Soul (novel)

Soul, or Dzhan (Russian: Джан, borrowed from Persian: جان (or jân), “meaning soul, vital spirit, dear life”) is a novella by Andrey Platonov. It was completed in 1935 by as a result of his second trip to the Turkmen Republic. Although the Soviet state in the 1930s censored Dzhan, and only published selected chapters, the uncensored text was finally published in full in 1999.

Soul could be read as a “typical socialist realist novel of the Stalinist era,” yet it contains elements that separate it from this categorization. In summary, it is the story of how Nazar Chagataev, a “non-Russian” economist from Central Asia, leaves Moscow and goes to bring socialism to his people called the Dzhan, a lost, nomadic nation made up of rejects and outcasts that possess nothing but their souls.^[1] Upon reaching the Dzhan, Chagataev realizes that he can do nothing to help the nation yet embarks on a perilous journey with them through the desert to the mountains before returning to Moscow at the end of the story. The majority of the story narrates the perilous migration of the Dzhan nation from the Sary-Kamysh delta through the Kara-Kum desert to the Ust-Yurt Mountains.

Geography plays an important role in this novella especially given the fact that Platonov as a Russian writer was an “outsider” in Central Asia writing from the perspective of an “insider.”^[2] The story takes place during the 1930s at the end of the national delimitation process that occurred in Central Asia from 1924-1936 that resulted in the formation of the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek SSRs.^[3] Today the novel’s references to these specific geographical landmarks exist within the nations of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan respectively.