Book Review: "Happy Moscow" by Andrey Platonov

If you know me, then you probably know how much I adore Russian Literature. One of my favourite books of all time and one that I have read time and time again has been Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and other favourites of mine include War and Peace and the amazing Anna Karenina. But apart from the Golden Age, I do like other Russian novels as well. Books by Mikhail Bulgakov and Vladimir Nabokov have often been among my favourites, especially Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. Books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn such as The Gulag Archipelago and Cancer Ward have captured my being at one time or another with Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls having a profound impact on the way I think about Russian Literature and its bleak state of being. Let's now take a look at the novel Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov.

The great thing about this book is that it flicks between being about one particular everywoman of Russia named Moscow, and the October Revolution of 1917. There is a lot about Stalin, false promises of communism and the life of the people of Russia through what is commonly thought to be the most infamous age of 20th century Soviet History. We get glimpses of when this girl grows up and starts to fend for herself in almost a Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders way. I believe though, that Moll Flanders does this slightly better in the fact that the character is more thoroughly explored. The depth of the background may not be that required to the point that we are constantly thrown around within it. It seemed like it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a story based on context or a character-driven narrative.

I think that the opening paragraph is deliberately deceptive about the story, but it didn't really sell the book to me and I had to rely on the character of Moscow being so rebellious in her choice of men and her lifestyle in order for the book to remain interesting. Platonov may not show off with his words, but the opening needed to be more thorough than what it was. The image itself was pretty incredible but the way it was written made the scene fall slightly flat. The lack of emotion and teh reptition of phrase definitely shows the reader that Platonov does not make a show of his language use, but there are things that are better written by other writers of the same time period on similar topics:

A dark man with a burning torch was running down the street into a boring night of late autumn. The little girl saw him through a window of her home as she awoke from a boring dream. Then she heard the powerful shot of a rifle and a poor, sad cry – the man running with the torch had probably been killed. Soon after this came many distant shots and a din of people in the neighbouring prison...

All in all, I thought this book had a great concept and I liked the way the story went on about Moscow. However, I think that the story itself needed to be more character driven, more descriptive on Moscow's life and a bit longer in order to encompass everything it was wishing to cover. I felt like the book's writing style fell flat in comparison to others of its day and the book was too short for me to truly dive into. It left me feeling satisfied about the plot but severely unfulfilled in the writing, the extended metaphor and the language style that was ultimately, 'boring'.