Andrei Platonov: where to start with his literature – The Calvert Journal

The son of a metal worker with patents to his name, Andrei Platonov was born near Voronezh in 1899. He was an early supporter of the Bolshevik cause, coming of age with the October Revolution, and embraced the aspiration towards radical change that fuelled the many political and artistic movements of the period. In his twenties, he worked as a land-reclamation engineer draining swamps, and as a journalist. Thanks to the chaos and devastation of this period the years of Civil War in the aftermath of the First World War drought and famine were as formative for his politics as collectivist utopia and techno-optimism.

Contradictions between the modernist desire to engineer the human soul, and the horrors that transformative projects inflict on the people they seek to change, are at the heart of Platonovs fiction. In his world, most characters have a chimera-like quality: they are part-individual, part-archetype or social role, studies in how everyone is part of a common world, relying on the same words, caught up in the same plots. They are secular creatures inhabiting feeble, machine-like bodies, speaking a language that fuses vernacular with official jargon, making their way in a half-undone, alien world.

What makes reading Platonov an experience unlike pretty much anything else lies in his politics, and the words he uses to accommodate them. Odd phrasings, twisted idioms push language off its convenient, beaten track. The result is dizzying, funny, and unpredictable. It suits the frontlines he describes, where new, urbanised, industrialised lives are made from formerly rural, destitute millions. Platonovs world is grotesque and ironic, but in a way that resists attempts to separate satire from genuine ideological dedication. Harsh critiques of Stalinism and bureaucracy abound, but always crosshatched with communist commitment. He remains an insider of the Revolution.

From the early 1930s, when Stalinist purges destroyed the revolutionary generation, putting an end to much of the Soviet avant-garde and the possibility of aesthetic and political criticism, Platonov could hardly publish. Doubts about technocratic solutions intensified in his work. He sought compromise with the literary establishment, to little avail. In 1943, his son, who had been arrested and sent to a labour camp, and whom he had cared for since his return, died from tuberculosis, infecting Platonov. He succumbed to the same disease in 1951.

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Andrei Platonov: where to start with his literature - The Calvert Journal