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...In May 1933, Platonov wrote to Gorky urgently asking him if he thought it
was ‘objectively impossible’ for him to be a Soviet writer. The letter went
unanswered, but the rest of Platonov’s career seems to have been an attempt
to respond to it for himself—or at least to keep re-stating the question.
Seifrid has argued persuasively that the combinations of peasant speech and
Soviet slogans, utopian speculation and industrial terminology, of harsh
socio-historical fact and deep-seated existential yearning, make Platonov’s
‘the most quintessentially Soviet prose of the century’. It is thus all the
more ironic that the audience best equipped to appreciate it was able to
read it only as the ussr entered terminal decline. His status, however, is
now fully assured, paralleled in 20th-century Russian letters only by
Nabokov—in many senses his polar opposite, both in terms of social origins
and political views: the noble-born Nabokov harshly opposed the Soviet
regime from the Right, while Platonov directed his best efforts to serving
it from an independent position on the Left. Moreover, Nabokov’s linguistic
virtuosity was uprooted from his native context, his talent translatable
into other tongues and traditions, while much of Platonov will surely be
lost to anyone reading him in abstraction from the historical circumstances
interwoven with his work....

New Left Review 33, May-June 2005

Tony Wood on Andrey Platonov, Happy Moscow and Soul. Recently discovered
works by the neglected giant of twentieth-century Russian letters. The
singular language and multiple ambiguities of Platonov’s style, and heroic
impasses of his life and times.


TONY WOOD
ANNALS OF UTOPIA

Perhaps the most striking literary consequence of perestroika, standing out
even amid the late 1980s’ flood of new publications and overturning of
established truths, was the rediscovery of Andrei Platonov. Born in 1899—the
same year as Nabokov—Platonov had previously been known only as the author
of a handful of stories and tales who had, in the early 1930s, attracted the
ire of Soviet officialdom, and remained in literary limbo until his death in
1951. But with the appearance, in 1987 and 88, of two major works, Kotlovan
(The Foundation Pit) and Chevengur, he rapidly came to be seen as one of
Russia’s greatest 20th-century writers. Composed at the turn of the 1930s,
neither work had been published in the increasingly hostile literary climate
of Stalin’s ussr. Though both came out in the West in the early
1970s—English translations soon followed—it was their reception in Russia
that lifted Platonov from minor figure to the status of modernist master.
They combine a deep-seated yearning for utopia with troubled awareness of
the distance, difficulties and violence that separate it from the present,
encapsulating the contradictions of the Soviet experience like few other
texts. While Russians’ new-found access to Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and others
undoubtedly broadened their cultural horizons, Platonov’s work required a
full recalibration of the literary tradition—a process which continued as
more texts emerged from the family archive.

Most notable among these have been Schastlivaia Moskva (Happy Moscow), his
unfinished novel of the mid-1930s, which first came out in Russian in 1991,
and Dzhan—written in 1935, published in various, incomplete forms in the
Soviet Union since 1938, and now translated in full as Soul. Both have been
elegantly rendered into English by a team led by Robert Chandler, adding to
similarly scrupulous work on The Foundation Pit and a selection of stories,
gathered under the title The Return in 1999; their version of Chevengur, now
under way, will undoubtedly be superior to that published in the us in 1978,
and will be eagerly awaited by Anglophone audiences everywhere. It is
difficult to imagine translations more attuned to the cadences of the
original prose, or more sensitive to the texture of the author’s times.

For Platonov presents more formidable obstacles to the translator than any
other Russian writer. Native Russian speakers’ first reaction is generally
one of bafflement at the seeming awkwardness of the prose: it is replete
with redundancies, ill-suited collocations and syntax-muddling elisions;
metaphors are literalized, the abstract and concrete are confused or
interwoven. The overall effect approaches that of dream-logic or perhaps
even aphasia. But this is not an idiom of damage so much as of raw
construction: language itself, Platonov implicitly tells us, is the primary
material out of which utopias are built, its ungainliness marking our
passage into a transformed sphere of human relations—or else highlighting
the points where we are still anchored in its unreconstructed double.

At a syntactic level, Platonov’s prose disrupts the flow of our expectations
and assumptions. His words are chosen with immense care, and usually conceal
some proposition or pun that forces the reader to return to the sentence and
re-read it, without correcting or normalizing its oddities. A relatively
simple example: in The Foundation Pit, the proletarian Chiklin punches a
peasant in the face to get him to start living consciously. The peasant
staggered, but was careful not to lean over too far in case Chiklin thought
he had kulak inclinations himself, and so he moved even closer to him,
hoping to pick up some more serious injuries and so win entitlement to a
poor peasant’s right to life.

