platonov and theories of modernism

PLATONOV AND THEORIES OF MODERNISM

PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK

AbstractThis article seeks to establish a genealogy of the notion of modernism with respect to Platonov criticism in both the Soviet Union and the West. Noting the complexity of trying to account for the author’s idiosyncratic literary style, it suggests that modernism has functioned more as a term of subjective evaluation than of objective description (particularly in the West, where an institutional commitment to avant-garde poetics long served to differentiate scholarship from Soviet socialist realism). Whilst not denying Platonov’s links to a number of modernist and avant-garde principles and practices, the article also argues that too exclusive an emphasis on modernism has led to a resistance to seeing Platonov in terms of a broadly conceptualised realist tradition.Keywords: Platonov; Modernism; Brodsky; Voronskii; Tolstoi

It has never been easy to situate the work of Andrej Platonov in the literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century. As early as October 1920, as one of the two Voronež delegates to the First All-Union Congress of Pro-letarian Writers in Moscow, Platonov was asked “ -

?” (“what literary move-ments do you sympathise with or belong to?”). His reply was simple: “ -

, ” (“none, I have my own”).1 In 1933, a secret police report confirmed this sense of Platonov’s independence: “ -

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302 Philip Ross Bullock

.” (“Avoids professional

literary circles. Maintains loose and not very friendly relations with a small group of writers”).2 A later memoir gives a similar sense of isolation: “

, […]. ‘ ’” (“He never participated in any associations or cliques […].

Platonov contrived to remain ‘outside’”).3 This sense of Platonov’s status as an outsider in Soviet literary culture is often read ideologically; despite his frequently stated wish to be a Soviet writer, his works were repeatedly inter-preted as anti-Soviet by his critics. Yet this sense of isolation is also aesthetic and is matched by the difficulty in trying to account for his particular literary style, which defies easy description, analysis and categorisation. Reading the pre-publication reports on ‘Vprok’, for instance, one is struck by critics’ attempts to deal not just with the nature of Platonov’s apparent political satire, but also with the ambiguity of his literary technique. As one reviewerwrote in despair: “ .[…]

” (“Facts and the author’s fantasy are hard to tell apart in the book. […] It is not a series of sketches or a collection of short stories. It is not satire, nor is it realistic prose”).4 It is easier to sympathise with this apophatic attempt to describe Platonov’s prose. It seems easier to say what his writing is not than to suggest what it is. Ambivalence is the hallmark of his literary technique.

Within this context, however, modernism has come to be a term that is widely used to describe Platonov’s style. Although the term enjoys particular currency in Western scholarship (chiefly in the English-speaking world), it was, significantly enough, even used in Soviet discussions during Platonov’s own lifetime. At a meeting of the All-Russian Union of Soviet Writers on 1 February 1932, one critic proposed the following characterisation of his lite-rary style: “

, ” (“All of Platonov’s works are infected with purely literary archaisms, which sometimes sound modernist”).5 The use of “modernist” here carries clearly negative connota-tions, as the critic goes on to suggest: “ – -

” (“Style is the other side of political analysis”).6 Because of the direct relationship between aesthetics and politics in Soviet culture, any discussion of Platonov’s “modernism” (or, to give it its Soviet name, “forma-lism”) was likely to be associated with an implication of political unrelia-bility.

It should come as little surprise, then, that Platonov’s rehabilitation within the Soviet Union from the late 1950s onwards was achieved by pro-moting an image of him as a realist. As Thomas Seifrid argues: “These studies not surprisingly tend to view him as a particular kind of realist (indeed, for critics of the Brezhnev era, a Socialist Realist), and so impute to

Platonov and Theories of Modernism 303

his works a more or less direct mimetic concern with social and historical context and a psychologism of character portrayal that functions as that context’s reflection.”7 The reader’s report on the first volume of essays to be published on Platonov – Tv Stat’ (1970) – made the following significant observation: “

-,

– ”(“in the collection insufficient attention is paid to the place of Andrej Platonov’s work in the process of the development of socialist realism in Soviet literature, and Andrej Platonov is insufficiently portrayed as a socialist realist artist”).8 The three-volume (1984-1985) empha-sised Platonov’s provincial background (suggesting the particular importance of narodnost’ in shaping Platonov’s rehabilitation at this time) and presented him as a “ - ” (“artist-humanist in the Gor’kij school”),9 thus aligning him with a tradition that was both po-litically and aesthetically acceptable.

