Science Fiction and Socialism
Andrei Platonov’s Literalization of Reality; on the Planet Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Satellite
Pavla Veselá
In the history of constructing socialism or communism (I will use these terms interchangeably),1 the chapter about the October Revolution and the Soviet Union has been read by numerous leftists. Critics from Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky, through Leon Trotsky and Victor Serge, to Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, noted problems that de-Stalinization subsequently brought to light and that became touchstones for formulating the New Left—a broad-ranging set of theories and practices which, to quote Robin Blackburn, “typically define themselves in relation to regional, continental and global issues rather than mainly to the sphere of national political life: ecology, migrant labour, anti-racism and anti-militarism being key concerns” (238). Whether called “Soviet-type socialism,” “real socialism,” “actually existing socialism” (while it lasted), “the Soviet experiment,” or “the party-state,” the Soviet enclave became associated with “an economy in which the means of economic activity were overwhelmingly under state ownership and control; and a political system in which the Communist Party (under different names in different countries), or rather its leaders, enjoyed a virtual monopoly of power, which was vigilantly defended against any form of dissent by systematic—often savage—repression” (Miliband 7). By now, too, the enclave’s economic and environmentalist failures have become well-known, and so has the correspondence of the augmented state power with inflated bureaucracy, repressive institutional control, violence and militarism. The politics of decolonization, gender emancipation, anti-racism, and even class equality remained in crucial ways only on paper, and the regimes’ sociocultural inertia came to be associated with censorship, the infamous “doctrine” of socialist realism, and a reverence for parades, statues, and mummies. Such and other defeats of the “Soviet bloc” have of course become items in the conservative inventory but they have also taught Western leftists important lessons.
Although in the Soviet Union, following the relative cultural freedom in the 1920s, the potential of literature to disrupt ideological illusions was curtailed by the Zhdanovist2 demand for writers to portray positive, conscious heroes who contributed to reality’s revolutionary development, literature—including literature of the most ideological kind—nevertheless remained an incomplete and contradictory witness to conflicts. The prose and poetry of Andrei Platonov (1899-1951), to whom this essay is dedicated, reflected the first three Soviet decades and, despite a gradual diminution of the intensity of his critical perspective after the mid-1930s, the writer’s observations oftentimes resonated with those of the aforementioned leftists. This may not be immediately apparent because the longer the story of Platonov’s oeuvre in the Soviet Union and other cultural contexts, the more representative have become Chevengur (Chevengur) and Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit). Published in full at the end of the 1960s (although only at the end of the 1980s in the Soviet bloc), these two novels eventually gained the status of “repressed masterworks,” and as Thomas Seifrid put it, referring to Chevengur, it is the novel’s “apparent antipathy toward communist utopianism in general that has fueled [its] dissident/émigré reputation as an attack on the Soviet system as a whole” (103). However, besides Chevengur and Kotlovan being critical as well as sympathetic to socialism, neither may be said to represent Platonov’s complex oeuvre. When his poetry and fiction appeared and reappeared in the Soviet enclave, they could remain touchstones in a critique without giving up hope—as in former Czechoslovakia.
A Flower in the Sand
If without the Thaw,3 the world would have never heard of Andrei Platonov, then without the October Revolution,4 he would have not become a writer in the first place. The oldest child in an impoverished family of ten, Platonov worked since the age of thirteen for various small companies in Voronezh. It was in the aftermath of the October Revolution and the Civil War that he earned a degree as a land improvement engineer and joined a proletarian literary organization. When his first poems, stories and essays were published in the early 1920s, Platonov gave up engineering and moved to Moscow to become a full-time writer. His first collection of stories, Epifanskie shliuzy (The Epifan Locks),came out in 1927 and was closely followed by three others, including in 1929 Proiskhozhenie mastera (The Origins of a Master), where a fragment of Chevengur appeared.5 Although Platonov’s depiction of Soviet realities encountered increasing disapproval (which grew stronger in the 1930s), the collection Reka Potudan’ (The River Potudan) was issued in 1937, along with a handful of stand-alone stories and criticism. After Platonov was mobilized in 1941 and sent to the front as a war correspondent, another set of stories appeared, several collections of which made it to print, but at the end of his life, he wrote and translated mostly fairy-tales and folk-tales. When Platonov died in 1951, much of his writing remained unpublished, including the plays from the 1930s.
