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Abstract: Just as Pushkin was the bard of Peter the Great’s Revolution, singing of both the beauty and the brutality of Peter’s new capital city, so Platonov is the bard of the 1917 Revolution, singing both of the hope it embodied and of its terrible consequences. The confused, jumbled language used by Platonov’s characters is compared with the clarity and harmony of Pushkin’s language. The importance, when translating Platonov, of reproducing his frequent ambiguities and his idiosyncratic use of small words such as prepositions. The importance of reproducing Platonov’s surprising directness. He is not a self-conscious stylist like Nabokov. Ordinary words and images, even clichés, are forced into extraordinary combinations by an intense pressure of experience.