Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Soul by Andrei Platonov Andrei Platonov: The genius who supported communism but mocked the Soviet system. Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky described Platonov as an “outstanding writer of our time”, and one of the major figures of 20th century literature, placing the blue-chip Soviet author alongside Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett. But here is the thing, Platonov was someone who supported the Bolshevik Revolution and joined the Communist Party while his multi-layered, richly detailed books showed no mercy, exposing the totalitarian society built around a lie. Platonov’s characters buried themselves in communism but found no relief. Early career. The son of a railway worker was born in the town of Voronezh in 1899. Platonov was originally Andrei Klimentov. He created his pen name in 1920 to pay homage to his father, Platon Klimentov, who had some inventions to his credit. The oldest in a family of eleven children, Andrei took his first job as an errand-boy. He was 13. Around that age, he also began writing poetry. Following in his father’s footsteps, the teen worked as an engineer’s assistant for the South-Eastern railway, a symbol of Soviet industrial might at the time. One of Platonov’s most recurrent images, pointing metaphorically toward the theme of revolution and utopia, became that of the train or locomotive. Andrei Platonov, 1925. Like many other young people of his generation, Platonov welcomed the Revolution of October 1917 with palpable enthusiasm. When the Civil War broke out, he was a locomotive driver assistant on trains delivering ammunition to the Red Army. Who would have ever thought that, three decades later, the most Soviet - and most sincere of all Soviet writers - would end up being written off as a pariah, persecuted by the Soviet regime? The only Soviet genius who genuinely believed in the communist utopia eventually became its victim. Platonov’s love-hate relationship with the literature. Platonov’s first book, Electrification, came out in 1921. Throughout the 1920s, his stories were published in major Soviet literary journals. He started to gain momentum on the local literary scene, worked as a journalist and took part in public talks on philosophical and political issues. Despite initial success, literature was never the be-all and end-all for Platonov, though. After graduating from a polytechnical institute, he worked as an electrical engineer, introducing electricity into local agriculture in the wake of the deadly drought, which struck Povolzhye in 1921. Having witnessed the consequences of the man-made famine, Platonov said he could no longer enjoy a “contemplative activity”, literature. Several of his stories of the 1920s featured starving and impoverished peasant characters. In an effort to prevent similar droughts in the future, the writer took a job with the Voronezh branch of the land management agency. He excavated some 763 ponds, dug 315 wells, built several bridges and dams and installed three electrical stations. By the late 1920s, Platonov curtailed his involvement with electrical engineering in favor of writing. The novelist moved to Moscow where his literary career was doomed to derail. The ambivalence of the writer. While Platonov was himself committed to the aims of the Soviet plan for building a socialist society, his novels and stories maintained a parallel life, mocking the bureaucratic disasters of the Soviet ideology. This dualism was dangerous, and eventually cost Platonov his career. Vintage Classics, 2010. The “right” Soviet writers were expected to celebrate the achievements of industrialization and collectivization, not vocally criticize the system. This was surely a red flag for Joseph Stalin, who famously addressed Platonov as “bastard” in the margins of the Krasnaya Nov’ magazine, where Platonov’s novel For Future Use was published. Paradoxically enough, this does not mean that Platonov was an enemy of the communist utopia, Soviet regime, collectivization, etc. He masterfully used the language of Soviet utopia as a weapon. Unlike most of his peers, such as Isaak Babel, Yury Olesha, Evgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Bulgakov and Mikhail Zoshchenko, who chose to play with the malleability of language, Platonov resigned himself to the raw language of his era, sometimes sacrificing the intricacies of plot and stylistic twists. The most notable works. The author isn’t called the master of “socialist realism” for nothing. His magnum opus, Chevengur, (Platonov’s only completed novel) is a behind- the-scenes look at Soviet life during the New Economic Policy, masterminded by Vladimir Lenin in the 1920s. It’s one of those books you’ll have to read again and again to understand the idea behind it. Chevengur is a utopian town where communism is being introduced at a record pace. The result is a catastrophe that Platonov, who witnessed Stalin’s collectivization, describes with the devilish wit. The novel was actually scheduled for publication when Soviet censors withdrew it at the last minute for ideological reasons, claiming it rocked the boat, jeopardizing