Whereas the work of Soviet authors such as Evgenii Zamiatin reached the world during their lifetime, the process of discovering and rediscovering Platonov began only during the Thaw. Over a century after the publication of his first works, after all became available (in Russian, at least), we can know that aside from stories such as “Potomki solntsa” (“Descendants of the Sun,” 1922) and “Antiseksus” (“Antisexus,” 1926), which are set in the future, Platonov relentlessly depicted his present and immediate past. Whether lyrical, ironic or satirical, with its grotesque and fantastic elements, his vision was realistic, often even brutally realistic in its description of hunger, poverty and violence in the Soviet Union of the 1920s; the traumas of the purges, forced collectivization, Stalinist bureaucracy and the empty slogans of the 1930s; and the devastation and torment during the Second World War. Yet his writing was never anti-utopian and it maintained hopes for a more just and happier world that would be achieved not solely through certain (at that time prevalent) technological methods, but also hope for communism rooted in the spiritual, the aesthetic and the folkloric; in solidarity with ordinary villagers, engineers and desert nomads. There are scraps of hope even in the war stories as well as the folk-tales and the fairy-tales.
Arguably, Platonov was not primarily a writer of science fiction, certainly not science fiction in the way it was defined by Stalinism, infamous for reducing the genre to concerns with “technological marvels of the near future, such as the radar, improved tractors and oil drills, and the taming of the Arctic” (Potts 11). The worlds Platonov imagined include technological novums like perpetuum mobiles, opportunist robots and electrosuns (although these do not always work), and there are improved tractors and drills, but the fantastic and fairy-tale elements bring the writing closer to speculative fiction. Moreover, the novum in his work does not always establish an alternative framework and infiltrates instead the empirical world, acquiring the status that Darko Suvin assigned to Gogol’s Nose, “significant because it is walking down the Nevski Prospect, with a certain rank in the civil service, and so on” (8). With exceptions of several early stories and the tales, Platonov’s fiction is therefore realistic, but there are estranging science-fictional and fantastic—or science-fictional-become-fantastic—elements. It is through them that redemptive hope often enters his world.
Following their Soviet release, various stories by Platonov were translated in Czechoslovakia. Article-length studies came out not solely as paratexts in the nine collections issued between the years 1966 and 1987, but also in periodicals such as Impuls (Impulse) and Plamen (Flame). While introducing Platonov’s presence on the Czech cultural scene in the December 1989 issue of Sovětská literatura (Soviet Literature), Jaroslava Heřtová noted that Platonov remains comprehensible to Czech readers through his Švejkean characters, wise plebeians under a mask of simplicity who expose everything that degrades and dehumanizes people, as well as through his critique of bureaucracy and the catastrophic picture of war. Heřtová’s observations were relevant not only in the context of uncertainties concerning at that time ongoing revolutions, but also because the last pre-1989 book was a collection of Platonov’s war-time stories, Nesmrtelní (The Immortals). Heřtová’s bibliographical angle saved the writer from being associated solely with the war stories or from becoming interpreted as an anti-communist, which was increasingly common during this period. The Czechoslovak collections from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, in texts and paratexts, indeed suggest that as various fragments of Platonov’s oeuvre were appearing, they served different purposes.
From Utopian Satire to Fairy-Tale
While Chevengur and Kotlovan remained for the most part in manuscript, other works by Platonov came out in the Soviet enclave. In the mid-1960s, while Czechoslovakia wrestled with the illusions and disillusions of its own “real socialism,” several stories were printed in periodicals. Those selected for the lasting impact of book publication were principally from the late 1920s/early 1930s, with the exception, in Czech, of “Reka Potudan’” (“The River Potudan,” 1937) and, in Slovak, “Fro” (“Fro,” 1936), “Tretii syn” (“The Third Son,” 1936) and five 1940s stories. The first Czech collection Co nám jde k duhu (For Future Use,1966), besides the title story “Vprok” (“For Future Use,” 1931), included “Usomnivshiisia Makar” (“Doubting Makhar,” 1929) and “Gorod Gradov” (“The City of Gradov,” 1927). Two further 1920s stories were printed in the Slovak Utajený človek (The Innermost Man, 1966): the title story “Sokrovennyi chelovek” (“The Innermost Man,” 1928) and “Iamskaia sloboda” (“Iamskaia Settlement,” 1926-28). “Sokrovennyi chelovek” and “Iamskaia sloboda” then came out in Czech in the 1967 Řeka Potudaň (The River Potudan), along with the title story.
