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Andrei Platonov

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Andrei Platonov
Andrei Platonov in 1938 (39 age)
Andrei Platonov in 1938 (39 age)
BornAndrei Platonovich Klimentov
(1899-08-28)28 August 1899
Voronezh, Voronezh Governorate, Russian Empire
Died5 January 1951(1951-01-05) (aged 51)
Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
OccupationNovelist, philosopher, playwright, poet, engineer
NationalityRussian
Period1919–1951
GenreNovel, short story, poetry, journalism

Andrei Platonov (Template:Lang-ru, IPA: [ɐnˈdrʲej pɫɐˈtonəf]; 28 August [O.S. 16 August] 1899[1] – 5 January 1951) was the pen name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov (Template:Lang-ru), a Soviet Russian writer, philosopher, playwright, and poet, whose works anticipate existentialism. Although Platonov regarded himself as a communist, his principal works remained unpublished in his lifetime because of their skeptical attitude toward collectivization and other Stalinist policies, as well as for their experimental, avant-garde form. His famous works include the novels The Foundation Pit (Котлован) and Chevengur (Чевенгур).

In 2000, 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 2007, New York Review Books reissued a collection of Platonov's work including the novella Soul (Dzhan), the short story "The Return", and six other stories.[2]. This was followed by a reissue of The Foundation Pit in 2009[3], and in 2012 by Happy Moscow, an unfinished novel (unpublished in Platonov's lifetime).[4]

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 (and amateur inventor) 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

File:Платонов Андрей Платонович (1922).jpg
Andrei Platonov in 1922

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 ("Railroad"), the paper of the local railway workers' union, Krasnaia derevnia ("Red countryside") and Voronezhskaia kommuna ("Voronezh commune"), 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 (an anthology appeared in 1922), 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 (literally, "Red countryside"), 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 was admitted to the Communist Party in July 1920 as a candidate member on the recommendation of his friend Litvin (Molotov).[5] He began attending Party meetings, but was expelled from the Party on 30 October 1921 as an "unstable element". Later he described this parting of ways as caused by a "juvenile" reason. Although, like a number of other worker writers (many of whom he had become acquainted with through Kuznitsa and at the 1920 congress), he may have quit the party in dismay over the New Economic Policy (NEP). Deeply troubled by the terrible famine of 1921, he openly and controversially criticized the behavior (and privileges) of local communists at the time. Platonov applied for re-admission to the Party in spring 1924, offering the reassurance that he had remained a communist and a Marxist, but he was not readmitted then or on the next two occasions.[6]

In 1921 Platonov married Maria Aleksandrovna Kashintseva (1903–1983); they had a son, Platon, in 1922, and a daughter, Maria, in 1944.[7]

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.[8] 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.

Three critical works

When he did return to writing in 1926, 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.

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 chapter of Chevengur appeared in a magazine. The two novels only appeared in the USSR in 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 contributor was the theoretician György Lukács[9] 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 to his copy of the magazine about the author ("fool, idiot, scoundrel") and his literary style ("this isn't Russian but some incomprensible nonsense"). In a note to the editors of Krasnaya nov Stalin described Platonov as "an agent of our enemies" and suggested in a postscript that the author and other "numbskulls" should be punished in such a way that the punishment served them "for future use".[10]

In 1933 an OGPU official wrote a special report on Platonov. Attached were versions of The Sea of Youth and the play "14 Red Cabins" and the unknown "Technical Novel". It 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.[11]

Official support and censure

This was not the end of Platonov as a writer. He published eight volumes of fiction and essays between 1937 and his death in 1951.

In 1934, Maksim Gorky arranged for Platonov to be included in the “writer’s brigade” sent to Central Asia with the intention of publishing a collective work in celebration of ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan.[12] (In early 1934, a collective work by over thirty Soviet writers was published about the construction of the White Sea Canal.) Platonov’s contribution to the Turkmen volume was a short story titled “Takyr” (or “Salt-flats”) about the liberation of a Persian slave girl. Platonov returned to Turkmenistan in 1935 and based his novella Soul (or Dzhan) on that trip.

Dzhan tells how Nazar Chagataev, a “non-Russian” economist from Central Asia, leaves Moscow and goes to assist his people who are a lost, nomadic nation made up of rejects and outcasts possessing nothing but their souls; they are called the Dzhan.[13] The Soviet state censored Dzhan because of its graphic content and inability to fit into the socialist realist framework; the uncensored text was not published in full until 1999.

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.[14]: 626–629 

Stalin's ambivalence and Platonov's son

Stalin held ambivalent views regarding Platonov's worth as a writer. The same informer's report in July 1931 claimed that he referred to the writer as "a prophet, brilliant". For his part Platonov made hostile remarks about Trotsky, Rykov, and Bukharin but not about Stalin, to whom he wrote letters on several occasions.[15] "Is Platonov here?" asked Stalin at the meeting with Soviet writers held in Moscow at Gorky's villa in 1934 when the Soviet leader called writers "engineers of the human soul".

