September 01, 2009

Andrei Platonov

born September 1, 1899

in the best-known photograph of Andrei Platonov, the one that usually appears in his books and books about him, we see a man with thin, tightly compressed lips. Large eyes look directly at us. We can see the carefully arranged folds of a white scarf. This scarf always struck me as a sign of refinement and an artistic nature, although perhaps the perpetually broke Platonov simply picked it up cheap somewhere. Or maybe it was a hand-me-down from one of his more successful friends.

Platonov’s intelligent face, focused and intense, immediately gives him away as not just an intellectual, but a person with an elaborate inner life. Some cosmic shift must have taken place in 1899 in the working class neighborhood outside Voronezh—where the writer was born into the family of a railroad metalworker—to enable him not only to reach amazing heights of insight and philosophically conceptualize all of Russian life and history, but also to create an absolutely new language, a language needed to describe the new world, the world that Platonov witnessed come to life.

Platonov’s relationship with this new world is a complicated and puzzling thing. On the one hand, his biography and origins would naturally have set the young man, who back then went by the name of Klimentov, on a path leading to the Bolsheviks and revolution. He went to work at the age of 15 to help his family and held a number of “proletarian” jobs—laborer, smelter, machinist. The world of machinery and the railroad always seemed to him a world of order, the basis for a future paradise. When one of the protagonists of his novel Chevengur shows up at a depot looking for a job, an amazing picture opens up before him:

Polished rails stretched out before him; stationary freight cars bore the names of distant lands: Trans-Caspian, Trans-Caucasian, Trans-Siberian. Strange, special people were walking about over the tracks. They were intelligent and thoughtful—switch operators, engine-drivers, inspectors and so on. All around were buildings, engines, artifacts and devices. Before Zakhar Pavlovich lay a new world of skills—a world he had loved for so long it seemed he had always known about it—and he decided to stand his ground there for ever.*

After the revolution, Platonov published frequently in newspapers with such revolutionary names as Fortified District News and Red Village. In 1920—amidst the turmoil of the Civil War and the politics of War Communism—he became a member of the Communist Party. One would have thought that said it all. But just one year later he left the party, and, as time went on, he even tried to give up writing, deciding he was not cut out for so contemplative a line of work.

In the mid-1920s, Platonov became involved in efforts to improve life in the countryside, working on electrification, drainage, and irrigation. What happened? Apparently the horrific famine that swept through the Russian countryside in 1921 made a more profound impression on him than all the upheavals of the Civil War. Several years were then spent in government service and dreams of a bloodless, gradual transformation of Russian life.

Then, in 1926, Platonov decided to devote himself fully to literature. What prompted this change of course? Was he simply unable to deny his own literary voice? Was he disillusioned with the transformation that he had been so eager to take part in by improving crop land and bringing electricity to villages?

By the late 1920s, when Platonov truly blossomed into an outstanding and highly unusual writer, he was the target of searing criticism by the authorities. He was published with decreasing frequency and then his fiction was banned entirely. His two main works —Chevengur and The Foundation Pit—first saw the light of day overseas, long after the writer’s death, and were published in his native land only during perestroika.

Platonov was essentially banished from literary life, not to mention everyday life. His 15-year-old son was arrested, and although the father did manage to get the son released, the boy returned from the camps with a fatal case of tuberculosis. While caring for his dying son, Platonov also contracted the disease, which ultimately took him to the grave in 1951, impoverished, adrift, and utterly forgotten.

One of the main legends associated with Platonov has him working as a dvornik (a position that involves sweeping the dvor or courtyard, in addition to other menial tasks) at the Moscow House of Writers. It was even said that when Alexander Fadeyev,* who was the head of the Writer’s Union at the time, passed by Platonov, whom he had recently mercilessly excoriated in the press, and condescendingly greeted him, the latter removed his cap, paused his sweeping, and replied, “Good day, your lordship…”

This is probably apocryphal. There is no evidence that Platonov ever worked as a dvornik, but the tale has significance. In the sixties and seventies, when the unofficial cult of Platonov was emerging, the job of dvornik had an unambiguous symbolism. Many people living on the margins of society—human rights activists, rock musicians, bohemian poets—found jobs working as dvorniki, which allowed them to live without conforming to the system. The notion that this great writer had worked as a dvornik provided a sort of archetype for the practice, however contrived.

It was probably around the same time that an exquisite literary joke started circulating:

A little boy breaks a window and an enraged dvornik starts running after him, screaming, “I’ll kill you, you rascal!” The boy runs away, thinking, “I should have stayed home and read my Hemingway.” At the same time, a morose Hemingway is sitting in Cuba, listening to some old man, thinking, “I should have stayed home in New York, drinking Martinis and reading my Maurois.” In a Paris bordello, a world-weary André Maurois is lying around thinking, “I should have stayed home drinking champagne and reading my Platonov.” At the same time, back in Moscow, an enraged Andrei Platonov is flailing his broom, chasing after a little boy, yelling, “I’ll kill you, you rascal!”

Platonov’s books certainly do read like horrific, scathing critiques of the regime. The residents of Chevengur, where communism has already been built, move their houses from one place to another every day to keep them from taking root, and they live off the energy of the sun, which is simply obligated to feed the poor. The kolkhoz workers in The Foundation Pit are endlessly digging a huge and pointless pit for a future building to house the proletariat. Meanwhile, the kulaks (prosperous farmers) are put in a raft and sent down the river and out to sea.

But was the communist utopia really so repugnant to Platonov? Was it not the very thing that Alexander Dvanov, the contemplative dreamer of Chevengur, sought? Was it not the very thing that the characters depicted in The Foundation Pit dreamt of? In his 1973 introduction to the foreign edition of The Foundation Pit, Joseph Brodsky, who placed Platonov on a par with Joyce and Kafka, wrote:

The Foundation Pit is an excessively gloomy work, and readers are in an extremely despondent state by the time they close the book. If it were possible at that moment to transform mental energy into physical energy, the first thing to do after closing this book would be to abolish the existing world order and proclaim a new age.

This does not mean, however, that Platonov was an enemy of this utopia, the regime, collectivization, and so forth. The only thing that can seriously be said about Platonov within the social context is that he wrote in the language of this utopia, in the language of his era... he, Platonov, subordinated himself to the language of the era, having seen in it the sorts of chasms that, once he peered into them, rendered him incapable of gliding along the literary surface, occupying himself with merely the intricacies of plot, typographic fads, and stylistic frill.

Today, some critics see in Platonov’s books not a categorical condemnation of utopia, but the story of the agony and torment entailed in the birth of a new world, a world in which everything must be new. Platonov’s surrealistic language is to some extent a reflection of the surrealist reality of 20th century Russia, and what verdict should be cast on this reality is a matter for the reader to decide.

Be that as it may, it is impossible to understand Russian history without reading Platonov. The challenge is breaking through his language, which is so strange it truly engulfs the reader. Which brings us back to Brodsky, who considered Platonov fundamentally impossible to translate, adding, “in a way, blessed is the language, into which he cannot be translated.”

— tamara eidelman

September 01, 2009

Andrei Platonov

See Also

Life and Work of Andrei Platonov

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