Whereas “Sokrovennyi chelovek,” “Iamskaia sloboda” and “Reka Potudan’” return to the early 1920s, “Gorod Gradov,” “Usomnivshiisia Makar” and “Vprok” present a satirical reflection on emergent Stalinist realities. The protagonists of the latter stories—Shmakov, Makhar and the unnamed narrator of “Vprok”—echo and foreshadow others, like the plebeian inventor Markun from the eponymous 1921 science-fiction story and the electrician from “Rodina elektrichestva” (“Electricity’s Homeland,” 1926) but also Nazar Chagataev from “Dzhan” (“Dzhan,” 1933-1935) and Nazar Fomin from “Afrodita” (“Aphrodite,” 1945-1946). Many such characters echo Platonov’s own involvement in modernization (between the years 1923 and 1926, for example, he oversaw the construction of 763 water reservoirs and 331 wells, of two types). “Gorod Gradov,” “Usomnivshiisia Makar” and “Vprok” therefore mock certain aspects of “real socialism” without advocating either a return to tsarism or a transition to capitalism. They satirize persistent (and new) class differences, the dominance of the party, economic failures, uncritical investment in technology and bureaucratization. But there is also hope that these problems can be overcome: the peasant Makhar, refreshed by studying Lenin in an insane asylum, liquidates the state apparatus by “common sense”; the administrative machine of Gradov is dissolved (Shmakov himself dies as the Commissioner for Unpaved Roads), and the narrator-electrician of “Vprok”—following his quixotic journey through villages burnt by the electric sun, decimated by crop failure and disease, and in the grips of vacuous leaders—accelerates one kolchoz in its efforts to “catch up and overtake without getting exhausted” (“Co nám jde k duhu” 187). The success of “Crimsons of Humanity” includes an increase to 140% in sowing and although “Vprok” was not a success with Stalin, the story concludes lightheartedly, with comrade Pasha’s grotesque vision of smoke from Soviet factories covering the sun over England.
From Platonov’s oeuvre, it is clear that he never opposed modernization of the countryside, industrialization, and electrification. Even “the desire for a utopian organization of the cosmos […] derided [in “Gorod Gradov”] is identical to that espoused unironically in so many of the Voronezh articles. Bogdanov’s ‘organizational science’6 is clearly parodied in one of the titles Shmakov invents for his paean to bureaucracy (‘Sovietization as the Basis for the Harmonization of the Universe’), while that of a manuscript discovered after Shmakov’s death satirizes the proletarian poet A. Gastev’s Normalizovannyi rabochii” (Seifrid 73, original emphasis). The stories criticize problems that emerged during the construction of socialism and they hope to reform it, although there is little indication of how. “The bureaucratic theme,” Seifrid noted elsewhere, became a public preoccupation after it was raised at the 1926 conference of the Communist Party, and problems like hunger and poverty were more than evident. By now, in considering problems that emerged in the Soviet enclave, it has become common to turn to the works of Marx, even Lenin, to argue that Marx-Lenin is not Marxism-Leninism, Soviet-style. If in Lenin’s view “[r]unning society […] was really ‘extraordinarily simple’ business of ‘book-keeping and control’ that was ‘within the reach of anybody who can read and write and know the first four arithmetical rules’” (Worsley 94), stories like “Usomnivshiisia Makar” propose exactly that—except, as in other Platonov’s works, the vision of the “withering away” of the state and its being replaced by self-determining communism is only half-serious, the proposed solution being evidently fantastic.
