The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

212 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

this category, the life and works of Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) are the most haunting.

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

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

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