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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Twenty Minutes

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Eclectic arts magazine programme, exploring a range of fascinating subjects

Eclectic arts magazine programme, exploring a range of fascinating people, places and events

Twenty Minutes: Among Animals and Plants

Among Animals and Plants

17/12/2010

BBC Radio 3 - Twenty Minutes, Among Animals and Plants

Rober Chandler introduces the work of Russian writer Andrey Platonov.

Rober Chandler introduces the work of Andrey Platonov, perhaps the greatest Russian writer to have written of the worst years of Stalin's dictatorship.

Andrey Platonov is perhaps the greatest Russian writer to have written of the worst years of Stalin's dictatorship. Robert Chandler, his translator, introduces a major lost talent. Platonov's novels (like The Foundation Pit) and stories (like Among Animals and Plants) tell of a whole country undergoing extraordinary changes. The impact of revolutionary upheaval is registered by Platonov in his remaking of the very language of his storytelling. In a world where utopia was promised the masses as they toiled in ghastly conditions in fear of what they thought let alone what they said or did, language is set adrift. Platonov noticed this and made stories from the terrfiying new world that manage to sound as if the world itself had been started again. 'Scum' Stalin wrote on the manuscript of one of Platonov's stories and he near disappeared from view and wasn't published properly in Russia until after the end of the USSR. And only now is he arriving in English, but his is a revelation worth waiting for.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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