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Andrei Platonovich Platonov (ɐnˈdrʲej plɐˈtonəvʲɪtɕ plɐˈtonəf; Климе́нтов; It used to be thought that Platonov was born on August 20/September 1, but recent scholarship has established the earlier date. See Thomas Seifrid, A Companion To Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit (Academic Studies Press, 2009: ), p. 4. – 5 January 1951) was a Soviet Union Russian people novelist, short story writer, philosopher, playwright, and poet. Although Platonov regarded himself as a Communism, his principal works remained unpublished in his lifetime because of their skeptical attitude toward collectivization of agriculture (1929–1940) and other Stalinism policies, as well as for their experimental, avant-garde form infused with existentialism which was not in line with the dominant socialist realism doctrine. His famous works include the novels Chevengur (1928) and The Foundation Pit (1930).
From 1918 through 1921, his most intensive period as a writer, he published dozens of poems (an anthology appeared in 1922), several stories, and hundreds of articles and essays, adopting in 1920 the pen-name Platonov by which he is best-known. With remarkable energy and intellectual precocity, he wrote confidently across a range of topics including literature, art, cultural life, science, philosophy, religion, education, politics, the civil war, foreign relations, economics, technology, famine and land reclamation, and 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 has also been involved with the local Proletcult movement, joined the Union of Communist Journalists in March 1920, and worked as an editor at ("Red countryside"), and the paper of the local railway workers' union. in August 1920, Platonov was elected to the interim board of the newly-formed Voronezh Union of Proletarian Writers and attended the First Congress of Proletarian Writers in Moscow in October 1920, organized by the Smithy group. He regularly read his poetry and gave critical talks at various club meetings.
In July 1920, Platonov was admitted to the Communist Party as a candidate member on the recommendation of his friend Litvin (Molotov). Alexei Varlamov, "Platonov and the Party", quoted in Online diary of Svetlana Koppel-Kovtun, 4 December 2016 (in Russian). He attended Party meetings, but was expelled from the Party on 30 October 1921 as an "unstable element". Later, he said the reason was "juvenile". He may have quit the party in dismay of the New Economic Policy (NEP), like a number of other worker writers (many of whom he had met through Kuznitsa and at the 1920 writers' congress). Troubled by the famine of 1921, he openly and controversially criticized the behaviour (and privileges) of local communists. In spring, 1924 Platonov applied for re-admission to the Party, offering reassurance that he had remained a communist and a Marxist, but he was denied then as on the next two occasions. Alexei Varlamov, "Platonov and the Party", quoted in Online diary of Svetlana Koppel-Kovtun, 4 December 2016 (in Russian).
In 1921 Platonov married Maria Aleksandrovna Kashintseva (1903–1983); they had a son, Platon, in 1922, and a daughter, Maria, in 1944.Seifrid, A Companion To Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, p. 15.
In 1922, in the wake of the devastating drought and famine of 1921, Platonov abandoned writing to work on electrification and land reclamation for the Voronezh Provincial Land Administration and later for the central government. "I could no longer be occupied with a contemplative activity like literature", he recalled later. For the next years, he worked as an engineer and administrator, organizing the digging of ponds and wells, draining of swampland, and building a hydroelectric plant.
Between 1926 and 1930, the period from NEP to the first five-year plan (1928–1932), Platonov produced his two major works, the novels Chevengur and The Foundation Pit. With their implicit criticism of the system, neither was then accepted for publication although one section of Chevengur appeared in a magazine. The two novels were only published in the USSR during the late 1980s.
In the 1930s, Platonov worked with the Soviet philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz, who edited The Literary Critic ( Literaturny Kritik), a Moscow magazine followed by Marxist philosophers around the world. Another of the magazine's contributors was the theoretician György Lukács D. Gutov, "Learn, learn and learn" in Make Everything New: A Project on Communism, eds. Grant Watson, Gerrie van Noord & Gavin Everall, Book Works and Project Arts Centre: Dublin, 2006, pp. 24–37. and Platonov built upon connections with the two philosophers. A turning point in his life and career as a writer came with the publication in March 1931 of For Future Use (″Vprok″ in Russian), a novella that chronicled the forced collectivisation of agriculture during the First Five Year Plan.
According to archival evidence (OGPU informer's report, 11 July 1931), Stalin read For Future Use carefully after its publication, adding marginal comments about the author ("fool, idiot, scoundrel") and his literary style ("this isn't Russian but some incomprehensible nonsense") to his copy of the magazine. In a note to the publishers, the Krasnaya nov monthly, Stalin described Platonov as "an agent of our enemies" and suggested in a postscript that the author and other "numbskulls" (i.e. the editors) should be punished in such a way that the punishment served them "for future use". The regime and the artistic intelligentsia: Central Committee and Cheka-OGPU-NKVD documents about cultural policy, 1917–1953, Moscow, 1999, p. 150 (in Russian), cited in Goncharov and Nekhotin.
In 1933, an OGPU official Shivarov wrote a special report on Platonov. Attached were versions of The Sea of Youth, the play "14 Red Huts" and the unfinished "Technical Novel". The report described For Future Use as "a satire on the organizing of collective farms," and commented that Platonov's subsequent work revealed the "deepening anti-Soviet attitudes" of the writer.Vitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices, Chapter 10, "The Arrested Word", The Free Press: New York, 1996, p. 211.