The promotion of such an image was, of course, facilitated by the limited range of texts available to Soviet readers (and, it must be admitted, can be readily justified with reference to the social and psychological ele-ments in many of his works, particularly of the later period). Nonetheless, there were some attempts to paint a more complex picture of Platonov’s literary style. Although first published in a volume entitled Problemy chudo -

with modernist writers of the 1920s, such as Babel’, Oleša and Zabolockij, and sets Platonov in a context that suggests that his prose might be more disruptive than was often taken to be the case: “ -

, , -. -

, ” (“Early Soviet prose depicted an unusual, catastrophic, shocked and shocking reality. This sense of shock imprinted itself in the very structure of prose, in style”).10

strangeness of early Soviet prose to the need to depict concrete historical events, his emphasis on modernist style challenges accounts of Platonov as a (socialist) realist and situates him as a writer with closer links to modernism and the avant-garde than was sometimes taken to be the case, at least in the Soviet Union.

Because discussion of Platonov in terms of modernism was problematic in Soviet criticism, Western criticism often turned to modernism as a way of distinguishing itself from a school shaped by the doctrine of socialist realismand establishing its own rival claim to greater intellectual freedom. This view was reinforced by the availability of works unpublished in the Soviet Union.


The first Western publication of ‘Kotlovan’ in 1969 was in the journal Stu-dent, significantly subtitled žurnal avangarda sovetskoj literatury.11 Similar-ly, Michail Geller’s introduction to the 1972 Paris edition of evengur made claims for Platonov’s significance that were strikingly different from those made in the Soviet Union. Emphasising literary style over referential content, Geller implicitly situated Platonov within a broader European canon of modernist writing that was characterised above all by the deformation of the literary language:

-12

Platonov’s language is distinctive; each time, he discovers both word and object anew. The writer’s main way of renewing language is not at the expense of using new or rare words, but by deforming the customary grammatical form of literary speech and by destroying the fixed relationship of meaning between words.

For Geller, Platonov’s linguistic experiments were evidence of his anti-Soviet politics (a theme explored in greater detail in his Andrej Platonov v poiskachs ’ja of 1982). Other scholars, however, analysed his language explicitly within the context of Soviet avant-garde poetics of the 1920s. The émigré scholar, Elena Tolstaja-Segal, for instance, painted a picture of the author as more closely integrated into the literary culture of his time than his image as a provincial autodidact might otherwise have suggested: “

-. ,

,” (“In its expressive purpose, Platonov’s linguistic work brings

about the programme of the futurists. At a linguistic level the deautomatisa-tion of possible combination of words, changes in syntax and poetic etymo-logy become Platonov’s main methods”).13

The division between Soviet scholarship that emphasised realist content and a rival Western tradition that privileged modernist form (often as an expression of Platonov’s supposedly anti-Soviet politics) was to be entrench-ed thereafter, and was matched by differing canons available in the two cultures. Because of the unavailability in the Soviet Union of works such as

evengur and ‘Kotlovan’ (at least until perestrojka), works postdating the establishment of socialist realism as official Soviet artistic policy tended to predominate in many discussions of Platonov’s literary achievements.14

