Andrei Platonov's The Fierce and Beautiful World

...Living people were to gather the scattered remains of their ancestors, who, put back together again, would then enjoy the old by–product of their souls...

...The people of Chevengur have "one profession, and that is their soul...

...Or it is tragic because real existing socialism is the wrong fulfillment of the right dream...

...The Third Son" (1936) is a tale of filial piety, as best embodied by a communist son...

...Platonov's standing among Russians is based above all on the eccentric language of his work up to 1931, before he accommodated himself to the canons of socialist realism...

...The story, included in The Fierce and Beautiful World, concerns a soldier's recognition of his duty as a father and a husband, but was deemed unflattering to the Soviet family...

...The civil war is over and, in the village of Chevengur, communism has spontaneously erupted...

...THE SEVEN stories in The Fierce and Beautiful World are lovely, severe, and humane, but they are easier than Platonov's best work...

...This was too optimistic...

...The writing in The Fierce and Beautiful World is not astonishing in the way of Chevengur and The Foundation Pit...

...And no other story in The Fierce and Beautiful World concerns a hero who is even capable of political disappointment...

...but for Platonov, utopia would be incomplete until even the dead could share in it...

...But Platonov became the great writer of the Stalinist period, not by celebrating work in the manner of Fedor DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 119 Gladkov's Cement, but by opening himself unreservedly, with no instrument but his "precise child's heart," to suffering—which is the opposite of making and doing...

...and so it takes its place with Vladimir Tatlin's Monument for the Third International and Stalin's Palace of Soviets among the great unbuilt structures of Soviet life...

...He returned home ill with tuberculosis, from which he died in 1943...

...Much of Platonov's work is intensely fearful of sex, as if his people were virgins saving themselves for the world-historical equivalent of true love...

...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 123...

...Homecoming" is a modest, humane, and profoundly conservative story of the abiding hearth...

...Most of them appeared in a translated collection put out by the Soviets in 1972, fifteen years before The Foundation Pit would be published for the first time in the Soviet Union...

...He had always been, above all, susceptible: he was a writer who took dictation from events...

...One recalls Adorno's remark: "There is only tenderness in the coarsest demand: that noone shall go hungry anymore...

...In the end, the workers dig—instead of a foundation pit—their own mass grave...

...Instead of trade, we've set up life...

...Nazar Chagatayev, a dhzan himself and his people's would-be rescuer, has more promiscuous ambitions of happiness—"Grief seemed to him something vulgar, and he was determined to build a happy world in his fatherland because otherwise he couldn't understand what to do with his life, or how to exist"—but they are to no avail...

...they will serve just as well if the young man needs something to be buried in...

...Whether or not Platonov literally believed in this idea, Fedorov's Philosophy of the Common Cause—which outlined it—was his most cherished book, and one of his characters suggests that Lenin's body has been preserved precisely for the purpose of its imminent resurrection...

...The character of this travesty, and the others, cannot be conveyed in English...

...In 1921, Platonov answered by giving up literature in favor of zhiznestroenie or "life-building...

...Other utopians draw their constituency from the living and the yet-to-live...

...This singularity (and all Russian commentators remark on Platonov's lack of real literary ancestors or heirs) has to do with his native genius...

...BUT THESE remarks hardly apply to the best story in The Fierce and Beautiful World...

...it cashiers the idea of utopia that had animated people's lives as they dreamed their way through poverty, and leaves the mind as barren as the world...

...Dhzan is not, in fact, a story at all, but a novella or miniature epic, and its inclusion here alone justifies the book's reissue...

...Because of this the mosquitoes were now afraid of people, and would not come near them at all...

...Either, like any true utopia, it solves all soluble problems, but leaves people still with bodies that suffer and time that passes...

...The boy, only fifteen, was alleged to be an "anti-Soviet youth terrorist...

...To settle down, then—in the botched world of Stalinism—to sex and fatherhood and domesticity amounts to a sane and dispiriting admission that this is the best one is likely to get...

...He had very able translators in Mirra Ginsburg, Robert Chandler, and Anthony Olcott, but English editions of his books can, at best, paraphrase a heartbreak...

...Or, finally, Soviet communism enforces, in one of two ways, what Ernst Bloch called "the tragedy of fulfillment...

...It is his early work, written when it still seemed—hope against hope—that a large realm of freedom might be wrested from the realm of necessity, that makes him such a singular writer...

...They are easier to translate, to read, and—probably for Soviet officials and American readers alike—to accept...

...But the flock is incurably nomadic, and its members wander away from socialism "one by one to all the countries of the world...

...But it seems 118 r DISSENT / Spring 2001 genuinely to have surprised and pained Platonov that his work could be accused of being "counterrevolutionary" Platonov first fell afoul of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) in 1929...

...and it is his prose's "empathetic infection with the speech habits" of his characters, as Thomas Seifrid says, that makes it especially remarkable in the original...

...His mercurial and many-voiced style has neither the defenses nor the confinement of a wellestablished ego...

...Chevengur is a wildly ambiguous book...

...Weeds are declared "international property," and cattle are liberated: "The livestock wants to become people too, you know...

...As a teenager, Platonov attempted to construct a perpetuum mobile...

...The introduction to that volume, praising "healthy, straightforward" Platonov for his theme of "the moral regeneration of man in the process of revolutionary transformation," is a whitewash in red...

...By that date, he had once again been banned from print, this time for publishing "Homecoming...

...In "Fro" (1936), a young wife reconciles herself to her husband's indefinite absences as he works to construct socialism in the Far East...

...later on in his great utopian fantasy, Chevengur, he imagined a new earth producing crops by itself, without any touch of a peasant's hand...

...Not much, but it will have to be enough...

...Nastya's creator—whom Joseph Brodsky and others have considered the greatest twentiethcentury writer of Russian prose—knew the perils of an opportune birth...

...The dhzan are a dwindling, listless people of Turkmenistan, so demoralized by their poverty that the neighboring Khans cannot even use them as slaves, "because they no longer had that small desire to live which is essential even for a slave...

...Few if any other modern novelists were able to so thoroughly assimilate history to art...

...it's that politics no longer promises them any fit terrestrial accommodation...

...In story after story, the keynote is resignation...

...The author may have been mistaken in representing the death of Soviet society through the death of the little girl, but this mistake was occasioned only by excessive anxiety on behalf of something loved, something whose loss is equivalent to the destruction not only of the entire past, but of the future as well...

...The withdrawal of political will from public life is followed by a withdrawal of psychological resources as well, and we come to define our self-interest as narrowly as possible...

...More important to him than Marx was the nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, an advocate of the brotherhood of man and the human triumph over nature who also believed in the possibility of a materialist resurrection of the dead...

...He worked for several years as a land-reclamation engineer—the effort to wrest life from dead nature is one of his fiction's preoccupying themes—and in 1926 he received a government certificate crediting him with having dug in the course of three years an astonishingly Stakhanovite 763 ponds and 331 wells...

...The only major Soviet writer of workingclass origin, Platonov wrote of, and from, a collectivity we can hardly imagine in our time...

...Platonov made "lyrico-satirical" fables—to use Gorky's disapproving term—of Lenin's electrification campaign, the first Five Year Plan, the sovietization of Turkmenistan, and the demobilization of soldiers from the Second World War—even as these upheavals were taking place...

...But self-sufficiency was not his psychological model...

...It makes its unique indictment of Stalinism by reversing Fedorov's dream of resurrection: instead of rescuing the dead from their limbo, workers are conscripted into the common grave...

...Where Platonov's earlier work, especially Chevengur, had fastened its mad hopefulness not only to the red juggernaut but to "all the poor, rejected objects, all the small, unknown, forgotten things," his work was now domesticated...

...Terminology," comes the answer...

...Platonov himself became infected while nursing his son and died from tuberculosis in 1951...

...Soviet communism is premature: there is no one to carry it out but a partnership of doctrinaires and ignoramuses ("What are those words, the ones that can't be understood...

...The Foundation Pit—Platonov's next and last novel—is set in a world barren of meaning save for travestied meaning...

...Platonov's own future was largely foreclosed in 1931...

...But it also means the quiet triumph of a meagerness called realism—realism the literary mode and realism the resigned daily attitude...

...Still, in the end, even the home was no home, not for literature or life—one of the lessons, perhaps, of Platonov's career...

...Such blueprints are like a tailor's measurements for a bridegroom's suit...

...Constructive, eudaemonistic Eros— "builder of cities," according to Auden—is relegated to mere sexuality...

...But it would be unjust, critically and morally, to consider this simply the result of political accommodation...

...Soviet ideology was, of course, a kind of Prometheanism: the Soviet Union would find its happiness and distinction in being a society of makers, remaking itself...

...When it is a question of finding an asylum for our affections, the choice for most of us, to put it crudely, is between narcissism and the egoisme a deux of romantic love...

...It is impossible not to think of this enormous labor of digging while reading The Foundation Pit, the story of a peasant village's efforts to construct a huge apartment building in which to house the local "proletariat...

...Born in 1899 in a small settlement on the open steppe near Voronezh, Platonov lived in lockstep with his times, turning eighteen just as revolution arrived and identifying his hopes with those of the new Soviet state...

...Having no role in the workplace or public life, Eros is placed under a kind of house arrest...

...His later retreat, in style and subject matter, was a political necessity, and probably an artistic and psychological one, too...

...It isn't that wombs aren't manufacturing angels any more...

...Some of the people had settled apart from each other, in order not to suffer for others when there was nothing to eat, and in order not to have to weep when people close to them died...

...They, too, could be rescued by politics and science—"scientific socialism...

...Where Eros might have sought satisfaction far and wide, the hope of pleasure and the instinct of play are instead fas 122 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 tidiously compartmentalized, finding their object mostly in the bedroom and at the margins of the day...

...It even seems fitting that Platonov should die of a communicable disease...

...In The Foundation Pit, Voschev says, "Man will make a building and unmake himself...

...Soviet communism is wonderful: a triumph over nature, it allows peasants with their "home-made" faces to realize their homemade dreams...

...Who will live in it then...

...But some of the people lived in families...

...He had been publishing for only two years, and if there was no disguising the satirical element in his stories of collectivization, he seems nevertheless to have imagined that the authorities would perceive his loyalty to the revolution...

...Marxism—"that sin of optimism," E. M. Cioran called it—naturally found many adherents...

...Dermatology, or something...

...He was publicly accused by RAPP luminaries of being soft on kulaks, and when Stalin himself looked over a story called "For Future Use," he wrote in its margins, "Talented, but a bastard...

...Even so, Platonov gorged his heart on hope to a remarkable degree...

...Soviet communism is a nightmare: it makes use of jargon constantly and massacre occasionally ("oppressive elements" are "ushered into posthumous life in an organized and healthy fashion...

...Eventually Mikhail Sholokhov interceded, and the boy was released from the camps during the war...

...There is no good way for English to reproduce the effect of peasant speech meeting hackneyed Soviet jargon and curdling on contact, much less of duplicating a pun like Platonov's samooblozhenie (the term, used to explain how the village has purchased some coffins, means both "voluntary taxation" and "self-burial...

...To praise the utopian spirit in this way may have an ugly ring at a time when utopia sounds to many ears like a codeword for mass murder—as indeed Platonov's writing showed that it could be—but there is clearly little place on earth for angels when there is none for heaven...

...All of his fictional people ask in some form the question of his title character in "Makar the Doubtful": "What am I to do in life in order to be needed by myself and others...

...Chevengur—his only full-length novel— was written on the eve of Stalin's mass collectivization, before Platonov's anxiety for the Soviet and human future overwhelmed him...

...In 1995, Vivian Gornick, arguing that the power of romantic love "to break the bonds of the frightened, ignorant self' could no longer be believed in, announced "the end of the novel of love...

...But Tatyana Tolstaya's image of him, in her introduction to The Fierce and Beautiful World, as "an angel"—"let us be grateful that such creatures sometimes visit our world"—is a mystification...

...In "The River Potudan (1937)," Nikita is at last capable DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 121 BOOKS of making love to his wife, but "he did not find from loving Lyuba intimately any higher happiness that he had usually known—he felt only that his heart was now in charge of his whole body and could divide his blood with his poor but necessary pleasure...

...Romantic love is still the usual grail, and "domestic realism" the customary mode, in fiction and elsewhere...

...BENJAMIN KUNKEL has contributed reviews to the Nation, the Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Times...

...It is striking that the reduced, straitened quality of Platonov's later work—offering domestic life as a refuge from the wreck of utopia— is a quality shared with much of our contemporary writing, without our sensing, most of the time, that there is any reduction or straitening involved...

...Returned from Moscow, he shepherds the starving dhzan on a long march to socialism, which proves a temporary haven of staple foods, medicine, and lantern fuel...

...The Chevengurian peasants are determined to 120 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 overthrow nature—which is to say, the reign of death—and their ambition is unbounded: "As long as any natural raw material goes untouched by human hands, people are far from having invented everything...

...THE GARGANTUAN Proletarian Home of The Foundation Pit is never built...

...Nothing else Platonov wrote is so painfully ambiguous, implying at once the necessity and the impossibility of socialism, rebuking reforming intellectuals as well as lamenting the intractability of the masses...

...The new dispensation extends even to plants and animals...

...But these stories almost permit such a treatment...

...Part of the fascination of Platonov's career is the chance it affords to witness this withdrawal, this bleak homecoming, as it takes place...

...In "Aphrodite" (1945), a young engineer reaffirms his unrequited love for two associated beauties: a woman who has left him and a glorious Soviet future still in the offing...

...It is no surprise that The Foundation Pit, completed in 1931, could not be published in the Soviet Union before glasnost...

...This means angelic souls are saved from the kind of savage disappointment Platonov underwent, along with millions of others...

...Ernest Hemingway admired it for the clarity and directness of its style...

...As Louis Aragon (also a communist) wrote during World War II: "Parlez d'amour car tout le reste est crime...

...in these cases they had nothing but their love one for another, because they had neither good food, nor hope for the future, nor any other happiness to distract them, and their hearts grew so weak that they could only love for a wife or for a husband, which is the most helpless, poor and everlasting of all feelings...

...In a canceled ending to The Foundation Pit, he wrote Will the USSR die like Nastya, or will it grow into a whole person, a new historical society...

...Of course, this is ridiculous and often sinister...

...Platonov's artistic imperative must have been the practical imperative of any number of Soviet citizens: to withdraw hope from history and politics at large, and to confine it to the house, the marriage, the job...

...Hope and disappointment have the same dimensions...

...The collection's other heroes are resigned to the hoped-for happiness of romantic love, "the most helpless, poor and everlasting of all feelings...

...The novella is remarkable above all for its inescapably literal and allegorical depiction of their poverty: At first the mosquitoes ate the people so badly that they tore the skin off their bones, but after a little time their blood became used to mosquitoes' poison and began to develop an antidote from which the mosquitoes became helpless and fell to the ground...

...Although Platonov never heard on his door what he called "the sharp rap of an official hand," he was not allowed to publish for several years, and when he returned to print it was as a more cautious writer, deliberately a socialist realist...

...Susceptible Platonov seems prey to all points of view...

...His most severe punishment came in the form of the arrest of his son in 1938...

...Reading Chevengur is like listening to Mahler: a noble-sounding theme will become queasily corrupted into the sarcasm and cliché it contained all along...

...Benjamin Kunkel THE FIERCE AND BEAUTIFUL WORLD by Andrei Platonov translated by Joseph Barnes, introduction by Tatyana Tolstaya New York Review Books, 2000 288 pp $12.95 paper IN ANDREI PLATONOVS novel The Foundation Pit, Nastya—a beautiful and precociously ideological, kulak-baiting little girl on whose especial behalf socialism is being constructed in Russia—boasts of having delayed her birth until the revolution: "As soon as Lenin came, I came too...

...Russia in the early twentieth century was a society brimming with dreamers...