Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics) (42 page)

Evening set in. The father came back from the forest. The young lad got ready. The stepmother gave him six bricks and a rooster, put an awl in his right hand and gave him three iron skillets to put on his head.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘you must go before anyone’s there, before they come to the party. Sit on the floor, make these bricks into a wall and put the skillets on top of your head like a roof. Tuck the rooster against your left side and hold the awl in your right hand. When they fly in and insult you, when they rush into the bathhouse, you must poke the rooster. The rooster will crow and they’ll all rush out of the bathhouse again. And when the girl is left behind on her own, you must seize her by her braid. You must catch her and not let go. There in your hands she’ll turn herself into one creature after another. She’ll turn into a
mouse, then a rat, but you mustn’t let go. Just keep hold of her braid. Then she’ll turn into a spindle. You must snap the spindle, pick it up again and say, “One end be a beautiful maiden, the other end be a heap of gold!” Then strike her with the whip and say, “Once a fair maiden, now a young filly!” ’

He collected all this stuff and went off to the bathhouse. He put the bricks all round him, he put the skillets on top of his head, he took hold of the rooster and the awl – and there he sat. And then there they all were! They opened the door and flew in as ravens.

‘But now he’s waiting in a city of stone,’ they said. ‘He’s sitting under a roof of iron.’

And they began pecking at this roof of his. But he prodded the rooster with his awl, and the rooster crowed. They all rushed out of the bathhouse. The girl was left behind on her own. He seized her by her braid. There in his hands she began turning herself into one creature after another. She was a mouse, then a rat, and who knows what else. But he didn’t let go. Then she turned into a spindle. He took the spindle, snapped it in half and said, ‘One end be a fair maiden, the other end be a heap of gold!’

And she turned into a fair maiden. And he led her out of the bathhouse, struck her with a whip, mounted her and rode off. He rode into open steppe. He rode and rode. He beat her and whipped her. He galloped and galloped for all he was worth. He made her fair sweat, he did, but he never went anywhere near those other forty. And in the meantime those forty were arguing. Was he riding on her? Or was she riding him? There was no way they could tell.

‘Beyond thrice-nine seas, beyond thrice-nine lands, in the thrice-ninth tsardom, in the thrice-ninth country, lives a lad who has never been baptised and who has never prayed. Let him tell us!’

They found a little lame girl, and she ran off and dragged this lad along, but he wouldn’t say anything. (This lad, you see, was a friend of the poor man’s son.) They dragged the lad back where he’d come from. Then they said, ‘Beyond thrice-nine seas, beyond thrice-nine lands, in the thrice-ninth tsardom, in
the thrice-ninth country, lives a lass who has never been baptised and who has never prayed. Let her tell us!’

And once again the little lame girl ran off and she dragged this girl along to them. And then they learned that it was
he
who had been riding on
her.
Well, they all rode about for a while and then they rode home. All of them went home, but he was the last of all. He struck his filly with a whip and said, ‘Once a young filly, now a fair maiden!’

And then she said, ‘Come and ask for my hand and I’ll be your wife. You have made me human again.’ (There had been an unclean spirit in her, you see.)

By the time he got back home, it was already light. The father had gone off into the forest. The stepmother asked, ‘Well, who was the rider and who was ridden? Did you ride on her, or did she ride you?’

‘I rode on her. The girls wanted to know. They tried all they could to find out and they brought along a lad from beyond thrice-nine seas, from beyond thrice-nine lands, but he didn’t say. Then they brought a lass from beyond thrice-nine seas, from beyond thrice-nine lands, a lass who had never been baptised and who had never prayed. It was this lass who told them – yes, that’s how they found out. And then we all rode back home, and I was the last of all. And then she said, “Send your mother to ask for my hand and I’ll marry you. You’ve made me human.” ’

The stepmother gave him something to eat and drink, then put him to bed.

Back came the father. He began scolding his son.

The stepmother took the lad’s side. ‘You were young once,’ she said to her husband. ‘You used to go revelling too!’

They sat down to eat and drink. The stepmother said, ‘It’s time your son married. Else he’ll be going out revelling night after night.’