The second distinctive feature of Platonov’s language—which to a certain
extent explains its strangeness—is his deployment, deformation and
re-combination of the wide variety of discourses, from official slogans to
peasant proverbs, that collided during the lexical upheavals of the
post-Revolutionary period, as illiterate masses came into contact with new
political jargon and Bolshevik bureaucratese. It is this polyphonic,
disjointed idiom that separates him from the rest of the Russian literary
tradition, and from his contemporaries. Platonov’s prose has none of the
terse urgency of Babel, the verbal somersaults of Belyi, or the relentless,
punning intelligence of Nabokov. If he can be identified with any particular
literary strand, it is the satirical-grotesque of Gogol and Leskov, with
whom he shares not only largely rural characters and settings but also the
use of skaz—a third-person narrative voice into which the sub-standard
locutions and verbal tics of the protagonists often tumble, skewing the
perspective from which the reader views the action.

But Platonov takes this strategy still further, to the point where so many
varieties of speech are present that there is no longer a main thread, and
the narrator stands at an unidentifiable distance from events. (A point well
made by Thomas Seifrid in his excellent 1992 monograph on the writer.) In
The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson spoke of the ‘glaciality of Platonov’s
tone’, a ‘dissociation of sensibility so absolute that it sometimes evades
our attention altogether like a pane of glass’. Yet at other times, the
prose is suffused with tenderness, its occasionally beautiful sentences
translating the discomfort and melancholy of the characters into aesthetic
satisfaction, at least, for those on the other side of the page.
Indeed, ambiguity is arguably Platonov’s defining trait—the parallaxes of
narrative voice, the tensions between parody and sympathy, the unresolvable
play of ironies, all combining to blur his authorial position even as they
reveal his astounding talent. As a result, interpretations of his work have
ranged across the theoretical and political spectrum. Joseph Brodsky praised
him for showing us ‘the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the
language’, seeing Platonov as attacking ‘the very carrier of millenarian
sensibility in Russian society’. Anti-communists have cast Platonov as a
lone voice laying bare the totalitarian assault on reason, and the brutal
follies of utopianism per se—downplaying Platonov’s fundamentally positive
attitude to Soviet power. Others have viewed him as the ultimate realist,
portraying the ghastly absurdity of everyday life, or else as a dreamy
humanist; still others have focused on the intertextual dimensions of his
work, and debts to a range of Russian thinkers.

There was until recently, however, a broad critical consensus that Platonov’s
output declined in quality after Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, and that
his attempts during the 1930s to arrive at a style that censors would not
object to resulted in a dimming of his creative energies. Silenced by the
Stalinist literary bureaucracy, so the argument runs, Platonov adapted his
singular mode of expression to produce acceptable, if still eccentric,
variations on standard Socialist Realist themes. Soul is taken as exemplary
in this regard, relating as it does the story of a half-Turkmen,
half-Russian Communist sent from Moscow to lead his nomadic people into the
socialist future. But its melancholic, emaciated characters and political
and historical ambiguities constantly act to subvert its supposed genre
allegiances. Similarly, Happy Moscow’s formally prototypical
protagonists—parachutist, engineer, doctor—are beset by existential troubles
and emotional torment, tainting the flurry of socialist construction around
them with shapeless fear and anomie. While Soul is a subtle exercise in
Platonovian subversion, Happy Moscow is a full-blown masterpiece, worthy not
only of consideration alongside its author’s better-known works, but of
comparison with modernist fiction’s greatest achievements. The translation
of these two works into English requires us to re-examine Platonov’s
trajectory, the better to appreciate their place in his oeuvre, and to
arrive at a truer measure of their author’s stature.

Platonov was born in the Black Earth province of Voronezh, as Andrei
Platonovich Klimentov; he seems to have assumed the name Platonov around
1918, at the start of his writing career. He grew up in a settlement outside
Voronezh, between railway lines and open steppe—precisely the border terrain
between the ruminative rhythms and vast spaces of peasant life on the one
hand, and the tokens of technological progress on the other, that recurs
throughout his work. His father was a metal-worker for the railway, and a
locally renowned autodidact and inventor. The oldest of eleven children,
Platonov started work in his early teens, mostly in local industry. Too
young to fight in the First World War, he had by 1918 enrolled in the
Voronezh Railway Polytechnic, and that autumn began to write for the local
Bolshevik press on a wide variety of themes—philosophy, technology,
politics, poetry. By 1922 he had published over 200 articles, a pamphlet on
electrification and a book of poems. Platonov’s enthusiasm for industrial
modernity comes across in lines such as ‘We will kill the universe with
machines’; ‘In our furnaces beats the captive sun’; or ‘We are building
steel bridges into the unknown’.

