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EAST-WEST-RESEARCH  August 2005

EAST-WEST-RESEARCH August 2005

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Subject:

Review of Platonov's 'Happy Moscow' and 'Soul' by Tony Wood (New Left Review)

From:

"Serguei Alex. Oushakine" <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Serguei Alex. Oushakine

Date:

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 18:36:22 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Parts/Attachments

text/plain (639 lines)

http://www.newleftreview.org/

...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. 

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