Andrei Platonov


Andrei Platonov was the pen name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov, a Soviet Russian writer, philosopher, playwright, and poet, whose works anticipate existentialism. Although Platonov was a Communist, most of his works were banned in his own lifetime for their skeptical attitude toward collectivization and other Stalinist policies, as well as for its experimental, avant-garde form. His famous works include the novels The Foundation Pit and :ru:Чевенгур|Chevengur.
New York Review Books Classics issued a collection of short stories, including his most famous story, The Potudan River, with an introduction by Tatyana Tolstaya, in 2000. New York Review Books reissued a collection of Platonov's work including the novella Soul, the short story The Return, and six other stories in 2007. This was followed by a reissue of The Foundation Pit in 2009, and Happy Moscow, an unfinished novel that was left unpublished in Platonov's lifetime, in 2012.

Early life and education

Platonov was born in the settlement of Yamskaya Sloboda on the outskirts of Voronezh in the Chernozem Region of Central Russia.
His father was a metal fitter employed in the railroad workshops and his mother was the daughter of a watchmaker.
He attended a local parish school and completed his primary education at a four-year city school and began work at age thirteen, with such jobs as office clerk at a local insurance company, smelter at a pipe factory, assistant machinist, warehouseman, and on the railroad.
Following the 1917 revolutions, he studied electrical technology at Voronezh Polytechnic Institute.
When civil war broke out he assisted his father on trains delivering troops and supplies and clearing snow.

Early career

Platonov had also begun writing poems, submitting them to papers in Moscow and elsewhere, and he was writing prolifically for local periodicals including Zheleznyi put, the paper of the local railway workers' union, Krasnaia derevnia and Voronezhskaia kommuna, official papers of the Voronezh Communist Party, and Kuznitsa, national journal of the Smithy group of proletarian writers.
From 1918 through 1921, his most intensive period as a writer, he published dozens of poems, several stories, and hundreds of articles and essays, adopting in 1920 the Platonov pen-name by which he is best-known. With remarkably high energy and intellectual precocity he wrote confidently across a wide range of topics including literature, art, cultural life, science, philosophy, religion, education, politics, the civil war, foreign relations, economics, technology, famine and land reclamation, amongst others. It was not unusual around 1920 to see two or three pieces by Platonov, on quite different subjects, appear daily in the press.
He was also involved with the local Proletcult movement, joined the Union of Communist Journalists in March 1920, and worked as an editor at Krasnaia Derevnia, the paper of the local railway workers' union. He was elected in August 1920 to the provisional directing board of the newly formed Voronezh Union of Proletarian Writers, attended the First Congress of Proletarian Writers in Moscow in October 1920, which was organized by the Kuznitsa group, and regularly read his poetry and gave critical talks at various club meetings.
Platonov joined the Communist Party in the spring of 1920, and started attending the party school, but had left by the end of 1921, for what he later called a "juvenile" reason. Although, like a number of other worker writers, he may have quit the party in dismay over the New Economic Policy. Deeply troubled by the terrible famine of 1921, he openly and controversially criticized the behavior of local communists at the time. There is also some evidence that he may have been expelled for refusal to clean up others' trash during an obligatory subbotnik. He was readmitted as a candidate member only in 1924.
In 1921 Platonov married Maria Aleksandrovna Kashintseva ; they had a son, Platon, in 1922, and a daughter, Maria, in 1944.
In 1922, in the wake of the devastating drought and famine of 1921, Platonov abandoned journalistic and literary work entirely to work on electrification projects and conduct land reclamation work for the Voronezh Provincial Land Administration and later for agencies of the central government. "I could no longer be occupied with a contemplative activity like literature," he recalled later. For the next few years, he worked as an engineer and administrator, organizing the digging of ponds and wells, the draining of swamp land, and the building of a hydroelectric plant.
In 1925 he published a book about the Black Sea Revolt of 1905. This was the same year that Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin was made. Platonov's book was an official publication of the Bolshevik Party.

