The story exposes the ways of thinking promulgated by the Communist propaganda in 1920s and 1930s and throws in quite a few realistic facts of everyday Soviet life in those times.

This collection of Platonov’s short fiction brings together seven works drawn from the whole of his career. It includes the harrowing novella Dzahn (“Soul”), in which a young man returns to his Asian birthplace to find his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech, and “The Potudan River,” Platonov’s most celebrated story.