‘All right then. What’s stopping him?’

‘Well, shall I ask for the hand of our neighbour’s daughter?’

‘A likely story!’ laughed the father. ‘As if our rich neighbour’s going to give his daughter to our poor son!’

‘I’ll go round and ask,’ said the stepmother.

The father told her not to go. ‘We’re poor and needy,’ he kept saying, ‘but our neighbours are rich.’ But the stepmother slipped round all the same. And so she talked about this, and she talked about that, and then she asked if her stepson could marry their daughter.

‘Do you think we’ve raised our daughter just for your son?’ laughed the father.

But then the daughter opened the door. ‘Papenka,’ she said, ‘let me marry him. He’s my groom. He’s made me human.’

After that, the father didn’t say another word. There was a merry feast and a wedding.

(1899–1951)

Andrey Platonov, the greatest Russian prose-writer of the last century, is still best known for the extraordinary novels and stories he wrote in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His later work, more optimistic in tone and apparently simpler, has often been wrongly seen as representing a compromise with the demands of the Soviet authorities. In reality, it is no less profound than his earlier work and it deals with the same themes – perhaps still more subtly. Platonov is as remarkable for his persistence as for his boldness. The entire body of his work can be seen as a single book – and
The Magic Ring
, his small collection of versions of Russian magic tales, can be seen as the final chapter of this book.

The son of a railway worker who also gilded the cupolas of local churches, Andrey Platonov was born at the turn of a century – on 1 September 1899 – and between town and country, on the edge of the central Russian city of Voronezh. This seems fitting; in his mature work Platonov seems to delight in eliding every conceivable boundary – between animal and human, between the animate and the inanimate, between souls and machines, between life and death. He was almost certainly an atheist, yet his work is full of religious symbolism and imbued with deep religious feeling. He was a passionate supporter of the 1917 Revolution and remained sympathetic to the dream that gave birth to it, yet few people have written more searingly of its catastrophic consequences.

Platonov’s relationship with the official Soviet literary world was no less complex. Some of his works were published and immediately subjected to fierce criticism; others were accepted
for publication yet published only thirty or forty years after his death. Platonov was never himself arrested but, in
1938
, his fifteen-year-old son, Platon, was sent to the Gulag – probably in order to put pressure on Platonov himself; Platon was released in late
1940
, only to die three years later of the tuberculosis he had caught in the camps. During the Second World War Platonov worked as a correspondent for
Red Star
(the newspaper of the Red Army) and published several volumes of stories, but in
1946
he was again subjected to vicious criticism. After this, he could no longer publish work of his own. He did, however – perhaps largely through the support of the influential Mikhail Sholokhov
¹
– manage to publish his versions of traditional folktales: a collection titled
Bashkir Folktales
in November 1947, and
The Magic Ring
in October 1950. The first of these seven retellings of Russian
skazki
, ‘Finist the Bright Falcon’, was also published separately, in three different editions, in 1947 and 1948.

Platonov had evidently been giving serious thought to the folktale for at least ten years before this; between 1938 and 1940 he had reviewed several different anthologies. He formulates his thoughts most clearly, however, in a review (published in October 1947) of Aleksey Tolstoy’s versions of Russian folktales – a review that Platonov must have written around the same time as he was working on his own versions. Platonov begins by criticizing most previous collections – even Afanasyev’s. Though he refers to it as one of the best works of Russian folklore, he expresses regret that Afanasyev, for all his love of folktales, was not himself an artist: ‘If we remember such an ideal “reworker” of folk themes as Pushkin, and the quality of the
skazki
he created, then everyone will understand our view that only an artist – and only a great artist at that – is up to the task of “composing” or “reworking” a
skazka
.’ Platonov then affirms that the aim of such great artists as Pushkin and Lev Tolstoy – and Aleksey Tolstoy in his own time – has always been ‘the restoration, the recreation – from all the variants the people has created on a particular theme – of the very best root variant of a particular tale’. Platonov continues, ‘But these writers do still more – they enrich and inform a popular
folktale with the power of their own creativity and endow it with the definitive, ideal combination of meaning and form that will allow this tale to continue to exist for a long time or forever.’ Platonov concludes, ‘But a first small volume of folktales is only a beginning; it is essential to publish the entire corpus of Russian folktales. This body of work, in addition to its artistic and ethical value, must also serve as a material repository for the treasure of the Russian language, our people’s most precious possession.’

