just wanted to complete some minor revisions and touch ups. Yet this work does seem to be underdeveloped to me. I wanted to learn and experience more from the characters. I think that thematically Platonov could also have filled in a much clearer picture as to what exactly the problem was with the twentieth century. Basically the book was too short. Despite its flaws however, this is an extraordinary imaginative novel full of compelling characters and ideas.

Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence

Women in Love is D. H. Lawrence’s sequel to The Rainbow. My commentary on The Rainbow is here. Set in the early years of the twentieth century, this novel begins a few years after the events of The Rainbow. The plot primarily concerns Ursula Brangwen’s affair and eventual marriage to Rupert Birkin, as well as her sister Gudrun’s affair with wealthy industrialist Gerald Crich. Like its predecessor, this work is packed with philosophical meanderings on the meaning of life, the Universe and human relationships. Once again there is so much to this book in terms of philosophies, characterizations and writing style of which I could easily devote scores and scores of pages to discussion.

Basically, the novel analyzes the relationships between all four main characters. In doing so it expands upon Lawrence’s grand theory of humanity. Ursula, having undergone a major epiphany in the previous book, and Birkin, who seems to be philosophizing many of Lawrence’s own ideas, have, in the author’s eyes, reached an ideal. They are mostly unaffected by the opinions of other social conventions, etc. They are very much in touch with nature, their true selves, and their own inner beings. Gudrun is an artist who is self confident and very much associated with what, at the time, was chic modernity. Though not portrayed as a monster, Gerold is the driven and willful owner of a mining empire.

Birkin sums up what seems to be Lawrence’s worldview around the middle of the book. Humanity’s history as well as its future seems to have been, and be headed down three potential paths. First there is the cold and mechanistic will of the European man. This tendency is bringing the world into destructive industrialism and modernity. Gerald is the representation of this aspect,

“Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow?”

Lawrence contrasts this with the drive towards the sensual and artistic. The text connects this tendency with dark and primal urges and with feminine sexuality. This is also a path of discovery and Lawrence references it in connection with Eve’s discovery of knowledge when she ate the apple.  Lawrence shows a tendency towards stereotypical, but not hateful, thought by tying these drives with the people of Africa. The author does show a degree of respect for those who take this road however. Birken again ponders,

“He realised that there were great mysteries to be unsealed, sensual, mindless, dreadful mysteries, far beyond the phallic cult. How far, in their inverted culture, had these West Africans gone beyond phallic knowledge? Very, very far. Birkin recalled again the female figure: the elongated, long, long body, the curious unexpected heavy buttocks, the long, imprisoned neck, the face with tiny features like a beetle's. This was far beyond any phallic knowledge, sensual subtle realities far beyond the scope of phallic investigation.” 

Gudrun, as well as a Loerke, a German sculptor that she befriends and flirts with, seem to embody the above tendencies.

Birkin eventually concludes that there is a better alternative to both of the above paths. 

“There was the other way, the remaining way.” 

There are multiple references in the text to the fact that this third path is so revolutionary and beyond what mankind has realized in the past that it is not expressible in words. Lawrence spends much of the book attempting to paint a picture of this alternative. It is a seemingly contradictory combination of never surrendering one’s individuality to another person or to society. At the same time, the individual finds a way to completely touch one’s core self with the core self of another person or persons without actually surrendering any bit of the self. Of course, the individual very much remains attached to the natural world.

All relations, with one exception, depicted in both books seem to involve a struggle for dominance between couples and other pairs of people. One or both members of the relationships eventually cede part or all of their identity to the other member. The one couple that avoids this struggle is Ursula and Birkin. These two idealized people seem to reach a state beyond that of traditional love where their inner beings touch. In another way, their relationship is less than a traditional marriage as they avoid the power struggle and thus do not surrender any of themselves to each other.

This is work of extreme philosophical complexity. In an attempt at getting at some of the basic meanings here, the above is a somewhat of an oversimplification as to what goes on in this book.

Of course in its totality Lawrence’s worldview is too contrived and farfetched for me to accept. However his ruminations are fascinating and he reveals a lot of useful and important insights. At one point, Gudrun and Loerke even predict how industrialism and militarism would one day become a threat to the existence of the human race.

The characters are also intricately and realistically drawn. They are extremely complex. There are no cartoon- like villains here. Even Gerald, who represents society’s headlong dangerous and poisonous rush into industrialism and modernity, is portrayed with sympathy and nuance.

I loved both of these books. Perhaps The Rainbow was a little more compelling as the portrait and transformation of Ursula in that work was magnificent. Nothing in Women in Love really compares to aesthetic beatify of that depiction. One should really read these two novels in order as they are, both in story and theme, sequential. 

For those who are interested in fictional works that center on relationships, deep characters and philosophic meditations on the meaning of it all, these two novels are must reads!