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By Olga Bobrova
In 1920 the writers of the young Soviet Republic were offered a questionnaire. Among others there was the following question: "What literary trend appeals to you?" Andrei Platonov, then only 21, answered: "No one. I have a trend of my own".
On September 1 we mark the centenary of the birth of this outstanding Russian writer, a writer whose work was not duly appreciated neither in his lifetime nor after his death.
It takes a great effort to read Platonov's prose, which has nothing in common with customary fiction. There is neither a plot easy to understand, nor clear-cut dramaturgy lines, nor minutely portrayed characters, nor habitual literary devices. Nothing that could make it easier for the reader to comprehend. Nothing that could give him an opportunity to take things at their face value. So, what is Platonov's prose all about? It's about life with its pain and blood, greatness and queerness, logic and absurdity, fragility and infinity. His prose seems to push the reader out into an open, unfriendly world. It makes one feel lonely, suffer together with its characters and struggle in the search for truth and the meaning of existence.
"What makes Platonov a classical writer of the 20th century?" asks a prominent Russian expert on Platonov's heritage, Natalia Kornienko. "He preserved the precious feature of the Russian classical literature of the 19th century, that is the wish to go beyond literature, belief that there exists the mystery of life, which can be penetrated by the writer's pen. Platonov developed this tradition of the non-bookish attitude toward life."
The non-bookish attitude toward life... But could a person whose life turned him overnight from a child into a grownup have any other attitude toward life? "I lived and languished", Platonov wrote recalling the outskirts of the town of Voronezh in southern Russia, where he was born and grew up, recalling the poverty that reigned in the family of eight children, with him being the eldest. And what kind of yearning did he mean, if the only thing he was obsessed with was work for a piece of bread. He began working as a boy running errands for an insurance company and ended as assistant engine-driver on a railway. And he tried to study, of course, at first at the Voronezh city school, and then at a railway vocational school. These years of work and study fell on a period when the customary daily life was broken by World War One in 1914 and the October Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Yet there was something than made young Platonov feel the yearning he wrote about. For why else, given the circumstances, did he begin to write? His first publication was a collection of verses "The Blue Depth" in 1922. The author's foreword offers an explanation for many things in the emotions of his younger years: "We hate our squalor. We are forcing our way out of dirt. And this is the point we are making. From our ugliness will grow the soul of the world."
Whom did he mean by saying "we"? No doubt: the proletariat. "The working class is my home country, and my future is linked with the proletariat," he wrote many years later. He would call himself a proletarian writer. Indeed, for all his life he was a man of labor. He worked as a specialist in land improvement and built electric power stations. He wrote scientific works on these subjects and received a great number of patents for his inventions. Besides, he traveled a lot across Russia, working and getting firsthand experience of life. Platonov believed that literary work should take only the hours free from creative labor. Mind you, he spoke of hours, not even days!
Platonov's first literary publication dates from 1918 - it was a short story in the Voronezh-based journal "The Iron Way". This fact, however, does not testify to the birth of a writer. Still ahead lay the years to be given to social and political journalism and work for newspapers, where the ardor of revolutionary romanticism, the drive to transform the world and devotion to technical progress were all that mattered. The simplicity of these impulses soon became all too clear to him. The traditional Russian life could not but subdue them. And people, as they were cowed and unhappy and deprived of personality, appeared before the reader in a series of short stories "The Yamskaya Suburb". These people resented innovations, which were alien to them, which were imposed from the outside.
In 1927 Platonov was the first to speak in literature of the need to overcome the tragedy of the Civil War, which broke out after the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917. As he watches life and nature, the main character of the story "The Inner Man" suddenly comes to an idea that it would be well to resurrect all those killed in the war - both Communists and their enemies - so that justice could prevail. Given the times, that was a blasphemous idea. As was practically everything written by Platonov at the turn of the 1930s, the years when the general feeling was that the country was triumphantly advancing toward socialism. The message of the novel "The Trench" (1929-1930) is that creation based on slave labor is pointless. The novel "Chevengur" (1927) insists there is no happiness introduced by decree, without work, without creating actual values. The satirical novel "The Town of Gradov" (1926) portrays the red tape capable of destroying all life.
It's small wonder that in the 1930s Platonov was practically banned from publishing. This made him take up literary criticism. "He wrote a very strange history of Russian literature," says Natalia Kornienko. "Platonov believed that all Russian literature of the 19th century was concerned with the destruction of the image of the harmonious person created by Pushkin. And he criticized Dostoevsky for this. To save literature, according to Platonov, one had to return to Pushkin's idea of life, to his art, which could protect a person. Platonov applied these criteria to foreign writers too, criticizing Joyce, Capek, Proust and Hemingway, who did not make him happy either. Platonov was very sensitive to the dehumanization of culture in the 20th century, its disintegration and, more concretely, to the onset of fascism and Nazism."
When during World War Two Nazi troops invaded the Soviet Union, Platonov applied for the position of a war correspondent. From 1942 to 1945 he worked as such at the front, repeatedly risking his life. At the front he developed tuberculosis and eventually died of it in 1951.
Platonov created great prose about war. In a letter to his wife he admitted: "I write stories about Red Army soldiers. What comes out - these are requiems in prose. I want my word to be up to the scale of the feat of arms performed by the Russian soldier".
Platonov's life was tragic. He lived in the most dramatic periods of the country's history - war, revolution, devastation, and totalitarianism. In his lifetime, he was not officially recognized. Nor can the fate of his literary heritage be described as triumphant. In the 1960s and 1980s there were attempts to bring Platonov back to the reader. Many of his works have been published since then but until now there is no complete works. More important, there are no original texts that have not been distorted by censorship and editing. His heritage as dramatist and scriptwriter remains virtually unexplored.
The world is showing a great interest in Platonov's work. Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, India and China all have translations of his prose and experts on his work. This September the International Platonov Society is holding in Moscow a conference commemorating the writer .
 
 
 
 
 
 

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