Official censure and decline

When he did return to writing in 1926, however, a number of critics and readers noted the appearance of a major and original literary voice.
Moving to Moscow in 1927, he became, for the first time, a professional writer, working in the editorial departments of a number of leading magazines.
He produced his two major works, the novels :ru:Чевенгур|Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, between 1926 and 1930, overlapping slightly with the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928. These works, with their implicit criticism of the system, drew official sanction, and although a chapter of Chevengur appeared in a magazine, neither was published in full.
In 1930s, Platonov was working together with the Soviet philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz, who edited a Moscow magazine The Literary Critic, that was also followed by Marxist philosophers around the world. Another contributor was the theoretician György Lukács. Platonov built upon these connections with Lifshitz and Lukács, and in early 1934, Maksim Gorky arranged for Platonov to be included in “writer’s brigade” sent to Central Asia with the intention to publish a collective work in celebration of ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan. Platonov’s contribution to this collective work was a short story titled “Takyr” about the liberation of a Persian slave girl. Platonov later returned to the Turkmen Republic in 1935 a second time and wrote the novella Soul based on the trip. Dzhan is the story of how Nazar Chagataev, a “non-Russian” economist from Central Asia, leaves Moscow and goes to assist his people called the Dzhan, a lost, nomadic nation made up of rejects and outcasts that possess nothing but their souls. The Soviet state censored Dzhan due to its’ graphic content and inability to fit into the socialist realist framework, and the uncensored text was not published in full until 1999. Platonov continued to face harsh criticism from the Soviet state during the 1930’s.
In August 1936 the journal published Platonov's short story "Immortality", along with an editorial stating that the author's new works overcame his previous "grave creative errors". The following year this came under criticism in Krasnaya Nov, resulting in damage to Platonov's reputation.
Stalin held deeply ambivalent views regarding Platonov's worth. According to archival evidence Stalin called Platonov "fool, idiot, scoundrel", but later in the same meeting called him "a prophet, a genius". For his part Platonov made hostile remarks about Trotsky, Rykov, and Bukharin but not about Stalin, to whom he wrote letters on several occasions. By 1931, his work had come under sustained attack as anti-communist, with Stalin describing "For Future Use" as "a story from an agent of our enemies" and requiring a published apology from the Krasnaya Nov editor who had published it. Nevertheless, Platonov had published no fewer than eight volumes of fiction and essays from 1937 until his death in 1951. In the Stalinist Great Purge of the 1930s, Platonov's son was arrested as a "terrorist" and "spy". He was exiled, at the age of fifteen, to a labor camp where he contracted tuberculosis. When Platonov's son was released home he was terminally ill with tuberculosis. Platonov himself contracted the disease while nursing his son.
During the Great Patriotic War, Platonov served as a war correspondent, but his disease grew worse. In 1946, his last published short story, "The Return", fell under official disapproval. His last publications were two collections of folklore. After his death in 1951, Vasily Grossman spoke at his funeral.

Legacy

Although relatively unknown at the time of his death, his influence on later Russian writers has been considerable. Some of his work was published or reprinted during the 1960s' Khrushchev Thaw. Because of his political writings, perceived anti-totalitarian stance, and early death from tuberculosis, some English-speaking commentators have called him "the Russian George Orwell".
In journalism, stories, and poetry written during the first postrevolutionary years, Platonov interwove ideas about human mastery over nature with skepticism about triumphant human consciousness and will, and a sentimental and even erotic love of physical things with a fear and attendant abhorrence of matter. Platonov viewed the world as embodying at the same time the opposing principles of spirit and matter, reason and emotion, nature and machine.
He wrote of factories, machines, and technology as both enticing and dreadful. His aim was to turn industry over to machines, in order to "transfer man from the realm of material production to a higher sphere of life." Thus, in Platonov's vision of the coming "golden age" machines are both enemy and savior. Modern technologies, Platonov asserted paradoxically, would enable humanity to be "freed from the oppression of matter."
Platonov's writing, it has also been argued, has strong ties to the works of earlier Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky. He also uses much Christian symbolism, including a prominent and discernible influence from a wide range of contemporary and ancient philosophers, including the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov.
His Foundation Pit uses a combination of peasant language with ideological and political terms to create a sense of meaninglessness, aided by the abrupt and sometimes fantastic events of the plot. Joseph Brodsky considers the work deeply suspicious of the meaning of language, especially political language. This exploration of meaninglessness is a hallmark of existentialism and absurdism. Brodsky commented "Woe to the people into whose language Andrei Platonov can be translated."
Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot, ranked Soul as one of her four favorite 20th century Russian works.
Novelist Tatyana Tolstaya wrote, "Andrei Platonov is an extraordinary writer, perhaps the most brilliant Russian writer of the twentieth century."
Each year in Voronezh the literature exhibition is held in honour of Platonov, during which people read from the stage some of his works.

Tribute

, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina in 1981, is named after him.

List of works

Soul and Other Stories. Translated by Robert Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman.
The Foundation Pit. Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson.
Happy Moscow. Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler.