Andrey Platonov
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Andrei Platonov (Russian: Андре́й
Плато́нов) (August 28 [O.S. August 16]
1899 – January 5, 1951) was the pen name
of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov
(Russian: Андре́й Плато́нович Климе́нтов),
a Soviet author whose works anticipate
existentialism. Although Platonov was a
Communist, his works were banned in his
own lifetime for their skeptical
attitude toward collectivization and
other Stalinist policies. His famous
works include the novels The Foundation
Pit and Chevengur.
Life
Andrei Platonov (the name he began
to write under only in 1920, but by
which he is best known) was born in the
settlement of Yamskaia Sloboda on the
outskirts of Voronezh in the central
black earth region. His father was a
metal fitter (and an amateur inventor)
employed in the railroad workshops. His
mother was the daughter of a watchmaker.
Platonov attended a Church parish school
and completed his primary education at a
four-year city school. In 1914, at the
age of thirteen and a half, he began
work first as an office clerk at a local
insurance company, then as smelter at a
pipe factory, assistant machinist on a
private estate, worker in a plant making
artificial millstones, warehouseman, and
at other jobs, including on the
railroad. He began writing poems by the
time he turned thirteen, sending some
off to papers in Moscow and elsewhere,
though none were yet accepted.
In the wake of the 1917 revolutions,
Platonov became very active in a variety
of pursuits. He sought to advance his
technical education first with
preparatory courses and then at the
Voronezh Polytechnic Institute where he
studied electrical technology. When the
civil war broke out he assisted his
father on a train delivering troops and
supplies and clearing snow. At the same
time, he wrote prolifically for a
variety of local periodicals, especially
the paper of the local railway workers'
union, Zheleznyi put' (Railroad), the
official papers of the Voronezh
provincial committee of the Communist
Party, Krasnaia derevnia (Red
countryside) and Voronezhskaia kommuna
(Voronezh commune), the national journal
of the Smithy group of proletarian
writers, Kuznitsa, and many others.
The range of his writings in these years
was extraordinary. From 1918 through
1921, his most intensive as a writer, he
published dozens of poems (and a
collection of verses that appeared in
1922), several stories, and, most of
all, hundreds of articles and essays.
Platonov's productive energy and
intellectual precocity is most visible
in the remarkable range of topics he
confidently wrote about: literature,
art, cultural life, science, philosophy,
religion, education, politics, the civil
war, foreign relations, economics,
technology, famine, land reclamation,
and more. It was not unusually,
especially in 1920, to see two or three
pieces by him, on quite different
subjects, appear in the press every day
for several days running. He was also
involved with the local Proletcult
organization, joined the Union of
Communist Journalists in March 1920,
worked as an editor at Krasnaia derevnia,
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. He joined the
Communist Party in the spring of 1920,
and started attending the party school,
but left the party at the end of 1921,
for a "juvenile" reason, he later said.
He may have quit the party in dismay
over NEP, like a number of other worker
writers (many of whom he had become
acquainted with through Kuznitsa and at
the 1920 congress). But we also know
that Platonov was deeply troubled by the
terrible famine of 1921, and he openly
and controversially criticized the
behavior (and privileges) of local
communists at the time. There is also
some evidence that he was expelled from
the party when he refused to clean up
other people's trash during an
obligatory subbotnik (communist work
Saturday). He was readmitted as a
candidate member only in 1924.
In 1921 Platonov married Maria
Aleksandrova Kashintseva (1903-1983);
they had a son, Platon, in 1920, and a
daughter, Maria, in 1944.
In 1922, in the wake of the devastating
drought and famine of 1921 and after
quitting the party[citation needed],
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 a few years 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.
When he did return to writing in 1926,
however, he began to create works that
indicated to a number of critics and
readers the appearance of a major and
original literary voice. Moving to
Moscow in 1927, he became, for the first
time, a professional writer. He mainly
wrote fiction but also worked in the
editorial departments of a number of
leading magazines. He produced his two
major works, the novels 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 much
official criticism, and although a
chapter of Chevengur appeared in a
magazine, neither were published in
full. Other short stories which did
appear contributed even more to the
decline of his reputation.
Stalin held deeply ambivalent views
regarding Platonov's worth. According to
archival evidence Stalin called Platonov
"fool, idiot, scoundrel", then later in
the same meeting said Platonov was "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
came under sustained attack as anti-communist[citation
needed]. Nevertheless, Platonov
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" at
the age of fifteen, and exiled to a
labor camp where he contracted
tuberculosis. When he was finally
returned, Platonov himself contracted
the disease while nursing him. During
the Great Patriotic War (World War II),
Platonov served as a war correspondent,
but his disease grew worse, and after
the war, he ceased to write fiction,
instead putting out two collections of
folklore. He died in 1951.
Although he was 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 of tuberculosis, some
English-speaking commentators have
called him "the Russian George Orwell".
Writing
In journalism, stories, and poetry
written during the first
postrevolutionary years (1918–1922),
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. In complex
way, Platonov's thinking was an
anti-machine machinism. 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."
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.
Although his works generally take a
materialist stance, denying the
importance or existence of the soul, he
is stylistically very distinct from
Socialist Realism, which focused on
simple language and straightforward
plots.
