The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the “revolutionary romanticism” of Gladkov’s novel lies in its patches of very old-style sentimental pathos. Nyurka’s life is “flickering out.” Every morning and evening Dasha stops by to see her, but “the child had become all bones, and the skin on her face was yellow and rumpled likean old woman’s” (p. 243). Ideologically, the mother has gone forward: she is the New Soviet Woman and activist, her red headscarf flashes as she strides down the village path. The child, the new generation, has stayed behind. When Dasha asks Nyurka if she feels any pain or wants anything, the child answers: “I want to stay with you, so that you’d never go away – and always be near . . . and some grapes . . . near you, and grapes” (p. 245). After this exchange, Dasha leaves the Home, flings herself down on the grass, and sobs – but goes back to work. The child was her “life’s sacrifice”; we are told the loss was unbearable, but she bears it. She will not grab up Nyurka, feed her, or refuse to part from her. We do not see the actual death; it’s not clear that Dasha was present for it. When Gleb gets back from his meeting, Dasha tells him that “Nyurka is no more” with eyes full of tears. But the first subsection of the next chapter (ch. 16) is titled: “Our Hearts Must Be of Stone.”

Let us now consider equivalent scenes in The Foundation Pit. Compared with a genuine construction novel, the expropriation of the kulaks in Platonov is accomplished with a bare minimum of infrastructure and machines: no tractors, few visible tools, hardly even any weapons. The kulaks have slaughtered their livestock rather than allow it to be requisitioned. Under such conditions there should be a feast. But nourishment from those animals seems to be impossible: “Having liquidated the last of their steaming live inventory, the peasants began to eat meat . . . During that brief time, eating meat was like Communion. Nobody wanted to eat, but it was necessary to hide the flesh of the butchered family beasts inside one’s body and save it there from socialization” (pp. 100–01).

Some peasants grew bloated, some vomited, and those who let their livestock be collectivized “lay down in their empty coffins” and made their homes in them, “feeling sheltered and at rest.” The expropriating Bolsheviks employ a tame bear to sniff out hoarded food. But edible food is not to be seen; the entire episode is swarming with flies from these carcasses, which seem more alive than their peasant owners. The kulaks too are exhausted. The bear pokes at them with its paw, the requisitioners prod or smack or push them over, and when they die their bodies are simply stacked up. The passage from life to death is scarcely perceptible. One peasant asks his horse if it wants to join the collective farm. “‘So you’ve died?’” he says, getting no response (p. 100). But then we read that “the horse’s life was still intact – it merely shrank in distant

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poverty, broke up into continually smaller particles, and could not weary itself out.”

The kulaks aredispatchedona raft downthe river,afterwhichthe peasants on thekolkhoz[collective farm] celebrate the successful expropriation with a party. Singing weakly and stomping heavily, the peasants start up a strange dance. To get them to stop, to rest, they must be tackled by the local cripple and tumbled to the ground. Immediately they fall silent like mummies. The entire sequence echoes one of the most famous grotesque “dance scenes” in Russian literature, Gogol’s wedding party at the end of his 1831 Ukrainian tale “Sorochinsky Fair.” “People whose sullen faces seem incapable of smiling stamped their feet and shook their shoulders in time to the music,” Gogol writes of their drunken swaying. A group of old women is singled out: “Blind to all around them and quite incapable of sensing either compassion or innocent delight, these old hags were propelled by the sheer power of drink into a movement that was faintly human, like lifeless machines set in motion by a mechanic . . .”21 Such a Gogolian dynamic, poised between animate and inanimate bodies and moving indifferently between them, appears to govern “blind matter” in a triumphantly socialist village as well. The cumulative effect of these entropic scenes in Platonov is mesmerizing and suggests that his materialism was of an entirely original, non-dialectical sort. Such a message was not welcome during the Stalinist era of heroic achievements. Matter, Platonov suggests, is not so easy to mobilize or to control, nor can mere words energize it. Energy flows slower through it than we suppose and cannot be stored reliably in it. The focus of this truth is the death of the orphaned girl Nastya.