From the Afterword to Platonov's Soul and Other Stories

Soul and Other Stories, by Andrey Platonov
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman
New York Review Books

From the Afterword, by John Berger

from p. 310: "The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls--walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens."

from p. 312: "The world today is suffering from another form of modern poverty. No need to quote the figures; they are widely known and repeating them only makes another wall of statistics. More than half the world population live with less than $2 a day. Local cultures, with their partial remedies--both physical and spiritual--for some of life's afflictions, are being systematically destroyed or attacked. The new technology and means of communication, the free-market economy, productive abundance, parliamentary democracy, are failing, so far as the poor are concerned, to keep any of their promises beyond that of the supply of certain cheap consumerist goods, which the poor can buy when they steal."

from p. 313: "Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity."

from p. 317: "The multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed, and they have the capacity to outlive the walls.
The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: Democracy, Liberty, Productivity, etc.
With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a process of questioning. Soon? Within a generation.
Meanwhile, the answers abound in the multitudes; multiple ingenuities for getting by, their refusal of frontiers, their search for holes in the walls, their adoration of children, their readiness when necessary to become martyrs, their belief in continuity, their recurring acknowledgment that life's gifts are small and priceless."