Whereas the rediscovery in the post-Stalin era of other writers who had come


to prominence in the 1920s such as Babel’, Pil’njak and Oleša can be seen as a limited reincorporation of modernist elements within mainstream Soviet literary culture, the continued prominence of Platonov’s stories of the second half of the 1930s and the Great Patriotic War was such that even those of his earlier, more experimental works that were available (such as ‘Epifanskie šljuzy’, for instance) could be read through the prism of his later literary development. By contrast, a tendency in the West to concentrate primarily on the works of the late 1920s and early 1930s led to an equally, if inversely, tendentious establishment of a critical hierarchy that favoured modernism over socialist realism.15

The work that most clearly articulated this division is Joseph Brodsky’s 1984 essay, ‘Catastrophes in the Air’, published in his collection, Less Than One.16 Brodsky’s first thoughts on Platonov had appeared in 1973 in the form of a brief preface to the American translation of ‘Kotlovan’.17 Although it contains many passages taken directly from this preface, ‘Catastrophes in the Air’ is a denser, longer and more provocative piece of writing that uses Platonov as a way of understanding Russian prose in the twentieth century more generally. Its most frequently cited passages concern Platonov’s lan-guage, whether its propensity to an apocalyptic and eschatological mindset or its proximity to elements of official Soviet discourse. Yet equally significant is Brodsky’s preference for modernist form over realist representation. For Brodsky, the heritage of nineteenth-century Russian prose has no analogy in the twentieth. Burdened by the need to represent the atrocious tragedy of recent history, modern Russian prose, he argues, “fails”: “Hypnotized by the scope of the tragedy that befell the nation, it keeps scratching its wounds, unable to transcend the experience either philosophically or stylistically.”18

Brodsky traces the mimetic instinct in Russian prose to the influence of Tol-stoj, both as a writer himself and as a dominant influence on the development of socialist realism: “The sad truth […] is that Russian prose has been in a metaphysical slump for quite some time, ever since it produced Tolstoy, who took the idea of art reflecting reality a bit too literally and in whose shadow the subordinate clauses of Russian prose are writhing indolently till this day.”19 chov, Korolenko, Kuprin, Bunin, Gor’kij, Andreev and Gladkov as disciples of Tolstoyan mimeticism,20 Brod-sky proposes instead a lineage of modernist prose going back to Dostoevskij and including “authors like Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Babel, and a few others” who “were paralyzed […] into a telegraph-style tongue-twitching that, for a while, would pass for an avant-garde art.”21 Most importantly, Brodsky discerns the influence of Dostoevskij “on every major writer in this century, from Kafka on”,22 setting up a lineage of European modernist prose that deliberately excludes twentieth-century Russia itself.

It is in this context that his analysis of Platonov’s language takes on its particular significance. Aware that in the Soviet Union Platonov was read


through the prism of socialist realism, and that even in the West he was often seen as a witness of his terrible times (something very much in evidence in Geller’s work, for instance), Brodsky promotes an idiosyncratic view of Pla-tonov that favours aesthetic autonomy over any form of realistic represen-tation. Having established a lineage of modernist writers that goes back to Dostoevskij, resists the mimetic concerns of a form of realistic representation that has its roots in Tolstoj, and is practised primarily in the West, Brodsky reinterprets Platonov as the greatest exponent of a new kind of prose: “he treated the language not so much as a novelist but as a poet […]. His art was anything but mimetic: it wasn’t imitating reality; it was creating, or better still, reaching for one.”23 Brodsky’s position is understandable enough: as a poet in exile, he discerns his own position in the works of the authors he admires. Moreover, by promoting style and aesthetics above content, Brod-sky sets Platonov in the trans-national context of European modernism, rather than seeing him as a chronicler of the tragic events of Soviet history. But it is precisely this subjective element that renders Brodsky’s frequent use of the word “modernism” so problematic. It functions not so much as a term of description and analysis, as one of judgement and approval; modernism is a marker of taste and ideology. The issue would not be so acute were it not for the fact that the peculiarities of Brodsky’s taste map closely onto the in-stitutionalisation of modernism within the Western academy, especially in the post-war era where a commitment to avant-garde poetics stood in opposition to the promotion of socialist realism in the Eastern bloc (as well as in reaction to the development of mass culture in capitalist societies). Just as “realism” functioned as both an aesthetic and ethical category within Soviet cultural politics, especially in the Stalin era, so too is the co-existence of descriptive and evaluative elements within modernism as a Western critical term some-thing that scholars need to bear in mind when employing it.24