Considering the satirical stories, in the preface to Co nám jde k duhu, Miloslav Wagner remarked that although they could be used in anti-Soviet propaganda, this was not their purpose; rather, Platonov aimed to confront negative tendencies such as anti-Leninism and the cult of the leader. Even the published fragments of Chevengur, Wagner proposed, searched for redemption through dedication to work, love and a fondness for technology (but not fondness of the fetishistic, uncritical kind). The critic had good words also for the provincial engineer Pukhov, the protagonist of “Sokrovennyi chelovek” (a story that overlaps thematically with Chevengur, which, as Jameson noted in his essay on Platonov in The Seeds of Time, takes place roughly between the years 1917 and 1923). Wagner argued that by the end of his journey through the Civil War, Pukhov creates a positive relationship to the revolution. In the commentary on Řeka Potudaň, Miluše Očadlíková arrived at a similar point, having underscored Platonov’s ability to survive many tragic events through his dedication to art that valued life—a dedication that informed his rejection of a purely technological understanding of the revolution, his critique of forced collectivization, and his defense of the weak and powerless living under a dehumanized apparatus. Platonov’s world, as Očadlíková described it, is marked by unity in multiplicity, wherefore originates “his emphatically attentive relation to wise and good machines, the suffering of animals, the pain of nature and the silent existence of things” (195). The fantastic, quixotic, even comic account of the early 1920s in “Sokrovennyi chelovek” and Chevengur allow for deep comprehension of their tragic dimensions as well as a certain degree of forgiveness.
Although this implies too easy of a reconciliation (Pukhov’s final awakening to a “thoroughly revolutionary morning” remains haunted by the violent events the story depicts, just as the slaughter in and of the village Chevengur cannot be laughed away), it was in the hands of Ivan Králik, in the afterword to the Slovak edition of “Sokrovennyi chelovek” and “Iamskaia sloboda,” that Pukhov turned into the proverbial positive hero, a revolutionary “wanderer in arms” (“Dotknúť sa sveta” 154), with no account of the critical dimension that Pukhov represents. For it is true that, as Tora Lane put it, Platonov reveals “how ordinary and poor people attempt to use slogans in absurd and grotesque ways in an effort to understand existence and to ‘think for the first time,’ only to become even more confused and alienated” (10) but some become truly misguided, and although Platonov’s view of the October Revolution and its immediate aftermath was not negative, it was not uncritical, either.
That hope in Platonov’s fictional world arises rather like the Nose on Nevski Prospect becomes clearer in his later stories, such as the 1937 “Reka Potudan’,” where—as Jameson remarked (although mistakenly referring to the story as “Homecoming”)—the Civil-War veteran protagonist “is discovered years later in a neighboring town, after [… an] abrupt and unexplained departure from family and marriage, cleaning out latrines—as though abnegation of this kind had some distant connection with the most morbid images of sainthood and asceticism” (“Utopia, Modernism, and Death” 113). Arguably, “Reka Potudan’” could tell the story of “belatedly fulfilled, empathetic love” (Očadlíková 193), but at the heart there is alienation and loneliness, notwithstanding the semi-happy end—just as in “Fro” and “Tretii syn,” the late 1930s stories included in the Slovak Ten krásny a krutý svet (The Fierce and Beautiful World, 1966): Fro adopts an orphan in reaction to her husband’s re-departure for the Far East and the six brothers in “Tretii syn” momentarily reunite only due to the death of their mother.
Perhaps for this reason, Ten krásny a krutý svet includes the 1940s stories where the aforementioned motifs of traumatized soldiers, harmed mechanics, abandoned women and decimated children reoccur but with fairy-tale endings: the child protagonists of “Zheleznaia starucha” (“The Iron Old Woman,” 1941), “Cvetok na zemlje” (“A Flower on the Ground,” 1945) and “Eshche mama” (“Another Mother,” 1947) live in poverty but enjoy nurturing relations; the soldier Ivanov in “Vozvrashchenie” (“Homecoming,” 1946) echoes Firsov from “Reka Potudan’” but Ivanov returns to family life with children. “Cvetok na zemlje” envisions the non-alienated existence of people in other-than-human nature (as flowers grow from dust, grandsons grow from grandfathers) and in the only thematically different story, “V prekrasnom i iarostnom mire” (“The Fierce and Beautiful World,” 1941), technology (represented by the train, as often in Platonov’s world) has the power to blind but also to mysteriously return sight. Even though Ten krásny a krutý svet includes also “Gorod Gradov” and “Usomnivshiisia Makar,” in the commentary on the collection, Králik briefly describes the stories as satires of tsarist bureaucracy that survived in the Soviet era and a critique of governance from below that may mutate into “national bureaucratization” when every muzhik may abuse power. Above all, the afterword emphasizes Platonov’s ability to find happiness despite repression: his stories for and about children are the ultimate expression of his “all-embracing humanism, love towards everything that accompanies people living on earth, pleasing their vision and warming their souls” (“Doslov” 170).