It is difficult to get a precise sense of Platonov’s intellectual
formation—he never kept a detailed diary. Boyhood acquaintances refer to
earnest discussions of Kant, while his early journalistic output was clearly
influenced by both the science fiction and philosophical ideas of Aleksandr
Bogdanov, the unorthodox Marxist theorist of Proletkul’t, an organization in
whose Voronezh structures Platonov was very active around 1920. Platonov
undoubtedly read widely, and his works allude to a fairly broad range of
writers; non-Russians include Freud, Spengler, Swift, Carlyle, Montaigne.
The thinkers featuring most prominently in his mature works, meanwhile, were
Vasily Rozanov, whose aphoristic philosophy focused on corporeality, and
above all Nikolai Fedorov, a librarian whose posthumously published
Philosophy of the Common Task (1906) argued that the chief source of discord
in the world was the endless succession of generations, and that mankind
should divert its full technological resources to the bodily resurrection of
the dead. The bizarre, eschatological dimension of Fedorov’s ideas was quite
in tune with the spirit abroad in pre-Revolutionary Russia—apocalyptic
pseudo-mysticism was rife. His project contains, moreover, elements of the
critique of capitalist industrial modernity common to much of the Russian
intellectual tradition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To be sure, Platonov did not adopt Fedorov’s views wholesale; but he shares
with him a tendency to conflate the physical and metaphysical, and in his
works repeatedly raises the Fedorovian theme of death not simply as
ineluctable, memory-destroying force, but as a physiological fact to be
confronted and potentially transcended. One is reminded here of the child
who dies at the conclusion of Chevengur—whereupon one of the protagonists
furiously decides that communism cannot have been established after all.

In the summer of 1919 Platonov was mobilized as a rifleman in the Red Army,
and fought against the Whites in his home town; it has been suggested that,
as a member of a Special Detachment, he may have participated in forced
grain requisitioning. The Civil War was, at any rate, clearly a formative
experience, and one that Platonov was to evoke several times throughout his
career, in a variety of registers: from bleakly dispassionate description of
the slaughter of the bourgeoisie in Chevengur, to tender evocation of a
veteran’s awkward homecoming in ‘Reka Potudan’’ (The River Potudan, 1937).
He was briefly a member of the Communist Party, from spring 1920 to autumn
1921; local Party documents state he was expelled as an ‘unstable element’
who had refused to attend meetings, while Platonov himself privately told
friends he had been disillusioned by the adoption of nep. He seems to have
been more committed to the transformative possibilities of the Revolution
than to any Marxist or other theoretical tradition; a certain anarchistic
idealism comes across in his works, but his politics as of the mid-1920s—his
request to rejoin the party in 1924 was turned down—are above all those of
an independent-minded, critical sympathizer with Soviet rule.

It was Platonov’s desire to make a concrete, practical contribution to the
new order that led him to quit journalism in 1922, in order to carry out
land reclamation for the local Soviet authorities. Though he continued to
write—his eclectic output now included science fiction stories, anticlerical
tales and earthy sketches of peasant life—Platonov was until 1926 largely
occupied with land improvement and hydrological work, and especially with
reversing the consequences of the harsh drought of 1921. He oversaw the
digging of hundreds of wells and ponds, drained thousands of acres of
marshland, rehabilitated dried-up rivers and streams choked with silt. It is
in this capacity that he makes a cameo appearance in Viktor Shklovsky’s Tret’ia
fabrika (Third Factory, 1926). Shklovsky travelled around the Voronezh
region with Platonov in a jeep in 1925, and reported discussions ‘about
literature, about Rozanov, about how one should not describe sunsets and
should not write stories.’ Pictures from the time show a fair-haired man
with a high forehead, slightly drooping nose and kindly but sombre eyes.
Judging by the accounts of acquaintances and friends—there is as yet no
full, standard biography, in Russian or any other language—Platonov seems to
have been a modest, private person, capable of laconic humour, but also
given to intense seriousness.

In 1926, Platonov went to work for the central land agency in Moscow and was
promptly posted to Tambov—centre of a rural uprising against the Bolsheviks
during the Civil War. Immensely isolated, Platonov was also extremely
productive during this period, starting work on Chevengur and writing
several stories which would be published in the collection Epifanskie
shliuzy (The Epifan Locks) in 1927. The collection was praised by Gorky, and
by this time Platonov had decided to become a professional writer and move
to Moscow; he now began to be published in the major Muscovite literary
journals—Novyi mir, Krasnaia nov’, Molodaia gvardiia. Portions of Chevengur
appeared in their pages in 1928, and a book containing its first section,
entitled Proiskhozhdenie mastera (The Origins of a Master) came out the
following year. Indeed, the novel was due to be published in full in 1929—it
had even been typeset—but printing was suspended. Part of the reason for
this was probably the mounting campaign by rapp, the Revolutionary
Association of Proletarian Writers, against Boris Pilniak, with whom
Platonov had collaborated on a play and some satirical sketches in 1928.
Pilniak was dubbed a class enemy, and Platonov accused of falling too much
under his influence, though the stylistic evidence for this is slight.

But the major cause of Chevengur’s interdiction was surely the novel itself:
an ambiguous, semi-satirical, semi-sympathetic portrayal of a peasant utopia
in the southern steppes. As elsewhere in Platonov’s oeuvre, the setting is
an endlessly flat landscape strewn with low huts and overgrown with
burdocks; the topography, indeed, acts almost as an abstract, mathematical
surface on which events unfold all but at random—characters arrive and
depart with little causal explanation, like conjectural points on a plane.
The loose, episodic plot follows the trail of Dvanov, a typical Platonovian
innocent, and his Quixotic friend Kopenkin, who has devoted himself to the
bodily resurrection of Rosa Luxemburg and rides a horse named Proletarian
Strength. They arrive at Chevengur, where communism has been declared; all
productive labour has ceased and the sun has been appointed ‘worldwide
proletarian’ to toil on behalf of the populace. The inhabitants of
utopia—having brutally disposed of the bourgeoisie by arranging a ‘Second
Coming’ for them—now devote themselves to useless endeavour: moving houses
around, making objects with no function, raising handmade monuments to each
other. A huddled mass of outcasts—foreshadowing the wandering, emaciated
people of Soul—is brought in to populate the town, a first batch of men soon
followed by skeletal women who are to act as wives or mothers to the
revolutionary simpletons. Some collective work eventually resumes. But the
novel ends abruptly with the slaughter of the entire town by a detachment of
dehumanized cavalry. It is unclear whether these are bandits, White remnants
or Soviet government troops—and thus ultimately unknown whether Platonov
intended such an outcome to be inevitable crackdown, chance raid, deserved
downfall or tragic oblivion; or some unresolvable combination of all the
above.

Nightmare and ideal are inseparable in Chevengur, the deadpan violence and
senseless actions of the protagonists eerily attesting to the sheer scale of
upheaval required to found a new life-world. Indeed, the book’s fundamental
premise seems to be that utopia would require a shift in the order of
reality, and an accompanying suspension of routine, rational criteria. The
protagonists’ constant muddling of tangible things with intangible
ideas—communism is expected to have physical properties, such as warmth or a
sharp taste—suggests they inhabit, or wish to, a world organized according
to alternative reasoning and physical laws. Concerning the Chevengurians’
simple-mindedness, Jameson has pointed out, following Adorno, that utopia
would remove the need for a survival instinct—at which point, ‘no longer
fettered by the constraints of a now oppressive sociality’, its inhabitants
would be free to ‘blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives,
paranoids and schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a
world of true freedom, may make up the flora and fauna of “human nature”
itself.’

In Platonov’s own time, however—as Gorky argued in a letter of 1929
commenting on the manuscript of Chevengur—it simply would not do to have
revolutionaries appear as ‘cranks’ and ‘half-wits’. Gorky also pointed out
that, despite Platonov’s talent, the ‘lyrico-satirical’ tone of the book
would be unacceptable to the censors. Nevertheless, Platonov did manage to
publish several stories in the late 1920s and early 1930s that display his
distinctive style—not yet fully formed in Epifanskie shliuzy—and whose
satirical bent would create a storm of protest. The 1929 story
‘Usomnivshiisia Makar’ (Doubting Makar) contained numerous barbs against the
bureaucratization of Soviet life, and the distance between powerful,
technophile elite and unlettered masses, as the statistic-worship of the
Five Year Plan gathered pace. Platonov was immediately accused by the rapp
faithful of being a ‘petty bourgeois element’, of implicit support for
fascism, of ‘nihilistic indiscipline’. Worst of all, according to the rapp
critic Lev Averbakh, was his ambiguity, since ‘our time will not stand for
ambiguity’. The shrillness of the criticism aimed at Platonov from this time
onwards is all the more striking for the fact that, apart from Gorky, he was
Russia’s only proletarian writer of any distinction.

The pivotal event in Platonov’s career came in 1931. He had been sent out to
the Voronezh region in the autumn of 1929 under the auspices of the
Commissariat of Agriculture and the newspaper Sotsialisticheskoe zemledelie
(Socialist Agriculture), to observe the progress of collectivization. Two
texts resulted from the trip. The Foundation Pit, Platonov’s best-known
work, is now thought to have been written in 1933, though he began making
notes towards it in the summer of 1930. It focuses on a group of labourers
digging the foundations of a building which is to serve as the home of the
proletariat. Again the theme of utopian aspiration, and its curtailment,
comes to the fore: the characters ache to live in the bright future they are
building from the crudest materials, but they are held in the present by the
leaden weight of circumstances. The novel is also an implicit reply to
path-breaking novels of ‘socialist construction’ such as Fedor Gladkov’s
Tsement (Cement, 1925), re-deploying and distorting blandly optimistic
tropes into melancholic metaphors: the pit grows ever larger, and eventually
comes to serve as a grave for Nastia, a wise, innocent and viciously
pragmatic little girl. Perhaps the most striking passages, however, relate
to collectivization: the kulaks and middle peasants are set adrift on a
raft, a class-conscious bear beats his enemies into submission, horses
spontaneously collectivize themselves. Here and elsewhere, metaphors are
literalized and rendered absurd—‘liquidation’, ‘a bear of a man’—and yet we
always remain aware that their fabular surface has a silent obverse of
literal, merciless fact.

That Platonov was never able to publish The Foundation Pit in his lifetime
seems unsurprising to the present-day reader, given its barely concealed
criticism of collectivization. But it was the 1931 publication of ‘Vprok’
(For Future Use), the other product of the journey to Voronezh—still
unavailable in English—that was to cause irreparable damage to Platonov’s
reputation. The story is an unstable mix of reportage on the activities of
collective farms and workshops, and absurd set-pieces of peasant comedy,
featuring ‘half-wits’ who are seemingly cousins of those in Chevengur. One
village, for instance, has set up an electrical sun to shine constant light
on it; another has devised a machine bristling with artificial arms and
hands which replicate the sound of tumultuous applause—a pointed joke at the
expense of the choreography of Party Congresses surely not lost on its
readers. Most damning for Platonov, however, was the thinly disguised
first-person narrator, an unusually direct piece of authorial positioning
that is rendered all the more provocative by the story’s uncertain genre
status. In the midst of semi-grotesque episodes, for instance, there is a
long excursus on land reclamation which is totally redundant to the
narrative, but doubtless of practical use as non-fiction. Its hybridity and
satire aside, ‘Vprok’ also depicted collectivization as an incoherent,
shambolic process, largely irrelevant to the needs of rural people, who were
perfectly capable of organizing themselves as they saw fit.

The story was characterized as ‘slander’ by rapp, and its author labelled an
‘anarchizing philistine’ and ‘literary henchman of the kulaks’. Stalin is
reported to have written in the margins of his copy of Krasnaia nov’, where
the story was published, the words ‘bastard’ and ‘scum’. Aleksandr Fadeev,
the editor of the journal, was apparently summoned to the Kremlin and
instructed to unmask Platonov as a class enemy. Fadeev wrote a stinging
denunciation of material he had himself signed into print, attacking
Platonov’s language: ‘He scatters about him little jokes and funny sayings,
and engages in deliberate and importunate linguistic contortions’. Though
rapp was dissolved in 1932 and Platonov admitted to the Writers’ Union
formed that year, he was unable to publish anything until 1934, and
thereafter was repeatedly attacked by the Stalinist literary
establishment—most notably after another collection of stories, Reka Potudan’
(The River Potudan) appeared in 1937. Among his defenders in the late 1930s
was Georg Lukács, the most prominent contributor to the journal Literaturnyi
kritik, in whose pages two Platonov short stories appeared in
1936—unprecedented for a publication otherwise devoted exclusively to
critical articles. Platonov also wrote several essays for Literaturnyi
kritik, both under his own name and a pseudonym, ‘F. Chelovekov’—from
chelovek meaning ‘man’ or ‘human’—on writers ranging from Hemingway to
Mayakovsky and Akhmatova. The journal was, however, shut down in 1940 after
denunciations from the literary apparatchiks, and publication of
Razmyshleniia chitatelia (Thoughts of a Reader), a collection of Platonov’s
criticism, was suspended; though the book did eventually come out, in 1980.

Platonov’s literary fortunes revived somewhat during the war. At the
instigation of Vasily Grossman, in 1942 he was taken on as a front-line
correspondent for Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star), the Soviet Army journal, and
travelled with the infantry on foot through Kursk, Kiev and Mogilev, among
other battle-scarred places. Four volumes of his war stories came out
between 1942 and 1944. His personal life, however, was marked by tragedy:
his son Platon had been arrested in 1938, aged sixteen, for allegedly
belonging to an ‘anti-Soviet youth terrorist and spy-saboteur organization’.
Though Platonov managed to secure his release in 1941 through the offices of
Mikhail Sholokhov—an unlikely friend and defender of Platonov—the boy had
contracted tuberculosis in prison, and died in 1943. While he and his wife
were tending their son, Platonov fell victim to the same illness; but he
held out until 1951, managing to write several more stories, plays and film
scripts. A casualty of the Zhdanovite hysteria that took hold in 1946, he
published little in the postwar period, though in the late 1940s Sholokhov
did manage to get him a contract for re-renderings of Russian and Bashkir
folktales for children—an inspired move, since Platonov was ideally suited
to set their magical transformations and subtle moral lessons in a simple
yet expressive idiom. These are perhaps Platonov’s least-celebrated
works—and, ironically, have been read by generations of Soviet children and
adults unaware of their author’s identity.

Platonov’s rehabilitation began with the publication of a selection of
stories in 1958; more volumes trickled out during the 1960s and 70s, before
the publication of The Foundation Pit and Chevengur in Russia in the 1980s
revealed, as in a lightning flash, the dimensions of the talent that had
previously been obscured. Much excellent scholarship has been done since
then, establishing definitive dates and textual variants. Nonetheless, a
scholarly edition of Platonov’s complete works is not yet available: Parts
One and Two of the first of five projected volumes came out only in 2004.
This is to some extent the result of caution in releasing materials on the
part of his daughter, Maria; but the delay is also a consequence of the
thorough revision of critical understandings of his work occasioned by
manuscripts discovered in the 1990s.

Happy Moscow and Soul both originate in the period of ‘enforced silence’
Platonov underwent from 1931–34. The latter was the product of a trip to
Central Asia made in early 1934 as part of a brigade of writers sent to
celebrate ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan, and in a sense marks Platonov’s
escape from literary oblivion. Gorky recommended he be included in the
brigade, and Platonov leapt at the chance to be published again—indeed, it
is a striking feature of his career that he never wrote ‘for the desk drawer’,
as did, say, Bulgakov. Central Asian projects—Platonov made a second journey
there in 1935—interrupted work on Happy Moscow, which he began in 1932,
contracted with a publisher to deliver in 1934, and reported as being near
completion in 1936. The two works complement each other: one set in a
sparsely inhabited, inhospitable desert, the other in a vast, rapidly
growing metropolis; one has a langorous, single narrative, while the other
is fragmentary and incomplete—indeed, perhaps constitutively unfinishable.
Soul also strikes a relatively optimistic note, while Happy Moscow describes
the physical and mental shattering of its protagonists by their social and
historical milieu.

Soul relates the journey of Nazar Chagataev from Moscow back to his homeland
in the far north-east of Turkmenistan. He is of the dzhan people—a
multi-ethnic tribe of outcasts, orphans, criminals and others, defined not
so much by a common identity as by shared lack; they are called dzhan, the
Persian word for ‘soul’, because ‘they had nothing they could call their own
but their souls, that is, the ability to feel and suffer’. Chagataev’s task
is to re-gather the dzhan nation and build socialism between the Kara Kum
desert and the Ust-Yurt mountains. He wanders the desert and undergoes
various tribulations, including a duel with enormous birds that is laden
with Promethean echoes; though the text often alludes to Persian myth, too.
Yet he is continually frustrated by the dzhan’s unwillingess to embrace
life, as opposed to bare subsistence. The novel concludes with the dzhan
achieving prosperity, but independently of Chagataev’s efforts to determine
their fate—perhaps a sly critique of Stalinist nationalities policy, and of
the father-figure frequently invoked in the text. (These references were,
naturally, removed in all versions of the tale published in the ussr; a full
Russian version was published only in 1999.)

For all that Soul marks Platonov’s attempt to conform to the aesthetic
dictates of Socialist Realism, the story is full of accents consistent with
his earlier writings: the dzhan reprise the huddled masses of skin and bone
from Chevengur, Nastia from The Foundation Pit recurs as the little girl
Aidym, and Chagataev is pierced by the signature Platonovian melancholy—or
better, toská, a richly evocative Russian word which Nabokov described as
covering a range of feeling from ‘great spiritual anguish’ to ennui, via ‘a
dull ache of the soul’, ‘sick pining’, ‘vague restlessness’ and yearning.
Another prominent feature of Soul, which it shares with Happy Moscow, is its
sensuous physicality. Unlike the Chevengurians, who were gripped by a
revolutionary puritanism, the dzhan often try to ‘win children from the
poverty of their bodies’; the desert insects, too, hurry to multiply.
Indeed, the arid landscape of Soul is not the blank slate of Soviet
pseudo-colonialist visions, but a space teeming with life and full of
historical traces—ruined cities, oases, even the skeleton of a Red Army
soldier from the Civil War, his bones bleached a timeless white by desert
winds.

The action of Happy Moscow is divided among several protagonists, all of
whom are troubled variations on standard Socialist Realist heroes. The book
takes its title from its eponymous heroine, Moscow Chestnova—the surname
derives from the word ‘honest’—a healthy, ruddy complexioned young woman
who, over the course of the novel, flits from man to man, unable to find
satisfaction in love or life. She is eventually maimed while working on
construction of the capital’s Metro—a staggeringly frequent occurrence, even
according to official records—and ends the novel with a wooden leg and some
unspecified mental disorder. Moscow’s name obviously signals her as a
synecdoche for the city itself, whose ‘solemn energy’ is evoked with the
constant sounds of building work and the spark of electric tram wires; a
city ‘growing every minute into the time of the future; excited by work,
renouncing itself, it was struggling forward with a face that was young and
unrecognizable.’

The rest of the protagonists are the succession of men she loves, in
transient fashion. There is Bozhko, an employee of the Institute for Weights
and Measures—where Platonov himself worked for a time in 1929—who sits at
his desk late into the night writing letters in Esperanto to comrades across
the world, but is unable to find happiness with the people around him. There
is Komyagin, a shiftless army reservist incapable of completing any
purposeful activity, and Sambikin, a doctor who becomes obsessed by the
enigma of death, believing that the bodies of the dead contain an unknown
substance ‘endowed with the pungent energy of life’. And there is
Sartorius—surely a nod to Carlyle—an engineer who struggles to find his
place in the new collective life, much like his predecessor Prushevsky in
The Foundation Pit.

All of the characters are beset simultaneously by aspirations to
self-improvement, or even transcendence of the human condition, and by an
amorphous, paralysing fear. Sambikin, for instance, believes that man is ‘a
poorly constructed, homespun creature—no more than a vague embryo, or
blueprint, of something more authentic’; the rest of the novel’s
protagonists, too, seem to feel they are on the verge of some fundamental,
almost genetic improvement. But the promise held out here could also be a
death sentence: what if there is an intermediate step, some sort of triage,
before the long-awaited future? After her accident, Moscow Chestnova begins
‘to feel ashamed of living among her former friends, in their shared,
orderly city, now that she was lame, thin and mentally not right in the
head.’ The leap into a better existence is over an abyss: Sambikin follows
‘day and night . . . the world-wide current of events, and his mind lived in
a terror of responsibility for the entire senseless fate of physical
substance’; before witnessing Sambikin’s dissection of a dead woman,
Sartorius wants to ‘go to the trade-union committee and ask for comradely
protection against the terror of his yearning heart.’

The novel climaxes with an extraordinary sequence in which Sartorius,
diagnosed as ‘undergoing a process of indeterminate transformation’, goes
into the streets and decides that it is necessary to research the entire
extent of current life by transforming himself into other people . . .
rather than preserve himself for secret happiness, he intended to use events
and circumstances to destroy the resistance of his personality, so that the
unknown feelings of other people could enter him one by one.

He ends up at the Krestovsky market by the Riga Station and sees an endless
parade of random, anachronistic merchandise: ‘priests’ cassocks, ornamented
basins for baptising children, the frock-coats of deceased gentlemen, charms
on waistcoat chains’. Further on, there are more rudimentary offerings—‘hammers,
vices, axes for firewood, a handful of nails’. The inhabitants of the market
are ‘demoralized, out-of-work locksmiths’, wrinkled widows selling food,
petty thieves—a mute, hungry and brutalized underclass, true descendants of
the denizens of Dostoevsky’s Haymarket, and the human residue of Stalinist
modernization. It is from one of them—a certain Ivan Grunyakhin—that
Sartorius purchases a passport; thereafter, he is referred to in the
narrative by the name of this ‘unknown human being whose fate was swallowing
him up’.
The shift from Sartorius to Grunyakhin is far more than a simple switch of
identity papers—foretold as it is by Sartorius’s belief that ‘it was
impossible for him to remain the same uninterrupted person’. It echoes, in
more explicitly traumatic register, the enigmatic passage in Chevengur where
the narrator speaks of a ‘tiny spectator’ within each of us ‘who takes part
neither in action nor in suffering, and who is always cold-blooded and the
same’. He possesses a ‘powerless knowledge’, and is ‘somewhat like a man’s
dead brother’; he is the ‘eunuch of the soul’. The Russian philosopher
Valery Podoroga has argued that this passage provides a means of anatomizing
the relative positions of reader, narrator and text in Platonov—and
furthermore suggests that the extreme splitting of consciousness it implies
may have been the product of an actual schizophrenic episode. In Happy
Moscow, a similar notion is voiced by Sambikin, before being lived by
Sartorius:

sometimes, in illness, in unhappiness, in love, in a terrible dream, at any
moment, in fact, that’s remote from the normal, we clearly sense that there
are two of us—that I am one person but there’s someone else inside me as
well. This someone, this mysterious ‘he’, often mutters and sometimes weeps,
he wants to get out from inside you and go a long way away, he gets bored,
he feels frightened . . . We can see there are two of us and that we’ve had
enough of one another. We imagine the lightness, the freedom, the senseless
paradise of the animals when our consciousness was not dual but single.