All the available evidence points to Platonov’s broad familiarity with leading representatives of Russian and European modernism, even if the depth of his understanding is harder to gauge and his reading sometimes gives the impression of being haphazard rather than systematic. The achievements of Platonov’s modernism become particularly clear when his works of the late 1920s and early 1930s are juxtaposed with those written from the second half of the 1930s onwards, which are generally held to mark an idiosyncratic accommodation with socialist realism. Because Platonov continued to write and publish after the establishment of socialist realism as official Soviet artistic policy, it is possible to compare the substantial body of works written either side of this simplistic divide. Despite certain thematic continuities evident between the two periods, the presence of works that appear to conform to elements of socialist realist discourse serves to throw the experi-mental features of the earlier period into greater relief.


Platonov’s main claim for incorporation into the modernist canon rests, of course, on the infamous and idiosyncratic use of language that has long formed the basis of his reputation, especially in the West, but also, after the publication of previously forbidden texts, in Russia. Seifrid offers a helpful consideration of the potentials (and, indeed, the pitfalls) of this approach:

Platonov’s claim to modernist qualities rests principally on the striking deformations to which he subjects the Russian language (in works of roughly the mid 1920s to the early 1930s), and on the fact that he does so in the course of narrating a series of often bizarre events within a loose, anti-novelistic form. But Platonov hardly qualifies as a modernist in the effete, aestheticist sense that applies to a Joyce, a Belyi, or even a Khlebnikov (he was, after all, a writer of genuinely proletarian origins from an inauspicious cultural background – a fact of which he was himself keenly aware) and there is little in his works to suggest that their verbal peculiarities arise out of a self-conscious, avant-gardist assault on linguistic and artistic convention. His is rather a kind of de facto modernism developed, at one remove from the centers of Russian modernist culture, out of the satirical-grotesque tradition of Gogol’,Leskov, and Saltykov-Shchedrin and emphatically preserving the “crude” perspective of the semi-literate provincial masses (in this he somewhat resembles Zoshchenko, though there are important differ-ences between the two). If they resemble anything in the modernist canon, Platonov’s works are close to the distortions and formal violence of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or, to draw the parallel within Platonov’s own culture, the primitivism of Larionov’s imitations of peasant woodcuts […].25

Like a number of other commentators, Seifrid justifiably identifies Platonov as a descendant of the so-called “second line” of nineteenth-century prose-writers that was so central to the development of twentieth-century Russian modernism, yet Platonov himself rejected aspects of this comparison. Re-sponding to criticism at a meeting of the All-Russian Union of Soviet Writers in February 1932, Platonov objected: “ -

? , ” (“Is it possible to call my style archaic modernism? I have read Leskov, but I am no adherent of his”).26 That Seifrid reaches for comparisons from the field of thevisual arts suggests that Platonov’s relationship to modernism is one of broad cultural affinity, rather than one of direct literary influence.

Much of the impact of modernist modes of fiction derives from inten-tional authorial attempts to renovate (or, indeed, reject) the literary language of the past from a position of confident familiarity with the inherited canon, whether through education, apprenticeship or affiliation (which is how one might interpret Seifrid’s description of modernists such as Joyce, Belyj and