In the mid-1930s Platonov was again invited to contribute to a collective volume, about rail workers. He wrote two stories: "Immortality", which was highly praised, and "Among Animals and Plants", which was severely criticized and eventually published only in a heavily edited and far weaker version.
In August 1936, The Literary Critic published "Immortality" with a note explaining the difficulties the author had faced when proposing the story to other periodicals.N. Duzhina, "Andrei Platonov, Immortality" in Platonov's Land of Philosophers: Issues in his work, Institute of World Literature, 2001, p. 742 (in Russian). The following year, this publication came under criticism in Krasnaya Nov, damaging Platonov's reputation. In 1939, the story was republished in the intended collective volume, Fictional representations of Railway Transport (1939) dedicated to the heroes of the Soviet railroad system.N. Duzhina, "Andrei Platonov, Immortality" in Platonov's Land of Philosophers: Issues in his work, Institute of World Literature, 2001, p. 742 (in Russian).
Platonov published eight more books, fiction and essays, between 1937 and his death in 1951.
In January 1937, Platonov contributed to an issue of Literaturnaya gazeta in which the accused at the second Moscow Show Trial (Karl Radek, Pyatakov and others) were denounced and condemned by 30 well-known writers, including Boris Pasternak. His short text "To overcome evil" is included in his collected works. It has been suggested that it contains coded criticism of the regime. Robert Chandler, " 'To Ovecome Evil': Andrey Platonov and the Moscow Show Trials", NE Review, 3–4, 2014, pp. 145–153.
In May 1938, during the Great Purge, Platonov's son was arrested as a "terrorist" and "spy". Aged 15 years old, Platon was sentenced in September 1938 to ten years imprisonment and was sent to a corrective labour camp,Solomon Volkov, A History of 20th-century Russian culture, Moscow, 2008, pp. 174–175 (in Russian). where he contracted tuberculosis. Thanks to efforts by Platonov and his acquaintances (including Mikhail Sholokhov), Platon was released and returned home in October 1940, but he was terminally ill and died in January 1943. Platonov himself contracted the disease while nursing his son.
During the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), Platonov served as a war correspondent for the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and published a number of short stories about what he witnessed at the front. The war marked a slight upturn in Platonov's literary fortunes: he was again permitted to publish in major literary journals, and some of these war stories, notwithstanding Platonov's typical idiosyncratic language and metaphysics, were well received. However, towards the end of the war, Platonov's health worsened, and in 1944 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In 1946, his last published short story, "The Return," was slammed in Literaturnaya Gazeta as a "slander" against Soviet culture. His last publications were two collections of folklore. After his death in 1951, Vasily Grossman spoke at his funeral.]]
In journalism, stories, and poetry written during the first post-revolutionary years (1918–1922), Platonov interwove ideas about human mastery over nature with scepticism about triumphant human consciousness and will, and sentimental and even erotic love of physical things with 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 (though echoing a paradox characteristic of Marxism), would enable humanity to be "freed from the oppression of matter."See Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), chapter 1; V. V. Eidinova, "K tvorcheskoi biography A. Platonova," Voprosy literatury 3 (1978): 213–228; Thomas Langerak, "Andrei Platonov v Voronezhe," Russian Literature 23–24 (1988): 437–468; Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination; Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia (Cornell University Press, 2002). Quotations from A. Platonov, "Budushchii oktiabr' (diskussionnaia)," Voronezhskaia kommuna, 9 November 1920; idem., "Chto takoe eletrifikatsiia," Krasnaia derevnia, 13 October 1920; idem., "Zolotoi vek, sdellannyi iz elektrichestva," Voronezhskaia kommuna, 13 February 1921.
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 Christianity 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 ranked Soul as one of her four favorite 20th century Russian works. (Batuman is author of The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and was Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel The Idiot.)
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.
Platonov actively uses the technique of ostraneny, his prose is replete with lexical and grammatical "errors" characteristic of children's speech.
Yuri Levin highlights Platonov's characteristic techniques:
According to the researcher Levin, with the help of these turns, Platonov forms a "panteleological" space of the text, where "everything is connected with everything", and all events unfold among a single "nature". Левин Ю. От синтаксиса к смыслу и далее («Котлован» А. Платонова) // In book: Левин Ю. И. Избранные труды: Поэтика. Семиотика. — М.: Языки славянской культуры, 1998. — С. 392—419. — .
In the works of Andrey Platonov, form and content form a single, indissoluble whole, that is, the very language of Platonov's works is their content. Левин Ю. От синтаксиса к смыслу и далее («Котлован» А. Платонова) // In book: Левин Ю. И. Избранные труды: Поэтика. Семиотика. — М.: Языки славянской культуры, 1998. — С. 392—419. — .
Among the key motives of Platonov's work is the theme of death and its overcoming. Anatoly Ryasov writes about Platonov's "metaphysics of death".Anatoly Ryasov. Platonov: ideology, language, being (in Russian). Platonov in his youth came under the influence of Nikolai Fedorov and repeatedly refers to the idea of raising the dead. In the minds of his characters, it is associated with the coming arrival of communism.
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