Different as the four Czechoslovak collections from 1966 and 1967 were, through the selected stories and the paratexts by Wagner, Očadlíková and Králik, the readers were introduced to, on the one hand, Platonov as a revolutionary and critic of the technically-flawed and bureaucratic system, and on the other hand, to Platonov as an author of stories about relationships, family and children. Yet, in the two collections published in the 1970s, the first Platonov largely disappeared.
Normalization with Platonov’s Face
The motif of children permeates Platonov’s oeuvre across all three decades; there are poor children and starved orphans in tsarist, revolutionary, and Civil-War settings as well as the later years of the 1920s, 1930s, and the Second World War. Although they do not always have happy ends, the stories chosen for the 1973 Slovak Svetlo (Light) do have happy ends, with the exception of “Mat’” (“Mother,”1943), where the grenade pit becomes a mass grave. The remaining stories, though, conclude happily: Sasha Dvanov chats with Zakhar Pavlovich in “Proiskhozhenie mastera”; an orphan grows into a comrade who finds home in his homeland in “Glinniannyi dom v uezdnom sadu” (“Clay House in a Provincial Yard,” 1937); the child protagonist of “Nikita” (“Nikita,” 1945) learns that labor rather than fantasy makes everything alive; and in “Zhena mashinista” (“The Engine Driver’s Wife,” 1945), the small family of Piotr Saveliich—initially consisting of him, his wife and the engine of the E-series—loses the engine but gains the orphan Kondrat. At this time, Platonov was acquiring his status in the West through Chevengur and Kotlovan; in the East, even the earlier-printed satirical stories disappeared. Instead, in the Slovak collection, there was the “socialist realist” Platonov, with positive domestic stories, and the Platonov of folk-tales and fairy-tales, collections of which came out in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s as well.
Fantastic elements run even through the war-time stories in Svetlo, as “Nikodim Maksimov” (“Nikodim Maksimov,” 1943) tricks German planes and “Krestianin Iagafar” (“The Peasant Iagafar,” 1942) saves his war-damaged kolchoz by installing into the glasshouse and the cowshed 320 light bulbs and a ventilator, to spread the warmth. In the world of Platonov’s fiction, electrification often emerged in tragicomic light: in another story in this Slovak collection, the aforementioned “Rodina elektrichestva” (here titled “Svetlo”), the narrator assists the villagers of Verchovka in building an irrigation system driven by an electric generator made from an old motorcycle engine and run by homemade vodka. Concerning the successes of electrification, the stories speak for themselves, but they appear more tragic than comic, remembering that in 1967, students went to the streets of Prague in protest against electricity blackouts in dormitories, with candles and the slogan “We Want Light.” During this first mass protest since 1948, they were brutally beaten and several ended with serious injuries. The simple demand for light, symbolic as it became, was one of the defining events of the “Prague Spring.” There is, however, no suggestion of that in the afterword to Svetlo, where Miron Sisák underscored Platonov’s ability to dramatize the revolutionary transformation of provincial people into human beings conscious of their historical role. Nothing is wrong, it seems, either in Platonov’s world or the Czechoslovak realities into which the stories are ushered—nothing, except for the momentary return of the negative repressed. The only story to receive more attention is “Korova” (“The Cow,” 1943): Sisák mentions it in order to exemplify Platonov’s remarkable ability to depict a world without divisions among people and animals, children and adults, organic and inorganic matter, but also to note how the sorrow of the human world transpires through the sorrow of tortured plants and the tortured cow that commits suicide after losing her “son.”
