By Thomas Sanfilip

It is no secret that politics and literature have shared a long history together, often producing great literature in the process—Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, Alfred Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and others. But except for using political conflict as merely the backdrop to rather shallow and predictable narratives for television, film and popular fiction, the political as a viable framework from which to launch powerful fiction that grapples with a higher moral and ethical calling for social justice—as exercised by such giants of the past like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky—is generally non-existent. The writer driven by an all-encompassing moral and ethical intelligence is basically missing from today’s literary landscape.

The Russian author, Andrey Platonov, certainly qualifies as one of the more remarkable examples of this kind of intelligence. Having barely survived continual censorship and outright extinction under the Soviet system under Stalin—and still producing work so powerful and damning of the communist mindset—it begs the notion that socialism can ever be a benevolent political ideology under which any writer can flower.

Thus, the sub-title of Tora Lane’s probing examination of Platonov’s major novels and short fiction—The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution— encapsulates the paradoxical aspiration that Platonov himself, strangely enough, refused to abandon even in the face of his own personal tragedy.

Platonov started out as an electrical engineer, eventually writing short fiction. After serving in the army during the Revolution, he worked in a number of provinces in central Russia and saw the devastation of Lenin’s post-revolutionary repression of the peasants and its impact on their lives. By 1927 he was committed entirely to literary work, but could not adapt to the literary restrictions of the new Soviet Russia. He remained a solitary figure writing in his own unique style, accused of everything from pessimism to anarchism, nihilism and anti-realism. As a consequence, he was barred from book publication and reduced to a state of non-being as a writer, barely earning a living as a book reviewer under several pen names. His major works—Chevengur, The Foundation Pit and the incomplete, Happy Moscow—were written in the 1930s,all of which appeared after his death. Though the Russian poet, Yevtushenko, said in the USSR there was not an educated reader who did not know his work, Platonov was almost completely unknown to Russian readers until he was rehabilitated after his death 

“I am not a class enemy,” Platonov wrote Maxim Gorky,” and nothing can bring me to such a state because the working class is my native land, and my future is tied to the proletariat.”

So wrote Platonov at the beginning of Stalin’s 1930s Great Purge of writers, poets, intelligentsia, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, wealthy peasants, suspected saboteurs of the Revolution and counter-revolutionaries. Miraculously surviving the decade, Platonov’s voice was all but effectively silenced as a writer after Stalin read his work and simply described him as “scum.” 

“Where does the truth of our contemporary historical picture lie?” wrote Platonov. “Of course, it is a tragic picture, because the real historical work is being done not on the whole earth, but in a small part of it, with enormous overloading.” 

Platonov’s quest “for the forgotten dream of the Revolution,” according to Lane, was a “search for another meaning of the Revolution to be retrieved in literature.” This, of course, would make Platonov no more than an apologist for the ideals of Marxism and socialism, though I think his work achieves paradoxically the opposite effect—undercutting the very lies and outcomes of the Soviet socialist system from top to bottom by turning its propagandist language on its head. The people who are described in his fiction are ultimately  left alone and confused, without comfort or understanding, even their souls, stripped away, defined and overwhelmed by meaningless Marxist slogans and dogma.

Lane argues in convincing detail that Platonov, though critical of the Revolution, still clung to the belief that the revolutionary ideals he so fervently believed would, in fact, revolutionize the inner life of the people themselves, and thus affect a more authentic creation of literature derived from the people rather than dictated through prescribed ways by the Soviet rulers. 

“I am convinced that the coming of proletarian art will be ugly /formless,” he wrote. “We grow out of the earth, out of all of its filth, and everything that is on the earth is on us as well. But never fear; we will cleanse ourselves, we hate our squalor, we insist on moving out of the dirt. Therein lies our meaning. Out of our ugliness the soul of the world is growing.”

This sounds idealistic enough, but the reality fell far short of the post-revolutionary promise of artistic freedom that Platonov—like so many of other writers and artists of that era—were deluded into believing. But as Lane accurately points out, Platonov’s characters cling to the notion that the Revolution represents a penultimate truth, “as if they are speaking from an ecstatic transcendent position in history,” but buried deep in the morass of socialist rhetoric, they are unable to see through all its contradictions. She concludes that in Platonov’s view, in such

disillusionment, there is a longing for “the Inside,” in other words, a necessity for the individual to affirm the self, the soul, beyond the demands of any collective.

To Lane, this explains the uniqueness of Platonov’s writing style whereby he turns the empty platitudes and mindless rhetoric of socialist dogma to devastating effect, exposing itsabsurdities to explain everything material and metaphysical, including love. She argues the broader conclusion that Platonov’s work is not necessarily a record of what she terms “memory politics,” that is, of the October Revolution of 1917 and its impact politically on Europe and beyond. Rather Platonov’s belief that a literary revolution is born out of “revolution in existence.”

Literary criticism can suggest other avenues of inquiry, and Lane concludes on an intriguing perspective of Platonov’s place in today’s world as an author of relevance. Read together, her introduction and afterword endeavors to explain that relevance by posing the question—“Is it possible to reach an understanding of Communism in literature that is not communist literature?” Given the endless resurrection of socialism and its abject failure time and again as a viable form of social organization, it is hard to make a case for Platonov’s idealistic notions of a literary revolution ever evolving out of a decidedly aliterate culture.

In the end, Lane answers her own the question—”To the extent that the modern world in general and the realization of Communism in particular prefer the illuminated world of outer appearance, the nocturnal experience of shared existence in the Inner is also diminished or even extinguished. . . The problem with the myth of the Communist utopia, as Platonov tells it, is not the myth itself, but what happens when the myth purports to be real.”

Lane’s analysis of Platonov’s novels is an impressive accomplishment of real critical erudition, navigating between the near-exact  and imprecise point at every juncture of textual explication. Though she does not examine to any great extent the poetic expressiveness of Platonov’s prose that hovers unmistakably over his work, it is I think a key element of his prose, giving it unmistakable metaphysical  power and more fully explains her premise as the key  that most poignantly dramatizes the essence of his characters.

In her often brilliant and insightful critical study, Lane presents a skillful and detailed explication of Platonov’s life work, the writer’s moral backbone and adherence to his vision, and by so doing exposes the duplicity that constitutes political narrative, while inspiring both respect and admiration for Platonov’s lifetime of commitment to the truth. “Beauty does not exist separately, by itself,” he wrote. “It is the property of all . . . We grow out of the earth, out of all of its impurities and everything that is on the earth.”

Quoted Sources

Andrey Platonov, The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution, Tora Lane (Lexington Books, 2018)

The Foundation Pit, Andre Platonov, translated with introduction by Mirra Ginsburg (Northwestern Univ,. Press, 1994)

Martin Seymour-Smith, Funk & Wagnalls Guide to Modern World Literature (1973) 

The Notebooks of Andrey Platonov, selected and published by Maria Platonova, translated by Alex Miller, from “Soviet Literature,” 1973, vol.6. Moscow, Writer’s Union of the USSR,