the idea of building socialism. Platonov argued he had written his novel with “different intentions” but no one listened. It was never published as a whole until 1988. Andrei Platonov, 1947. His next tour de force, The Foundation Pit, is a dark and disturbing novel which reads like Kafka, but chronicles the benefits of Soviet communism. A group of humans is digging out the foundation for a building in the middle of nowhere for all to live happily one day. Platonov depicts hunger and death as he portrays workers, engineers and peasants exempt from all the good feelings as they continue their never- ending work and stagger around like empty-minded zombies from George Romero’s horror movies. The Foundation Pit, written between 1929-1930, is a scorching satire on Stalinism and the oppressive bureaucratic system that destroys hope, faith and humanity. While appearing to back proletariat with its class struggle and socialism, Platonov shows the real face of collectivism, devoid of human emotions and sentiments, bringing to mind George Orwell’s 1984. In fact, the fates of the two writers intertwined in a strange way. Tuberculosis claimed Orwell’s life in 1950, when he was only 46. Platonov would die of the same disease the following year. Reading Platonov is sort of a challenge hard to stomach. His language is irritating, even disturbing, striking some readers as complex or difficult to understand, but here is why. Platonov’s concerns are well justified. Again, they deal with the spiritual future of the nation under the Soviet system. During WWll, Platonov worked as a war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) Soviet newspaper and managed to publish some of his short stories. After the war, however, his work vanished into obscurity again. One of his unfinished masterpiece novels, Happy Moscow, saw the light of day only in 1991. For some reason, Platonov was never arrested or put in a jail cell. What’s worse, his fifteen-year-old son Platon was arrested on false charges and sent to the Gulag. The boy was released two years later, in 1940, but died of the tuberculosis he had caught in a Stalinist labor camp. Andrei Platonov contracted tuberculosis from his son, and succumbed to illness in 1951, aged 51. If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material. THE CONCEPT OF "SOUL" IN ANDREI PLATONOV'S SHORT NOVEL DZHAN. The subject of the research is the concept of “soul” — one of the most important semantic components of Andrei Platonov’s artistic world. The concept of “soul” is one of the core ones in the history of culture and it includes the complex religious, philosophical, ethical, spiritual and mental content. The concept of “soul” is consistently present in Platonov's works — from the first to the last ones — where it represents individual and personal, collective and national and world (cosmic) existence. The lexeme “soul” marks a zone of confl ict between the writer and philosopher and militant atheism and historical materialism of revolutionary ideology. Th e author and his heroes search for a “sincere socialism” (The intimate person, Doubting Makar). The Soviet critics saw “foolishness for Christ” in these searches (A. Gurvich). Platonov starts actualizing the “soul” concept in his short novel Dzhan (1932–1935) with the title, since a Turkic word “dzhan” means “soul” in Russian. Th is concept plays an important role in the artistic representation of an intimate life of the dzhan people and the main character Nazar Chagatayev. Conceptual analysis of the short novel Dzhan includes the following components: – defining semantic space of the “soul” concept in the novel, as well as its structure and functions; – describing reference situations the “soul” concept points at in a work of art; – studying the novel’s sphere of concepts (connections between the “soul” concept and the concepts of “mind”, “heart”, “happiness” and “life”); – detecting mythological and Evangelical implications in the contexts which are directly connected with the concept of “soul”; – defining convergences and divergences of the concept of “soul” in Platonov’s short novel Dzhan and its cultural semantics, which can be traced back to the Evangelical text. Andrey Platonov’s “Soul” Andrey Platonov brings out grand claims in others. Most excellent writers do this, but Platonov perhaps belongs in a special league. His chief translator Robert Chandler, in the introduction to the new Platonov collection Soul announces: "All Russians consider Pushkin their greatest poet; in time, I believe, it will become equally clear that Platonov is their greatest prose writer." The writer Penelope Fitzgerald is on record calling his short story "The Return" one of the "three great works of Russian literature of the millennium." Let us be clear right off: these claims are absurd. Platonov is far too weird to ever worry Count Tolstoy's descendants overmuch, and while most any millennium would be happy to claim a story as beautiful as "The Return," I can quickly think of three stories by Gogol that I prefer. Yet some force must be at work to persuade otherwise intelligent Englishmen to make crazy statements about a writer of whom most