Soul, by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Olga Meerson et al

A disillusioned revolutionary in search of truth

Andrey Platonov is considered the greatest post-revolution Russian writer. Yet, until recently, he was almost unknown. Born in 1899, he trained as an engineer, fought in the Red Army and began to write at 18. He was championed by Maxim Gorky and published widely.

At first a passionate believer in the ideals of the revolution, he was soon disillusioned with its reality of devastation, famine and tyranny. He lost faith in a golden future to be built by Communism and industry and developed a deeper understanding that inevitably penetrated his writing. His fate was sealed when Stalin wrote in the margin of one story: "Scum... Give him a good belting."

Although Platonov publicly repented for "ideological errors", his novels and plays were rejected. He made a comeback as a war correspondent, but in the clampdown that followed was again discarded. He died in 1951 from tuberculosis that he contracted from his son, who had been sent to Gulag at 15 and whom he nursed on his return. Platonov's work was rediscovered amid the ruins of the Soviet Union and published in the 1990s to universal acclaim.

In the 1930s, following the footsteps of Pushkin and Tolstoy, Platonov went to Central Asia. He found inspiration in its dramatic landscapes, strewn with the debris of ancient civilisations. The result was Dzhan – the Persian word for "soul" and for life as vital force.

The protagonist, Nazar Chagataev, is born in Central Asia but goes to Russia to study. He can pursue a career in engineering, but chooses to return to help his people: Dzhan, a nomadic tribe of outcast Turkmen-Uzbeks lost in a vast desert in the dry bed of the Oxus river's old course, between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. He finds them starving, decimated by disease and hunger, their flocks dead from thirst.

In a few deft brushstrokes Platonov sketches the memorable characters: the old mother who sent Nazar away for a better future; the mullah who has lost his sight through starvation and wants to sell his 11-year-old daughter for a donkey. Nazar takes her on, and she becomes his capable ally. He almost perishes in the desert on his way to the nearest town to find rescue. After much tribulation, he leads Dzhan to the high plateau, where they breed animals, till the land and build a new life. Nazar could stay, but again chooses to leave.

Before leaving Moscow, Nazar had married Vera – a woman pregnant with another man's child – to give her baby a father. He had fallen in love with Vera's older daughter, Ksenia. Vera and her infant die, but he returns to Moscow and reunion with the woman he loves.

Platonov is lucky in his English translators, who convey his unique voice, and his fresh, astonishing use of language. Although only 150 pages long, Soul is a novel of epic grandeur and mythic depth. It has elicited comparisons with Dante's Inferno and Attar's Sufi poem Conference of the Birds. More evidently, it is the odyssey of modern man, "a soul that searches for happiness" and finds it in the understanding and acceptance of life and love.