Andrei Platonovich Platonov

Andrei Platonov was born into a railway worker's family in Voronezh and embraced the revolution as the cause of his generation. After witnessing the Volga famine of 1921 he set down his pen, saying he could not practice literature while people starved, and became a land-reclamation engineer: for several years he dug wells and ponds around Voronezh and built small rural power stations. Electrification and irrigation were for him not technical chores but the material realization of the revolution. That experience made him a writer unlike any other. The novel Chevengur, finished in 1928, and The Foundation Pit of 1930 held the longing for utopia and the pain of its construction in a single language; neither could be published in the Soviet Union in his lifetime.

Catastrophe came in 1931, when the novella "For Future Use" (Vprok), a chronicle of the collectivized countryside, appeared in the journal Krasnaya Nov. Stalin left furious notes in the margins of the journal, branding the work a kulak chronicle; the verdict "a talented writer, but a scoundrel" is recorded as his. A press campaign followed, and Platonov wrote letters to Stalin and to Gorky explaining his intentions. He was no satirist: he had tried to render the difficulty of construction from within, but his sentences exceeded what the official grammar allowed.

Platonov was pushed to the margins of literary life, surviving on patent work as an engineer and scattered publications. His case shows the paradox of a writer who took the language of socialist construction more seriously than anyone, and collided with the state's literary tutelage precisely because of that seriousness. Post-Soviet archival scholarship has restored his manuscripts and censorship files, and Chevengur and The Foundation Pit are now ranked among the summits of twentieth-century Russian prose.

In 1934, with Maksim Gorky's backing, Platonov joined a collective writers' trip to Central Asia mounted for the tenth anniversary of Soviet Turkmenistan; the Russian-language account calls the inclusion a sign of trust. From that journey he brought back, among other works, the short story "Takyr" (Salt-flats). A second Turkmenistan trip in 1935 supplied the basis for the novella Soul, known in Russian as Dzhan, whose protagonist is a Central Asian economist, Nazar Chagataev, who leaves Moscow to help a lost nomadic people called the Dzhan. The novella was completed in 1935, but Soviet censorship in the 1930s permitted only selected chapters, and the uncensored text appeared in full only in 1999. With 1934 as a turning point he began publishing periodically again: "Fro", "Immortality", "The Earthen House in the District Garden", "The Third Son" and "Semyon" in 1936, and the novella "The River Potudan" in 1937. In these years he also worked with the philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs and the critic Mikhail Lifshitz, the period of their joint work on the Moscow magazine The Literary Critic (Literaturny Kritik); Platonov was connected with the Lukacs-Lifshitz circle and took part in its philosophical discussions on alienation and freedom. The recovery was not untroubled. In August 1936 The Literary Critic published "Immortality" with a note about the difficulties the author had met placing it, and the following year that publication drew criticism in Krasnaya Nov, damaging his reputation. Even so, he brought out eight more books, fiction and essays, between 1937 and his death in 1951. It was a period of recovery and of controversy at once, and 1930s censorship let readers see only part of what he wrote.

In May 1938 Platonov's only son, Platon, was arrested at the age of fifteen. The case grew out of a denunciation in the years of the Great Terror, and the boy was sentenced to a labor camp on absurd charges. Platonov appealed to everyone he could reach, and thanks in large part to the intervention of Mikhail Sholokhov, Platon was released in the autumn of 1940. But the tuberculosis he had contracted in the camps was already advanced. Nursing his son day and night, the father caught the disease himself; Platon died in January 1943.

Even after losing his son, Platonov went to the center of the war. From 1942 he served as a front-line correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), and his war sketches, which refused to abstract the death of the ordinary soldier, earned the respect of soldiers and fellow correspondents alike. In 1946 his story "The Return", a portrait of a soldier's homecoming, was attacked by the critic Yermilov, and he lost his access to print once more.

In his last years Platonov, ill with tuberculosis and living in poverty, supported his family by retelling Russian folk tales. He died in Moscow on January 5, 1951. The Foundation Pit and Chevengur were published in the Soviet Union only in the late 1980s, under glasnost. The prose of this electrical engineer, carried through trenches and sickrooms, remains one of the most truthful literary testimonies the revolutionary century produced.

In April 1938, Platonov's only son, Platon (aged 15), was arrested by the NKVD. A prank letter he and a friend had sent to a German journalist living in their building was twisted into a charge of espionage. Convicted under Article 58 (counter-revolutionary propaganda and terror) he was sentenced to ten years and sent through Solovki to the Norilsk forced-labour camp. Platonov wrote desperate appeals to Stalin, Yezhov, Frinovsky, and the Prosecutor General. Thanks largely to Mikhail Sholokhov's intervention, Platon was released in October 1940, but the tuberculosis he had contracted in the camps was already terminal. Platonov nursed his son at home; on 4 January 1943, Platon died in his father's arms, aged twenty. Platonov himself contracted tuberculosis while caring for him. Wartime bombing accelerated the disease, and he died of the same illness in 1951. Father and son lie side by side in Moscow's Armenian Cemetery.