A more tragic tone nevertheless characterizes the 1974 Czech Zrození mistra (The Origins of a Master), where Jan Zábrana’s afterword highlighted Platonov’s search for harmony, rather than its fulfillment. In the landscape of war, poverty, arithmetic reason, and dehumanized technology, Zábrana noted, there is uprootedness, ignorance and non-being; Platonov’s protagonists, besides thinking weirdly, illogically and naively, are lonely and abandoned. The only glimpse of hope emerges in human kinship with nature and in rare moments of love. This Czech collection includes also the 1920s “Iamskaia sloboda” and “Sokrovennyi chelovek” (besides “Proiskhozhenie mastera” and “Rodina elektrichestva,” though not titled “Svetlo”); from the 1930s, there is “Dzhan” (in the pre-1978 version), “Musornyi veter” (“Garbage Wind,” 1934), “Reka Potudan’,” “Glinniannyi dom v uezdnom sadu” and “Iul’skaia groza” (“July Storm,” 1938). The last mentioned is another of Platonov’s positive family stories, featuring a storm in the kolchoz “Common Life,” but the rest are more ambivalent; moreover, in Zábrana’s interpretation, even “Glinniannyi dom v uezdnom sadu” ends on a grotesque note rather than a utopian one. And the only story from the 1940s, “Afrodita,” is about ruined dreams of love and industrialization.
In short, if Svetlo almost denies tragedy, Zrození mistra almost denies hope. Only together though do they convey the complexities of the 1970s “Normalization Era.” The turn away from Platonov’s satirical work resonates with these complexities. As Platonov in the 1930s “sought for himself a place at socialist realism’s fringe” (Seifrid 177), his works became less openly critical, particularly after 1938, when his son was arrested and sent to a labor camp (to return a few years later dying of tuberculosis). This is not the place to discuss the shift to domesticity, fantasy, and magic (whether in Platonov’s oeuvre or during “Normalization”); suffice it to argue, along with Ernst Bloch, that even such stories might also have a transformative rather than escapist function. Moreover, on closer reading, the “happily-ever-after” tales resound with silences about what Platonov was ideologically forbidden to say. The aforementioned “Korova” may end as the family receives financial compensation for the dead cow, but besides this being another fantastic ending, it is a sad account of the persistence of the money economy and “market Stalinism.” If one defining feature of capitalism is the continual expansion of the system, the story shows that the Stalinist phantasmagoria of limitless production resulted in the same brutal commodification of nature. Gone is the fantastic vision of “socialized lifestock,” each member of which peacefully collects “a share of food according to its capacity” (Platonov, The Foundation Pit 87); “Korova” recalls the critique of greed in “Gorod Gradov,” where the ex-kulak Vereshchagin tortures his horse to death in order to collect insurance. All this is to say that whatever concessions Platonov made, and however his stories were interpreted, they continued to express hope—not solely for certain material comfort but also for harmonized relations (human relations and relations of humans with the rest of the natural world)—as well as critique of “real socialism.” That his concerns resonated with those of “normalized” Czechoslovakia is hardly a surprise.
Perestroika of the Soul
The third round of Czechoslovak Platonov consisted of three books: Dcery pouště (Daughters of the Desert, 1982), Aký chce byť svet (What the World Wants to Be Like, 1984) and Nesmrtelní, from 1987. Whereas in the first two collections, the only story that deals directly with the reality of the Second World War is “V storonu zakata solnca” (“Toward the Setting Sun,” 1943), the third one includes war stories. Altogether, the collections offer the readers perhaps the most comprehensive representation of Platonov, leaving aside the disbalance in favor of his war fiction, although they are once again framed in ways that reflect rather the period’s preoccupations.
Though illustrated and accompanied with an afterword by Jaroslav Žák, who makes Platonov look like an author of fairy-tales about love, kindness and comradeship, Dcery pouště includes dystopian and satirical works, such as “Satana mysli” (“A Satan of Thought,” 1922, here titled “Potomci slunce,” “Descendants of the Sun”), which ends as the mad engineer Vogulov ruthlessly blows up the cosmos. The Civil-War era is represented through new extracts from Chevengur, one of which depicts the destruction of Chevengur and the death of Kopenkin; the late 1920s/early 1930s appear through “Gorod Gradov” and “Gusudarstvennyi zhitel” (“A Resident of the State,” 1929), a mockery of Veretennikov’s eagerness to construct the state. Both Dcery pouště and Aký chce byť svet include, newly, the 1927 story “Epifanskie shliuzy” (“The Epifan Locks”), which dramatizes the failure of Petrine7 schemes to build a system of locks on the Don and Oka rivers (and which has been interpreted as a comment on Stalinist projects, such as the White Sea Canal). The Slovak collection, however, instead of “Satana mysli” and “Smert’ Kopenkina,” depicts the 1920s through “Iamskaia Settlement,” “Sokrovennyi chelovek” and another retrospective account of the Civil War, featuring an orphan girl who becomes an engine-driver. There is, newly, also the story “Semion” (“Semion,” 1926), about a pre-revolutionary era family decimated by poverty. The stories in Aký chce byť svet therefore give a less negative account of 1917, something that is confirmed in the afterword by Peter Birčák, who depicts the October Revolution in thoroughly positive terms, considers Platonov a writer of and for “the people,” and mentions solely his critique of bureaucracy.