Platonov justifiably saw himself as a successor, in this respect, to Pushkin and Lev Tolstoy.
²
His own
skazki
are witty and vigorous, and he has a remarkable ability to penetrate deep into the structure of a particular word, image or motif and bring out its deeper meaning. At the same time, Platonov is entirely himself in these
skazki
and one could even say that in them he has returned to his origins. Much of his work contains elements of folktale, and the surrealism of some of his earlier stories and novels is closer to that of folktale than to that of the self-conscious and intellectual French literary movement. And the themes of his
skazki
are the themes of his work as a whole; ‘No-Arms’ seems especially important for being the only work in which two of his deepest and most constant themes – orphanhood and the loss of limbs – are resolved optimistically.

In June 1940, in the journal
Children’s Literature
, Platonov published an enthusiastic review of the first edition of Pavel Bazhov’s
The Malachite Casket
. He wrote of one tale that it is ‘presented in the true, living language that gives a sense of the time and place of the action, of the individuality of the teller and of the philosophy of the people who created this tale. For each image, concept or action there is a uniquely exact and unrepeatable verbal form. The word serves as an organic part of a given action and belongs to it and to it alone. Any slightest discrepancy between word and fact has the effect of distorting the fact itself; everything then vanishes – both truth and art.
The Malachite Casket
contains very few such infringements of the organic structure of speech – so few that they are not worth mentioning.
’
³

The particular quality of Platonov’s own
skazki
becomes
most apparent if we compare them with the many folklore-inspired works of art and music from the first two decades of the twentieth century – and above all with the works associated with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. The mood of Stravinsky’s ballets is one of violence and erotic excitement. The dominant colour in the sets and costumes designed by Roerich, Goncharova and Stravinsky’s other collaborators is a brilliant red. The image that epitomizes this period – an image painted by Leon Bakst, Natalya Goncharova, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Valentin Serov and Viktor Vasnetsov among others – is that of the firebird.
⁴
The mood of Platonov’s
skazki
is very different. The virtues he celebrates are patience, endurance, kindness and forgiveness. He turns to Russian folklore as a source not of pagan vitality but of what can best be called Christian values. And his counterpart to the Firebird is Finist the Bright Falcon. The Firebird leaves behind her a tail feather that shines as bright ‘as a thousand candles’; it is no wonder that the bedazzled Tsar sends his sons out to capture her. Finist, by contrast, leaves behind him the plainest, greyest and most ordinary of feathers; only Maryushka, his ‘destined one’, has the perspicuity to grasp what this feather, with its promise of love and perhaps even of rebirth, is truly worth. The name Finist is derived from Phoenix, the bird that is reborn out of its own ashes; Finist and the Firebird appear to be male and female aspects of one and the same bird. Where Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Goncharova and others saw an image of alluring glamour, Platonov saw a symbol of quiet hope, of the possibility of new life springing even from grey ash. Afanasyev’s version, incidentally, makes no mention of the colour of Finist’s feather; in choosing to describe it as grey, Platonov appears – as so often in
The Magic Ring
– not to be adding something of his own to the oral versions but to be revealing their inner logic.

Platonov’s language is idiosyncratic yet also strangely impersonal; I have heard it described as ‘the language that might be spoken by the roots of trees’. Tragic though it is that Platonov was unable to publish original works during his last five years, there is something fitting about his having ended his career as a semi-anonymous reteller of folktales. During the decades after
his death his
skazki
were often included, without acknowledgement, in anthologies of literature for Soviet schoolchildren; Platonov’s name may, for a decade after his death, have been almost forgotten, but even then millions of children were reading his work. This would perhaps not have surprised Platonov; like the soldier-storyteller in ‘Wool over the Eyes’, he knew that ‘a story’s stronger than a Tsar’.