Chlebnikov as “effete” and “aestheticist”). Seifrid is certainly right to suggest that Platonov’s provincial background and haphazard education mean that his relationship to language and tradition is rather different from that of more mainstream representatives of Russian modernism. However, despite his reputation as a provincial autodidact, recent manuscript and source study has demonstrated that Platonov’s literary technique was just as premeditated as that of his more obviously experimental contemporaries; the distortions of grammar, syntax and phraseology that are characteristic of his prose were the result of a deliberate attempt to subjugate conventional narrative forms to a variety of radical compression that results in the reduction of logic and causality, as well as absurd linguistic effects.27 Yet there would appear to be at least one major difference between Platonov and other modernists in their handling of language. The peculiarity of Platonov’s prose stems not so much from his own attempts to promote a strong authorial persona in his works, as from the impression that they give of the confusion experienced by his characters in their struggle to come to terms with a world in which language itself has lost its fixed points of reference. Here, German-language work on narratology has done much to illuminate the narrative perspectives at work in Platonov’s work, demonstrating the way in which the lack of a unified autho-rial point of view gives rise to a complex montage of voices that certainly has affinities with modernist literary poetics, but which stems from a rather different creative impulse.28

Platonov’s affinity with certain stylistic aspects of Russian modernism has long been acknowledged, but a more recent trend in the critical literature has been the examination of his debt to the philosophical underpinnings of Russian avant-garde poetics. In fact, awareness of the philosophical sources of Platonov’s worldview goes back almost to the very beginning of Platonov scholarship, at least in the West, where the field was inaugurated by works by Tolstaja-Segal and Ayleen Teskey.29 Viewed through the prism of philoso-phy, Platonov’s innovative handling of language is not so much a stylistic affectation or form of experimentation for its own sake that rests ultimately on a commitment to a radical form of aesthetic autonomy; rather, Platonov’s handling of modernist devices in literature expresses a commitment to using language to achieve a fundamental transformation of society and the world itself through the restructuring of thought and perception. Thus, when read alongside his involvement in land-reclamation and engineering, or indeed alongside his early pronouncements as a journalist and essay-writer, Plato-nov’s works reveal a profound kinship with a Promethean strain in the Soviet Russian avant-garde. Indeed, discussion of Platonov in such terms is espe-cially salient when one bears in mind the widely employed distinction be-tween modernist and avant-garde elements in early twentieth century Euro-pean culture more generally, where modernism is held to reflect a crisis in modern bourgeois culture, and the avant-garde is seen as self-conscious and


politicised rejection of bourgeois values and institutions (and hence came to be a particularly prominent feature of Soviet literature and culture).30

Platonov rightly belongs in any discussion of the broader avant-garde project of refashioning life itself that was Soviet communism, especially throughout the 1920s, but also reaching into the early 1930s and potentially even later too. Thomas Langerak’s fundamental intellectual biography of the first two decades of Platonov’s life has shed much light on his connections to avant-garde literary movements, as has recent work by Nina Malygina.31 Apair of articles by Ben Dhooge traces in detail Platonov’s embrace of a highly personal poetic language in the second half of the 1920s, making compari-sons with Charms and Chlebnikov, as well as arguing for the potential in-fluence of theoretical articles by a number of LEF theorists.32 Dhooge ad-duces convincing evidence taken primarily from Platonov’s journalistic and critical writings, in which avant-garde utopianism can be most readily ob-served. The blurring and even outright destruction of boundaries between fictional and non-fictional genres was a characteristic feature of 1920s Rus-sian modernism, and much is to be gained by seeing Platonov’s output at this time – whether in literature, criticism or technical work – as a single, cohe-rent entity. Yet turning to the explicitly literary works themselves (other than certain works of the first half of the 1920s characterised by a scientific or technological world view that brings them close to the genre of fantastika), one detects a far greater degree of ambivalence about the transformative ideo-logy of the avant-garde. As Jacques Catteau has argued, Platonov’s utopia is Pelegian, not Promethean.33 His works treat the artistic and political ambi-tions of the avant-garde through parody (such as the handling of the pro-duction novel in ‘Kotlovan’ or ‘Juvenil’noe more’), elegy (the passing of the rural traditions of agrarian Russia in ), and satire (most obviously in works such as ‘Gorod Gradov’ or ‘Usomnivšijsja Makar’, but also through the acerbic historical parallelisms of ‘Epifanskie šljuzy’). The forward-look-ing, utopian elements of the Soviet avant-garde are absent from these works; or, rather, they are represented by means of the destructive effects they would have on individuals who instinctively grasped that they would never live in the radiant future. Thus, avant-garde culture comes to be a theme in Pla-tonov’s literary writings of the 1920s, rather than an overriding aesthetic and ideological principle as such.

