"Andrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union. Born in 1899, one of a railway worker''s 10 children, he was an engineer, a party member and a model proletarian writer before doubts about Communism, and his literary imagination, landed him in trouble with Stalin. His work stopped being published in the early 1930s and only resurfaced 40 years after his death in 1951. Happy Moscow is a novel begun in 1933 that, for unclear reasons, was never finished. It shows Platonov as a master of language, weaving out of official names, political speeches, ideological exhortations and popular philosophical hopes a reality equal to the gut feel of Soviet life in the 1930s….This novel represents Platonov at his least sceptical. But what saves it from sentimental socialist realism is the beauty of the language and the quality of the vision. In his other works Platonov''s characters run into crisis when they detect that language is the only Soviet reality.

Perhaps this plot too might have been resolved that way…. Happy Moscow remains an extraordinary read, because politics doesn''t get in the way. This is just what it felt like to be swept away by the Soviet ideal of a new humanity." The Independent " Happy Moscow is worth reading on countless scores. On the violence, often not physical, which a totalitarian system wreaks on the lives of those who exist within it, it is a vital counterpart to those works which deal with the more tangible horrors of the USSR, and a reminder of the unique, paradoxical power of literature to expose the mismatch between rhetoric and reality." The Spectator "Unlike Platonov''s other fictional works, whose action is set in desolate parts where the city features only as an unattainable dream, Happy Moscow evokes the Soviet capital in the throes of its reconstruction as a monumental collectivist metropolis. Moscow has become a place of socialist pleasure as well as of socialist work, of jazz-halls, amusement parks and shops, ringing with Stalin''s declaration of 1935, ''Life has become better, comrades, life has become merrier!'' In these years, daily existence was saturated with propaganda, and the sense of historical time was subjected to maximum strain….In 1984, when Joseph Brodsky wrote his characteristically declaratory and insightful essay ''Catastrophes in the Air'', he doubted that Platonov''s major works would ever be published in Russia.

In it, he identified Platonov as the only Russian writer capable of philosophically and stylistically transcending the tragedy of the twentieth century. Brodsky did not know then of Happy Moscow , which was first published in 1991. As he says, when great books are not published, time is falsified. The scholarly reclamation of Platonov from the obscurity to which he was condemned in the Soviet period has been one of the most fruitful areas of Russian literary activity in the decade since the end of Communism. Beyond its intrinsic significance, the collaborative, cosmopolitan and de-ideologized approach of the scholars engaged in this work represents the beginnings of the kind of cultural activity that democratic civil society should foster….Robert and Elizabeth Chandler''s exemplary translations are based on reliable texts, and yield the fruit of their long-standing collaboration with Russian-and English-speaking Platonov scholars." Times Literary Supplement "In the Thirties Stalin proclaimed Moscow a paradise. This savage satire shows the truth through the eyes of the ebullient Moscow Chestnova.

In Platonov''s hands she becomes a parody of a superwoman who leaves a career in aeronautics for lovers and life. Around her is a fascinating cast of characters and, even in translation, Platonov''s prose is extraordinary. This first English edition brings one of Russia''s great writers to light." The Times "Acclaimed by Joseph Brodsky as one of the great Russian writers of the twentieth century, Andrey Platonov comes with a formidable reputation, matched only by his relative obscurity. Happy Moscow , written in the early 1930s but only published for the first time in 1991, like The Foundation Pit , eschews linear narrative development for a sortie towards greater poetic truth. Moscow Chestnova is the Everywoman orphan who emerges as the predominant figure in a tale of Stalinist Russia, where public pronouncements of wealth contrast with private grief and hardship. Platonov, like Gogol before him, ploughs a vein of melancholic, mystical absurdity as his characters grapple with toska , a uniquely Russian word for spiritual ennui and aching. Translated with what appears scrupulous imagination by Robert Chandler, Happy Moscow is stirringly readable, taking the air from totalitarian bombast and breathing new life into a neglected classic.

" The Observer " Happy Moscow is a full-blown masterpiece, worthy not only of consideration alongside its author's better-known works, but of comparison with modernist fiction's greatest achievements. The translation of these two works into English requires us to re-examine Platonov's trajectory, the better to appreciate their place in his oeuvre, and to arrive at a truer measure of their author's stature." Tony Wood, New Left Review "Reading Platonov, one gets a sense of the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language and with each utterance that absurdity deepens." Joseph Brodsky "Joseph Brodsky placed Platonov alongside the great classics of modernity, Joyce, Musil or Kafka-the last of whom he greatly resembles at times….It is his way with language which gives Platonov's works their special force." Scotsman.