educated Westerners have never even heard. This force will reveal itself no later than ten pages into the title novella of the collection. Soul reads like the kind of Soviet myth that an American student might be forgiven for thinking impossible. We have a tendency to assume that art produced under an oppressive regime will either capitulate into risible official acceptability or take that oppression for its principal subject. Soul avoids this false dualism. Platonov wrote beneath the stainless steel yoke of socialist realism, a demand that all useful art concretely situate itself in history and celebrate the inexorable advance of the proletariat. In the most leanly technical sense, Soul satisfies these criteria. It describes the efforts of a young engineer returning to the Central Asian homeland of his youth and attempting to lift his tribe out of squalor and into communism. Agricultural reform is trumpeted, and a past exploitation of slaves is reviled. But here all resemblance ceases; a novel by Maxim Gorky and Soul have perhaps as much in common as do a Dodge Stratus and a cloud. While the action of Soul maintains a close adherence to physical existence, there is always a second, symbolic register as suggested by its title. Near the beginning of his adventure, the hero Nazar Chagataev sets off into the desert. He soon encounters a blind man and his child. Nazar takes up the blind man's child, and together they venture deeper into the scrubland. One night while they sleep, an old woman finds them. She fondles their clothes and goods and bodies. She kisses Nazar's neck and begins also to kiss his face. Nazar wakes: "Don't," says Chagataev. "You're my mother." And so she is. Remarkable here is that after this sudden and mystical entry, Nazar's mother plays a relatively quotidian part in the narrative. Her strangeness evaporates—which only furthers the story's strangeness. Soul is a dream allegory, one in which the reader can readily identify symbols without having equal success assessing what they signify. Socialist realism and polemical allegory tell us that which we already know or at least ought to know. This novella functions in the opposite manner. Its symbols are not familiar or easily interpreted, and their effect is to make the world larger and weirder. In a blasted Asian landscape where man crawls on the very lip of survival, we are made aware of a vastness that we do not know, that we fail to know, that we sense it is crucial to know. This sense of crucial knowledge and our inability to access it will instill in the reader a personal tension that might more commonly occur in religious texts. Just as it overthrows the daylit Soviet expectations of its period, so Soul also ignores the underground themes of that time. Platonov critiques Stalin, but not in the expected way. The police state is not mentioned, much less raged against. The question is rather of the possibilities and limits of revolution. Nazar's tribe, the Dzhan, is utterly ignorant of socialism, and the hero is repeatedly stymied in his attempts to bring them along. But Platonov is not conservative or liberal. The vision of Soul is not of a retreat from revolution but of a deeper, even more fundamentally revolutionized state. This state is polymorphous and supple. It has a host of different communities, and the socialist answer for each people is different, as it must be. Platonov's socialism is made of peoples; it cannot be imposed upon them. Soul feels sui generis. Like another masterpiece unpublished during the Stalin decades, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita , it feels both motherless and childless. One wonders how it ever came into being. The other stories in the collection are less bracing, though all are accomplished. For further reading, Penguin Classics' Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida , edited by Chandler, is a fabulous collection. The nineteenth century tales of the first half are deserved classics, but the selections of twentieth century writers, most of them unknown in the West, will be revelations. Alex Wenger is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction at Columbia University. He frequently reviews for Words without Borders . Slavic Review. Interdisciplinary Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Website Navigation. Secondary Navigation. Volume 73 Number 4 Abstracts. “The Dialectics of Nature in Kara-Kum”: Andrei Platonov’s Dzhan as the Environmental History of a Future Utopia. In the Soviet cultural geography of the early 1930s, the Kara-Kum desert of Turkmenistan-the setting of Andrei Platonov’s novella Dzhan - represented an environmental challenge to Soviet technological utopianism, just as its nomadic inhabitants challenged Stalinist narratives of political development. In this article, I offer new contexts for reading Dzhan , locating it within Russian and Soviet discourses of natural and national development and within the context of Platonov’s second profession as a meliorator (land reclamation engineer). I argue that Dzhan offers a vision of vernacular socialism , first, in its attention to the specific ecology of the desert and its inhabitants, and