The sense of alienation has reached such an extreme for Sartorius that a
single personality can no longer contain a consciousness now divided; the
only exit from this predicament is the abandonment of self, through flight
into another or into madness. We gain glimpses of the new Grunyakhin’s life
before the manuscript breaks off, but here too, the consciousness that was
formerly Sartorius is unsettled, unable to escape the source of his
melancholy. For it lies as much outside the man as within; indeed, its true
location is the frenetic life-world of 1930s Moscow. It is perhaps for this
reason that Platonov was unable to finish the book: his character’s escape
has led him only into a new cage, through the bars of which he glimpses once
again a future that, to his terror, may well be denied to him.

In May 1933, Platonov wrote to Gorky urgently asking him if he thought it
was ‘objectively impossible’ for him to be a Soviet writer. The letter went
unanswered, but the rest of Platonov’s career seems to have been an attempt
to respond to it for himself—or at least to keep re-stating the question.
Seifrid has argued persuasively that the combinations of peasant speech and
Soviet slogans, utopian speculation and industrial terminology, of harsh
socio-historical fact and deep-seated existential yearning, make Platonov’s
‘the most quintessentially Soviet prose of the century’. It is thus all the
more ironic that the audience best equipped to appreciate it was able to
read it only as the ussr entered terminal decline. His status, however, is
now fully assured, paralleled in 20th-century Russian letters only by
Nabokov—in many senses his polar opposite, both in terms of social origins
and political views: the noble-born Nabokov harshly opposed the Soviet
regime from the Right, while Platonov directed his best efforts to serving
it from an independent position on the Left. Moreover, Nabokov’s linguistic
virtuosity was uprooted from his native context, his talent translatable
into other tongues and traditions, while much of Platonov will surely be
lost to anyone reading him in abstraction from the historical circumstances
interwoven with his work.

In a longer perspective, Platonov belongs in a distinctive Russian tradition
of imagining alternative realities, stretching from the legendary peasant
city of Kitezh to the Fourier-inspired social re-organization of
Chernyshevsky’s Chto delat’? (What is to Be Done?, 1863), from Gogol’s
phantasmagorias to the multidimensional saccades of Belyi’s Peterburg
(1913). Since 1917, this line has become still more pronounced, with
branches ranging from the futurological fevers of the Revolutionary period
to dystopian critiques such as Evgeny Zamiatin’s My (We, 1924), and
including the magical parallelisms of Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita and
Nabokov’s geographical confections, Zembla and Antiterra. Recent variants
would include the science fiction of the Strugatsky brothers, transferred to
the screen by Tarkovsky and Sokurov, and the neo-Buddhist pastiche of
contemporary Russia by Viktor Pelevin. There is much debate on the origins
of this strand, but it surely relates to a deep-seated ambivalence in the
culture towards definitive demarcations of reality, as products of modes of
thought imported from the West. More importantly, however, these alternative
visions have always been the hallmark of resistance to the inevitable, of
escape from an arbitrary power or oppressive social totality. Platonov at
once went furthest in reconfiguring his language and logic, so as to better
convey his break with the given, and stayed closest to reality, by refusing
to separate his vision from the present entirely—denying himself the comfort
of a sealed, personal world in favour of an anxious collective aspiration.

Outside Russia, Platonov has often been compared to Kafka—largely in terms
of literary-historical significance, rather than style or content. It is
hard to find a single apposite comparator, though one could align Platonov
with many early 20th-century writers in his evocation—most of all in the
shift from Sartorius to Grunyakhin—of the embattled subjectivity of
modernity, stretched to breaking-point by the pull of vast, contending
social and historical forces. Connections could also be made to the plural
poetic voices and personalities of Fernando Pessoa, the forlorn flailing of
Beckett’s protagonists, Joyce’s radical linguistic innovations, Rilke’s
persistent, eerie engagement with death. But Platonov is more unlike these
figures than he resembles any of them, just as he differs markedly from
Russian writers of his time. His singularities are entirely specific to him,
and perhaps it is best to let him speak to readers in his own richly complex
idiom—comical and mournful by turns, but powerfully expressive of the dreams
and doubts that haunted its creator and his country.