The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

216 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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

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

Recall how Nyurka had clung to her mother and begged for love and for grapes, speaking like an ordinary little girl, without ideology. Nastya, living in a novel written five years later, is anothersort of being,sunk immeasurablydeeper into the Stalinist period of re-education and transformation. Her mother dies early in the book, after which Nastya announces to her adoptive collective that at first she “didn’t want to get born,” she was afraid her mother would be a bourgeois, but “as soon as Lenin came, I came too” (p. 62). She goes to school and learns to chant and to compose letters, one of which she sends to her protector: “Liquidate the kulak as a class,” she writes. “Regards to the poor kolkhoz, but not to the kulaks” (p. 84). Instead of signing her name on a document, she signs a hammer and sickle (p. 119). All these childish gestures are somehow both comic and awful. When Nastya dies one night of a chill, the minuscule remaining energy of the pit-diggers dissipates. For she was the forward-looking emancipated one, already living in the future; the adults were the emotional relics, held back by matter and weariness, hoping to learn from