second, in its resistance to two totalizing Soviet master narratives forming in the early 1930s: in the political domain, new Stalinist doctrine on modes of production, and in the literary domain, the socialist realist plot. “The Mountain of the Mind”: The Politics of the Gaze in Andrei Platonov’s Dzhan. Philip Ross Bullock. This article explores the prominent role played by visual tropes in Andrei Platonov’s Turkmen novella, Dzhan (Soul). While acknowledging Platonov’s literary inventiveness, it seeks to identify the equal importance of the gaze as a means of emotional and ideological cognition, thereby arguing that the shift in emphasis in his prose in the mid-1930s entailed not just a move away from explicitly linguistic experimentation but also a greater embrace of visual imagery. With reference to both Dzhan and the author’s letters and notebooks, this essay examines how the geographical relocation to Central Asia is accompanied by a heightened engagement with the world through the gaze, which functions principally in terms of gender and national identity. It concludes with a consideration of how the gaze is integral to a theory of Platonov’s understanding of language, arguing that the “situatedness” of the individual is predicated on his or her being seen in a visual context by an interlocutor. Soul Incorporated. In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel’nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan , one of Andrei Platonov’s first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state’s firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost’ to soznatel’nost’. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul . The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen” nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory. The Diaristic Form and Subjectivity under Khrushchev. At the start of the post-Stalin period, writers and literary critics began to embrace the diaristic form as never before in Soviet history. In this article, I explore the gravitation toward this and other short and documentary genres. I foreground the subject of literary form, which has, I maintain, for too long remained in the background of scholarship on Soviet literature. The rise of a new privileged form was related dialogically to the emergence of a new normative subjectivity-one that called on citizens to engage in meticulous empirical investigations of Soviet life and to arrive at and advance their own critical conclusions about Soviet reality. In advancing these arguments, I revise the interpretations of Soviet literary history that have highlighted the significance of the novel, contributing to a growing body of scholarship on the history of Soviet subjectivity. Images of the Nation Foreseen: Ivan Me�trovi�'s Vidovdan Temple and Primordial Yugoslavism. This article is an interdisciplinary study of the Vidovdan Temple (c. 1906-13), a sculptural-architectural whole that was Ivan Me�trovi�’s most controversial and most widely interpreted work. I analyze visual culture and intellectual history to show how this particular artwork became highly instrumental in creating and strengthening Yugoslavism’s primordialist dimension, which sharply marked the South Slavic territories’ political landscape in the decade preceding the first Yugoslav state’s creation. Not only did Me�trovi�'s artwork epitomize the idea of a South Slavic primeval unity, dismissing the national distinctiveness of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, it also enunciated an emphatic message of South Slavic political unification. By analyzing the Vidovdan Temple’s contemporaneous critical reception, I question its classical interpretation as a symbol of Yugoslav multicultural synthesis, arguing for a more context-sensitive and nuanced understanding of the ideology of Yugoslavism.� Stalin’s Answer to the National Question: A Case Study on the Editing of the 1938 Short Course. David Brandenberger and Mikhail V. Zelenov As a cornerstone of early Bolshevik propaganda, nationality policy allowed the revolutionary regime to cast the Soviet “experiment” as emancipatory in both ethnic and class terms. Paradoxically, much of the attention paid to the national question vanished from the party canon in 1938, for reasons that have never been fully explained. In this article we investigate this dramatic turnabout by examining how party historians and Iosif Stalin himself drafted what was to be the official narrative on nationality policy in the infamous Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) . In so doing, we not only supply a new answer to the national question but also highlight a key new source for other investigations of the Stalin period. The Witches of Wilno: Constant Litigation and Conflict Resolution. Seventeenth-century Wilno, capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and thus the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was home to five Christian confessions (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Greek Orthodox, and Uniate) and three religions (Christians, Jews, and Muslims [Tatars]). Against the general question of how they “made it work” arises the