In May 1938, during the Great Terror, Platonov's son was arrested as a "terrorist" and "spy". Aged 15 years old, Platon was sentenced in September 1938 to ten years' imprisonment in a corrective labour camp[16], where he contracted tuberculosis. As a result of 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, but his disease grew worse. In 1946, his last published short story, "The Return", fell under official disapproval.[17] His last publications were two collections of folklore. After his death in 1951, Vasily Grossman spoke at his funeral.[18]

Andrei Platonov's grave at the Armenian Cemetery (Moscow)

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".[citation needed]

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. 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."[19]

Platonov's writing, it has also been argued,[by whom?] 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."[20]

Elif Batuman ranked Soul as one of her four favorite 20th century Russian works.[21] (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."[22]

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

A planet discovered in 1981 by Soviet astronomer L.G. Karachkina was named after Platonov.[23]

List of works

Date of composition (and later publication in USSR)

  • Blue_Depths [24] (verse) - 1922
  • The Motherland of Electricity - 1926
  • The Sluices of Epifany (novella) - 1927
  • Meadow Craftsmen - 1928
  • The Innermost Man - 1928
  • Makar the Doubtful - 1928
  • Chevengur - 1929 (1988)
  • For Future Use - 1930 (1931)
  • The Foundation Pit (novel) - 1930 (1987)
  • "Fourteen Little Red Huts" (play) - 1931 (1988)
  • The Sea of Youth (novel) - 1934 (1986)
  • Soul, or Dzhan (novella) - 1934 (1966; 1999)
  • The Third Son - 1936
  • The River Potudan (collection of short stories) - 1937
  • Happy Moscow (unfinished novel) - 1933-1936 (1991)
  • "The Return" (short story) - 1946

Undated

  • Among Animals and Plants
  • Fro (novella)
  • The Cow
  • "The Hurdy Gurdy" (play)
  • Father-Mother (screenplay) [25]

Works translated into English

  • Soul and Other Stories, New York Review Books, 2007 (tr. Robert Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman).
  • The Foundation Pit, New York Review Books, 2009 (tr. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson).
  • Happy Moscow, New York Review Books, 2012 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler).

References

  1. ^ 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: ISBN 1-934843-57-1), p. 4.
  2. ^ "Soul". New York Review Books. Retrieved 2019-08-09.
  3. ^ "The Foundation Pit". New York Review Books. Retrieved 2019-08-09.
  4. ^ "Happy Moscow". New York Review Books. Retrieved 2019-08-09.
  5. ^ Alexei Varlamov, "Platonov and the Party", quoted in Online diary of Svetlana Koppel-Kovtun, 4 December 2016 (in Russian).
  6. ^ Alexei Varlamov, "Platonov and the Party", quoted in Online diary of Svetlana Koppel-Kovtun, 4 December 2016 (in Russian).
  7. ^ Seifrid, A Companion To Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, p. 15.
  8. ^ Platonov, Andrei Platonovich (1925). Vosstanie v Chernomorskom flote v 1905 godu : v iiune v Odesse i v noiabre v Sevastopole. Leningrad: Priboi: Leningradskii istpart. Otdel Leningradskago Gubernskogo Komiteta RKP (b)po izucheniiu istorii Oktiabr’skoi Revoliutsii i RKP (b). pp. 294 pp. OCLC 65658464. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  9. ^ 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.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ Vitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices, Chapter 10, "The Arrested Word", The Free Press: New York, 1996, p. 211.
  12. ^ Platonov, Andreĭ Platonovich, 1899-1951. (2008). Soul and other stories. New York Review Books. ISBN 978-1-59017-254-4. OCLC 153582650.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  13. ^ Queen Mary University; Chandler, Robert (2017). "Bread for the Soul: Andrey Platonov" (PDF). Studia Litterarum. 2 (1): 244–267. doi:10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-1-244-267.
  14. ^ Slezhine, Yuri (2017). The House of Government. Princeton. ISBN 9780691176949.
  15. ^ Goncharov, Vladimir; Nekhotin, Vladimir, eds. (c. 2000). "Andrei Platonov in OGPU-NKVD-NKGB documents, 1930-1945". Khronos (online journal) in Russian.
  16. ^ Solomon Volkov, A History of 20th-century Russian culture, Moscow, 2008, pp. 174-175(in Russian).
  17. ^ Kahn, Andrew; Lipovetsky, Mark; Reyfman, Irina; Sandler, Stephanie (2018). A History of Russian Literature. Oxford. p. 547. ISBN 9780199663941.
  18. ^ Kalder, Daniel (18 February 2010). "Andrei Platonov: Russia's greatest 20th-century prose stylist?". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
  19. ^ See Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), chapter 1; V. V. Eidinova, "K tvorcheskoi biografii 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.
  20. ^ Tolstaya, Tatyana (13 April 2000). "Out of this World". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
  21. ^ Batuman, Elif (2010-03-11). "Alternative Russian Classics". Retrieved 2019-08-09.
  22. ^ Tolstaya, Tatyana (2000-04-13). "Out of This World". ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 2019-08-09.
  23. ^ Schmadel, Lutz D. (2003). Dictionary of Minor Planet Names (5th ed.). New York: Springer Verlag. p. 304. ISBN 3-540-00238-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  24. ^ Blue Depths.
  25. ^ "Andrei Platonov: Father-Mother". New Left Review. Retrieved 2013-06-22.

Further reading

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