The directory «Plots»

Platonov (Платонов) Andrey Platonovich
(1899–1951)

The son of a metalworker and the eldest of ten children, Platonov was born in a village near the town of Voronezh. After spending his adolescence in various trades and serving in the Red Army, he became an engineer in 1924, writing short pieces for newspapers. He began publishing stories and poems in the early 1920s, while working as a land reclamation expert in central Russia. Here he witnessed the disease and upheaval caused by forced collectivization. By 1927 he went to Moscow to write full-time. He was a peripheral member of the Pereval peasant writers group, and produced the short story collection The Locks of Epiphany. He produced his two major works, the novels 'Chevengur' and 'The Foundation Pit', between 1926 and 1930, overlapping slightly with the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928. These works, with their implicit criticism of the system, drew much official criticism, and although a chapter of 'Chevengur' appeared in a magazine, neither were published in full. Other short stories which did appear contributed even more to the decline of his reputation. In the Stalinist Great Purge of the 1930s, Platonov's son was arrested at the age of fifteen, and exiled to a labor camp where he contracted tuberculosis. When he was finally returned, Platonov himself contracted the disease while nursing him. During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), Platonov served as a war correspondent, but his disease grew worse, and after the war, he ceased to write fiction, instead putting out two collections of folklore. He died in 1951.

Although he was relatively unknown at the time of his death, his influence on later Russian writers has been considerable. Some of his work was published or reprinted during the 1960s' Khrushchev Thaw. Because of his political writings, perceived anti-totalitarian stance, and early death of tuberculosis, some English-speaking commentators have called him "the Russian George Orwell".

Platonov's writing has strong ties to the works of earlier Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky. He also uses much Christian symbolism. His 'Foundation Pit' uses a combination of peasant language with ideological and political terms to create a sense of meaninglessness, aided by the abrupt and sometimes fantastic events of the plot. Joseph Brodsky considers the work deeply suspicious of the meaning of language, especially political language. This exploration of meaninglessness is a hallmark of existentialism and absurdism. Although his works generally take a materialist stance, denying the importance or existence of the soul, he is stylistically very distinct from Socialist Realism, which focused on simple language and straight-forward plots.

USSR, 1989, Andrey Platonov

Russia, 1999, Birth Centenary of Andrey Platonov