issue of witchcraft practice in local perceptions and in prosecution in the courts. Witchcraft trials are treated here as an integral part of “constant litigation” and the “use of justice” in restoring communal peace. My conclusions and propositions include the following: that religion and confession played no role in witchcraft litigation; that although there is no doubt that beliefs in the existence of witchcraft persisted, there was nothing like a “witchcraft scare,” and allegations of sorcery were treated on a level with that of petty theft and general misbehavior between neighbors; and that the goal of recourse to the courts was here, and in other types of cases, the restoration of a status quo ante. My final proposition, which invites testing, is that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania represented in this question, as well as perhaps in others, a transitional zone between the European west and east. 1207 W. Oregon St., MC 144, Urbana, IL 61801-3716 Tel: 217-333-3621. The Modern Novel. The world-wide literary novel from early 20th Century onwards. Platonov: Soul. Andrei Platonov: Джан (Soul) Though originally written in the mid-1930s, this book was not published in the Soviet Union till 1964 and then in a censored version. The full version was not published till 1999. In fact, there were several versions written by Platonov. At the time of writing the book, Platonov was in trouble with the Soviet authorities and turned to writing about Central Asia, partially because he was tired of European civilisation but partially to please the Soviet authorities who were trying to develop the area, Soviet-style. Though the references to Stalin in the book are positive and the book might be interpreted as showing the success of Communism, I frankly doubt that the Soviets would have been too pleased with the book. The fact that they did not publish it for thirty years confirms this. The story starts with Nazar Chagataev, a young Central Asian man, who is in Moscow on the day of his graduation from university. At a party afterwards, he meets Vera, whom he is attracted to. They talk, meet and are married the following day. She then tells him that she is older than he thinks – thirty-four – has been married twice before and is pregnant. She then introduces him to her 15 year old daughter, Ksenya, to whom he is also attracted. Soon afterwards, he is sent to Central Asia to help his people. His people are the Dzhan. This is a Persian word meaning soul (the Russian title keeps the Persian word). The Dzhan, as we learn, are a small people, consisting of mainly refugees from bad marriages, escaping military service and the like. The area they live in – round the Sarykamysh Lake – is inhospitable with little food. Indeed, the situation has been so bad that Nazar’s mother, when he was fifteen, had sent him off to find his way in the world as there was no food. He had, with the help of the Soviet authorities, made his way to Moscow. Before the Soviet era, the Dzhan had been tormented by the Khiva authorities who saw them as bandits and who would come to their region every year and take a few of the people back to Khiva and kill them. The Dzhan, who longed for death, finally went en masse to Khiva and smilingly demanded death for all of them. This so confused the Khivans that the Dzhan were ignored and went back home to continue their pitiful existence. When Nazar arrives, he finds the situation still desperate. He does find his mother but, like most of the people, she is barely surviving. He goes to Khiva for help and this is promised. In the meantime another Communist agent, Nur-Mohammed, arrives and he decides to move the Dzhan away and they set off on a long trek. Naturally, some die on the way. Nazar eventually catches up with them and, after a showdown with Nur- Mohammed, Nur leaves and Nazar tries to take the people back home. With the help of Aidym, a young woman, he manages to do so but their journey is an epic one and superbly described by Platonov. Once they get home they start to build houses and Aidym organises them. Nazar get supplies from Khiva and the community starts to improve. However, the result is that several move away to try their fortune elsewhere. Nazar travels around Central Asia to persuade them to return home but cannot find them. However, when he does finally get back, he finds many of them have returned. There is now a thriving community. Nazar returns to Moscow and Ksenya (Vera died in childbirth) with Aidym, confident that his people will survive. Platonov’s story can be interpreted on many levels. It can be seen as a biblical epic, with Nazar as a Moses leading his people out of the wilderness or as a larger myth, with Nazar as the saviour leading his people out of a hell, or simply as a tribute to communist activity. However, you wish to read it, Platonov tells a very fine tale of a people yearning for death and lost in the wilderness and, thanks to one man and one young woman, finding their way out. Publishing history. First published 1964 by Moskovskii Rabochii First English translation Harvill 2003. Copyright © The Modern Novel 2015-2021 | WordPress website design by Applegreen.