Andrei Platonov
Encyclopedia
Andrei Platonov was the pen name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov , 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
(Котлован) and Chevengur (Чевенгур).
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 unusual, 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, 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. 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
".
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
.
3620 Platonov
, discovered by Soviet
astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina
in 1981 is named after him.
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
author whose works anticipate existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
. Although Platonov was a Communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, his works were banned in his own lifetime for their skeptical attitude toward collectivization
Collectivisation in the USSR
Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Stalin between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms...
and other Stalinist
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
policies. His famous works include the novels The Foundation Pit
The Foundation Pit
The Foundation Pit is a gloomy symbolical and semi-satirical novel by Andrei Platonov. The plot of the novel concerns a group of workers in the early Soviet Union attempting to dig out a huge foundation pit, on the base of which a gigantic House for all Proletariat will be built...
(Котлован) and Chevengur (Чевенгур).
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 VoronezhVoronezh
Voronezh is a city in southwestern Russia, the administrative center of Voronezh Oblast. It is located on both sides of the Voronezh River, away from where it flows into the Don. It is an operating center of the Southeastern Railway , as well as the center of the Don Highway...
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 unusual, 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
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
, 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, 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
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
's film The Battleship Potemkin
The Battleship Potemkin
The Battleship Potemkin , sometimes rendered as The Battleship Potyomkin, is a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm...
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
The Foundation Pit
The Foundation Pit is a gloomy symbolical and semi-satirical novel by Andrei Platonov. The plot of the novel concerns a group of workers in the early Soviet Union attempting to dig out a huge foundation pit, on the base of which a gigantic House for all Proletariat will be built...
, 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. Nevertheless, Platonov published no fewer than eight volumes of fiction and essays from 1937 until his death in 1951. In the Stalinist Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
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
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
. When he was finally returned, Platonov himself contracted the disease while nursing him. During the Great Patriotic War (World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
), Platonov served as a war correspondent
War correspondent
A war correspondent is a journalist who covers stories firsthand from a war zone. In the 19th century they were also called Special Correspondents.-Methods:...
, 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
Khrushchev Thaw
The Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and...
. 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
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
".
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. 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
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
. He also uses much Christian
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
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
Joseph Brodsky
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky , was a Russian poet and essayist.In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters...
considers the work deeply suspicious of the meaning of language, especially political language. This exploration of meaninglessness is a hallmark of existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
and absurdism
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...
.
Legacy
A minor planetMinor planet
An asteroid group or minor-planet group is a population of minor planets that have a share broadly similar orbits. Members are generally unrelated to each other, unlike in an asteroid family, which often results from the break-up of a single asteroid...
3620 Platonov
3620 Platonov
3620 Platonov is a main-belt asteroid discovered on September 7, 1981 by L. G. Karachkina at Nauchnyj and named for Soviet writer Andrei Platonov.- External links :*...
, discovered by Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina
Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina
Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina is a Soviet and Ukrainian astronomer.Working at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory since 1978, she has discovered a number of asteroids, including the Amor asteroid 5324 Lyapunov and the Trojan asteroid 3063 Makhaon. She has received a Ph.D. in astronomy from I. I...
in 1981 is named after him.
List of works
- The Sky-Blue Depths (verse)
- Epifan Locks (novella)
- Meadow Craftsmen
- The Innermost Man
- Chevengur (novel)
- The Third Son
- Among Animals and Plants (novella)
- Fro (novella)
- The Foundation PitThe Foundation PitThe Foundation Pit is a gloomy symbolical and semi-satirical novel by Andrei Platonov. The plot of the novel concerns a group of workers in the early Soviet Union attempting to dig out a huge foundation pit, on the base of which a gigantic House for all Proletariat will be built...
(novel) - The Sea of Youth (novel)
- Soul, or Dzhan (novella)
- The River Potudan (novella)
- Happy Moscow (unfinished novel)
- The Fierce and Beautiful World (novella)
- Fourteen Little Red Huts (play)
- The Hurdy Gurdy (play)
- The Cow
- The Return
- The Motherland of Electricity
- Father-Mother(screenplay)
Sources
- The Literary Encyclopedia
- Mirra Ginsburg, translator's introduction to The Foundation Pit, 1975.
- Thomas Seifrid, A Companion To Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, Academic Studies Press, 2009; ISBN 1934843571.
External links
- Интернет-библиотека Алексея Комарова Some texts in Russian at Alexei Komarov's Internet Library
- Андрей Платонович Платонов Works in Russian at ImWerden
- Happy Moscow Electronic fiction published in Triple Canopy (online magazine)Triple Canopy (online magazine)Triple Canopy is an online magazine, which was first published in 2008. In an effort to "slow down the Internet," the magazine curates and facilitates new media projects, which engage with the formal possibilities of the web. Its content ranges from art and literature to essays and critical theory...
built from a fragment of Platonov's Happy Moscow.