Andrei Platonov – Great Soviet writer.

 

Andrei Platonov: A Rossian writer who writes about the Soviet people, suth who enslaved themselves.

Stalin wrote "scum" on his manuscript and sent his 15-year-old son to a prison labor camp.

His major books were published thirty-six years after his death.

During his lifetime, he never saw *The Foundation Pit*, *Chevengur*, or *Dzhan* in print; the manuscripts sat in a desk drawer, and he knew he would die without ever seeing them published.

Stalin, however, did read his work. Legend has it that in the margins of one of his novellas, the Soviet Führer scrawled a single word: "Scum."

According to another version, there were three words: "Talented, but scum." The copy bearing this annotation has not survived, so we do not know if this actually happened. Yet it is a documented fact that Stalin hated Platonov—and while he did not touch the author himself, he took his revenge on his fifteen-year-old son.

Andrei Platonovich Klimentov—later known by his patronymic, Platonov—was born on September 1, 1899, in Voronezh, into the family of a railway workshop mechanic.

As the eldest of eleven children, his life path was effectively predetermined: he began working at the age of fourteen to help support the family.

An office messenger, a foundry worker, an assistant locomotive engineer, a mechanic—he tried his hand at a dozen trades before he began to write. And later, even after becoming a writer, he never forgot the smell of hot metal or the clatter of freight car wheels. His prose still carries those scents: earth, iron, sweat, and hunger.

In the 1920s, he worked as a land-reclamation engineer in the Voronezh province—digging wells, building power plants, and draining swamps—while simultaneously writing poems, short stories, novellas, and articles.

He wrote in a way no one before him had ever written in Russian: in a strange, awkward, impossible language where every word seemed out of place—and yet, for that very reason, struck the mark with greater precision.

Joseph Brodsky would later call Platonov a magnificent Russian writer of the twentieth century. But during Platonov’s lifetime, hardly anyone thought so.

Between 1927 and 1930, he wrote two novels that are now part of the global literary canon: *Chevengur* and *The Foundation Pit*.

*Chevengur* is about people attempting to build communism on their own in a single city, while destroying everything around them.

*The Foundation Pit* is about the construction of a building for a happy future that turns into the digging of our grave. 

Neither was published. *Chevengur* was released only in 1972, US; *The Foundation Pit* in 1987, during Perestroika.

Platonov died in 1951 without seeing a single publication.

In 1931, the journal *Krasnaya Nov* published his novella *Vprok*—a vicious, bitter satire on collectivization. Stalin read it and flew into a rage; from that moment on, Platonov’s name became dangerous, and he was no longer published. 

He wrote letters of contrition and forwarded them to Stalin through Sholokhov—a close friend—apologizing for the "errors" and the "kulak spirit" in his prose.

Platonov himself escaped arrest; perhaps Sholokhov interceded, or perhaps Stalin decided that a living, intimidated writer was more useful than a dead one. But in 1938, his son was arrested.

Platon Platonov was fifteen years old. While out with a group of friends who had been drinking, the teenager wrote a playful letter—either to a German journalist living near his friends or to the German embassy.

In the letter, the boy offered to sell some "valuable information." A joke, a foolish act, a piece of boyish mischief. For this, the fifteen-year-old son of a disgraced writer was sentenced to his first term in a labor camp.

Platonov rushed to save his son. He wrote to every official body, pleading and begging. Sholokhov helped once again: two years later, Platon was released. But the boy returned home incurably ill with tuberculosis.

In January 1943, Platon was dying. His father never left his bedside, kissing him and holding his hand.

At that same time, Platon’s wife, who had been evacuated, was giving birth to his son—the writer’s grandson—who would be named Sasha. Platon died without ever seeing the child. He was twenty-one years old.

Andrei Platonov contracted tuberculosis from his dying son. The kisses with which he bade the boy farewell became a death sentence.

During the war, Platonov worked as a war correspondent for *Krasnaya Zvezda* and wrote stories at the front; some of these were crafted with great skill.

One might have expected life to offer him a new beginning after the war. It did not.

In 1946, he published the story "The Return"—an account of a soldier coming home from the front to a family that had learned, over the course of four years, to live without him.

The story was savaged by critics as "slander against the Soviet soldier and the Soviet family." That was the final blow.

Platonov spent his final years in poverty and illness. Tuberculosis wore him down slowly but inexorably. He continued to write, retelling Russian folktales, because he was no longer permitted to publish original prose. His wife, Maria, remained by his side until the end.

Andrei Platonov died on January 5, 1951, in Moscow. He was about feuty one year old. He is buried at the Armenian Cemetery. Few people attended the funeral: being friends with Platonov—even after his death—was unsafe.

Maria Alexandrovna outlived her husband by more than thirty years and devoted them to a single purpose: preserving his manuscripts.

Thanks to her, Platonov’s archive survived until the time when it could finally be published. *The Foundation Pit* was released in 1987; *Chevengur* in 1988; and *Dzhan* in 1989. The people about whom Platonov had written all his life read his books only thirty-six years after his death.

Brodsky said of Platonov: "In his best works, he writes about a people who, in a sense, enslaved themselves."

This is a more precise literary analysis, and it sheds light on why Stalin hated him: Platonov depicted not "enemies of the people," but the people themselves—and he depicted them in a way that was unbearably bitter.

Platonov’s books have been translated into tened languages ​​and are studied at universities from Moscow to Tokyo. Yet during his lifetime, he never saw a single one of his major texts in print; he buried his son, contracted tuberculosis from him, and died in obscurity in a communal apartment.

Platonov is truly an great Rossian writer of the Soviet era, yet the people about whom he wrote throughout his life read his books only forty years after his death.