The 1980s domestic stories in the two collections are nevertheless equally ambiguous; besides “Vozvrashchenie,” which is featured in both, Dcery pouště includes “Fro” and a sad tale about an old, lonely violinist who fails to save a sparrow. In Aký chce byť svet, there is “Zhena mashinista” (titled “Starý mechanik,” “An Old Mechanic”) and “Zheleznaia starucha,” but there are also the more ambivalent “Reka Potudan’,” “Tretii syn” and new stories about Yushka—a man who cares for an orphan but remains abused by adults and laughed at by children—and Ulya—a girl who grows into a beautiful woman whom people admire but do not love. It is therefore interesting that in the afterword to Dcery pouště Žák gives such a fairy-tale interpretation of Platonov; moreover, with praise for the new edition of “Dzhan.”
Through “Dzhan,” and also “Takyr” (“Takyr,” 1934; here titled “Dcery pouště,” “Daughters of the Desert”) and “Peschanaia uchitel’nitsa” (“Teacher of the Sands,” 1927), a new thematic thread runs through the 1980s collections. In “Peschanaia uchitel’nitsa,” the Astrakhan protagonist Maria Nikoforovna teaches desert tribes of the Far East how to grow crops and after these get destroyed by nomads, agrees to extend her modernization efforts to the nomads as well. “Takyr” and “Dzhan” reflect Platonov’s 1930s journeys to Turkmenistan. The first is narrated from the perspective of a Persian woman and her daughter, who are abused and enslaved by Turkmen nomads. The daughter eventually escapes to become an agricultural scientist, symbolically set on cultivating the desert with imported fruit trees as well as ancient, dying out plants. “Dzhan” tells the story of Nazar Chagataev, returning to the desert wanderers dzhan. With its two endings, the story is ambivalent: in the original version, the nomads vanish in the desert; in the happy version, which Seifrid argued Platonov added as a compromise, the tribe survives, transformed and rebuilt. Chagatayev joins Ksenya in Moscow, along with the orphan girl Aidym, to receive thanks from the Central Committee of the Party for saving dzhan. Although Lane argued that “[w]ith the loss of the commonality of poverty they also lose dzhan” (92), neither of the versions uncritically romanticizes the nomads. But nor does modernization mean their salvation.
Complex as they are, the stories in Dcery pouště and Aký chce byť svet therefore contradict Birčák’s and Žák’s commentaries about an unambiguously good revolution and unambiguously happy domestication, but the content explodes the frame even more in the collection of war stories, which Ladislav Zadražil introduces as Platonov’s service in defense of the nation and the state. The apparent heroism and patriotism that marks Nesmrtelní is rather an embarrassment for Platonov, though on closer reading, the stories’ critique of the brutality of war, fanaticism, and the nonsense of violence reveal the same longing for human relations and warmth that permeates Platonov’s extended oeuvre. War means death of the heart: “A soldier is sad, living like a pole in the fence, without family, having nobody who could substitute him, to revive his heart and save it from turning into stone” (“Důstojník a voják” 62). Dehumanization is revealed not solely through the violence of the Nazis, but also through monstrous actions and thoughts of other soldiers. There is no triumph in “what will save Russia from death and make Russian people immortal has remained in this person’s dying heart” (“Pancíř” 34) since the heart itself is dying. The question is how to stay humane in inhumane conditions, and how to return and live, as in “Vozvrashchenie” and another “veteran story,” where the alienated villagers Gvozdarev and Gavrilovna pass a night in the erotics of tractor repair. Regarding the accompanying paratext, more fitting than the opening is the conclusion that describes Platonov’s “stubborn faith in the indestructibility of goodness, which leaves its marks and signs in nature as well as the human heart” (Zadražil 242).
