The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Platonov departs from our other exemplary writers in having no special city. He is associated with open spaces: wilderness, steppe, desert, tumbleweed, the wandering of lost people or tribes through exotic Siberian and Asian-Russian locales. Activityinthatwide-open space iscontemplativeratherthan aggressive; it does not know the frenetic pace of the production or construction novel. But Platonov was not a “peasant writer” with nostalgia for the pre-industrial village or patriarchal homestead – not, in other words, like Russia’s most famous twentieth-century Slavophile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Platonov was part of the new Russia. He knew machines and admired them. In his world, however, the human body is the furthest possible thing from a machine.

Born in the south of Russia into a poor metalworker’s family, Platonov, the eldest son, trained as a metalworker and hired himself out to build electric stations. After the Revolution he found work as a specialist in land reclamation in central Russia, where he gained first-hand knowledge of the terrible famine in rural areas during the early 1920s. In the mid-thirties, after Stalin’s savage drive to collectivize the peasantry, he made a trip to Turkmenistan in Soviet Central Asia, where the poverty, drought, and suffering had yet to find its chronicler. Throughout these years he wrote steadily: ten novellas, a hundred stories, four plays, six film scenarios, and dozens of critical articles.

Platonov began publishing seriously in 1927, although in small editions. His heroes and plots were out of step with the time: dreamers and drop-outs at grandiose but unrealized construction projects. When, in 1931, Stalin happened to read a short story of Platonov’s that struck him as sympathetic to the rich peasants (called kulaks or “fists”) then being deprived of their lands and goods, the author found himself almost unemployable. In 1938, his only son, age fifteen, was charged with counter-revolutionary conspiracy and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in a far northern camp. Through the intervention of Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84), Party-approved author of The Quiet Don, Platonov secured his son’s release in 1940, but the boy was already dying of tuberculosis. During World War II, Platonov worked as a war correspondent, and after he was wounded was again briefly published. By 1946, he was back on the blacklist – this time for a singularly beautiful short story, “The Homecoming,” about a soldier returning from the front to his now-unfamiliar family, a plot Stalin considered “anti-Soviet.” From then on, Platonov eked out a living by rewriting folk tales in a mandated pro-Stalinist spirit until his death at age fifty-two, from tuberculosis contracted while nursing his son. Out of this very ordinary, very terrible Soviet-era writer’s biography, we will consider only one work, the 1929–30 novel The Foundation Pit [Kotlovan],

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the first and greatest philosophical commentary on the structure, language, energy level, and party-mindedness of Gladkov’s 1925 production novel Cement.

The production of cement, like the destruction of the fascist enemy, is a straightforward material task. Platonov’s position on “matter” is far more potent and strange. Socialist realist works presume that the material world can be shaped for the better. There will always be sabotage, fresh destruction, violence, waste, decay, natural disasters – Cement is full of these – but the energy that new generations can apply against this “entropy” or anarchy is not questioned. The great ally in this struggle is the industrial machine. Platonov does not reject this faith. In his autobiography he remarked that from his youth he had loved steam engines, shrill whistles, sweaty work, and that there was a link (he didn’t know exactly what) between burdocks in the field, electricity, locomotives, and earthquakes. But unlike the construction novel, where this energy passes from animate to inanimate entities (from human muscles, always tensed and hot, to the pulleys that will haul fuel to the factory or bags of cement out of it), in Platonov the flow is more often reversed. Far from being concentrated or accelerated, the energy of human beings escapes and dissipates in open space. Even people eager to work on behalf of a Purpose rapidly cool down. Or as Platonov puts it in his 1938 Turkmenistan novella Dzhan: “Men live because they’re born, not by truth or by intelligence, and while the heart goes on beating it scatters and spreads their despair and finally destroys itself, losing its substance in patience and in work.”18