Conclusion
In the Soviet beginning, there was a vision of socialism, socialism as “freedom from unwanted and avoidable economic and material constraints, freedom for collective praxis” (Jameson, “Five Theses” 166). However, already by the turn of 1926 and 1927, when Walter Benjamin visited Moscow, he commented on the mobilizing power of the party and also its control; public engagement as well as the absorption of private time into “bureaucracy, political activity, [and] the press” (30); improvements in the life of the children but their continual destitution; bettered health-care yet the lack of sanitary aid, pauperism and illiteracy. “Now it is made clear to every Communist,” Benjamin concluded, “that the revolutionary work of this hour is not conflict, not civil war, but canal construction, electrification, and factory building” (45). As the lid on the Soviet box opened further, more problems emerged: the regime’s hierarchical, dictatorial, and violent features; restrictions on freedom of press and assembly; limitations in regard to gender and race equality; destruction of the natural world.
Efforts to reform “real socialism” unfortunately failed but over the course of seven decades, the Soviet enclave evolved, responding to outside and internal pressures. Like Benjamin, Platonov critiqued violence, pauperism, rampant bureaucracy, dominance of the party and broken relations. Still, at the bottom of the box, there was hope. Initially science-fictional, it became increasingly fantastic and fairy-tale-esque; some happy ends may even give the impression of being plush, artificially conditioned, and rotten, to use Bloch’s expressions. Even so, as in Czechoslovakia, before Platonov’s fiction became associated with “the apocalypse of Russian utopia” (Zadražilová 431), it could give solace. In the 1960s, Platonov appeared largely as a satirical critic and author of family tales. The latter became prominent during “Normalization,” although less so in the Czech context, and soon more complex stories would appear in the 1980s. At that time, against the gruesome background of the Soviet-Afghan proxy war, Platonov’s Far East fiction was also printed, with the “rotten happy end” of “Dzhan,” and the collection of war stories. Although this Platonov was far from the Platonov of the 1960s, his ultimately contradictory work has remained a source of hopeful, constructive criticism. It is worth remembering that underneath the author’s endless variations on failed projects, fragments of several visions of socialism or communism, both existent and to come, remained: the party and electrification socialism of Lenin, the melancholy and contemplative Marxism of Benjamin, the self-determining communism of Gramsci.
NOTES
- In simple efforts to radicalize socialism by approximating it to communism.
- Named after the Soviet theoretician A. A. Zhdanov, Zhdanovist aesthetics called for art to mirror socialist reality. The nature of this reality was established in advance (negativity, for example, was largely absent) and art was therefore to further ideological mystification.
- Deriving its name from Ilia Ehrenburg’s novel Thaw, the term is used to describe the processes of political and cultural liberalization after Stalin’s death in 1953.
- “In the course of that violent and incomparable year [1917], Russia was rocked by not one but two insurrections, two confused, liberatory upheavals, two reconfigurings. The first, in February, dispensed breakneck with a half-millennium of autocratic rule. The second, in October [when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government], was vastly more far-reaching, contested, ultimately tragic and ultimately inspiring” (Miéville 1).
- Both Chevengur and Kotlovan were completed towards the end of the 1920s.
- The reference is to “tektology,” Alexander Bogdanov’s theories aimed at uniting and harmonizing social, cultural, scientific and other human activities as “universal organizational science.”
- Around the beginning of the eighteenth century, Peter the Great accelerated a series of political, military, economic and cultural reforms that aimed to modernize Russia and transform it into a major Western power. Platonov’s story does not critique solely the ruthless, top-down character of Petrine policies but also establishes analogies between the eighteenth-century ruler and Stalin
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Pavla Veselá teaches in the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague. Her research focuses on modern Anglophone and Slavic literature, and her publications include The Polyphony of Utopia: Critical Negativities Across Cultures from Bellamy and Bogdanov to Yefremov, Piercy and Butler (Peter Lang, 2024), contributions to Utopian Possibilities: Models, Theories, Critiques (ed. Liam Benison, U.Porto Press, 2023) and Comunidades intencionales: utopías concretas en la Historia (eds. Juan Pro and Elisabetta Di Minico, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2022) as well as articles in the journals Utopian Studies, Extrapolation, AUC Philologica, The Journal of William Morris Studies, Bohemica Litteraria and Science Fiction Studies.
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