A further issue to confront when considering Platonov’s relationship to modernism and the avant-garde is that he seems never to have belonged –either formally or informally – to any of the many literary factions that were so characteristic of the 1920s. This is important, because modernism in ge-neral, and the avant-garde in particular, imply not just an innovative approach to aesthetic practice and a particular ideological worldview, but a way of organising literary life through membership of and participation in artistic groups. The large body of crucial archival material that has been published in


Russia over the last decade or so has yet to advance a more detailed picture of Platonov’s aesthetics either (other than through deductive scholarship). We lack significant documentary material for crucial years during the com-position of works such as and ‘Kotlovan’ that constitute Platonov’s greatest claim to be considered a modernist. Moreover, those documents that have been published shed inconclusive light on the question of his aesthetic principles. Whether writing to his wife or jotting down observations and ideas in his note books, Platonov seems to have been particularly coy about giving voice to his personal experience of art and creativity. Where he does attempt some commentary, as in the numerous articles he wrote in the first half of the 1920s, his thinking comes across as improvisatory and contingent, rather than expressing any firm convictions about the theory and practice of writing (the articles he wrote for the journal Literaturnyj kritik in the late 1930s belong to a very different era, and their aesthetic assumptions are clearly shaped by political factors).

It is this absence that most thoroughly problematises any discussion of Platonov in terms of modernism. Theories, manifestos, polemics and public statements about the nature and aims of creativity are not secondary to an author’s literary work, but rather constitute an integral part of modernist and especially avant-garde cultural practice. The production of a large body of explicit commentary is crucial to modernism’s commitment to disturbing representation by placing emphasis on the artistic mediation of reality and foregrounding extra-literary and meta-literary elements in the work of art. Because, in the case of Platonov, we lack such a corpus of documents, we not only lack the means to understand him as a modernist, we may also lack the justification to see him as one in the first place. Not that there are nomoments in Platonov that invite interpretation in such terms. A work such as ‘Odnaždy ljubivšie’, for instance, comes close to aspects of LEF’s literatura fakta by fusing Platonov’s own letters to his wife with fictional material in a manner that recalls Russian modernism’s commitment to the synthesis of art and life by means of žiz .34 Langerak and Dhooge’s scrupulous consideration of the fusion of fact and invention that characterises the sketch ‘Pervyj Ivan’ also suggests something of the work’s refraction of avant-garde poetics.35 Similarly, the opening paragraph of ‘Vprok’ signals the presence of a complicated hierarchy of narrative levels that privileges ideological narra-tive over objective representation (arguably, it was the resulting ambiguity, rather than any allegedly anti-Soviet sentiment, that caused the work to be received with such hostility).36

There is also a broader methodological challenge in talking about lite-rary modernism and the avant-garde that Platonov particularly exemplifies. Much theorising about the nature and practice of the avant-garde is derived from the field of the visual arts, where the split between representation and abstraction is relatively clearly defined. A parallel field of study has been that


of the musical avant-garde, where the breakdown of traditional musical syntax around the turn of the century maps onto the move to abstraction in the visual arts. In both cases, the move from realism to modernism can be argued because both music and the visual arts are capable of thorough-going forms of abstraction. It is no accident that interart analogies and attempts to achieve effects related to either musical or visual culture were central to avant-garde poetics in literature, as it was only by means of such associations that language could begin even to aspire to such a radical renunciation of meaning. With the exception of zaum’, elements in works by Charms or even

-garde practices in poetry, literary modernism has a harder time when it comes to abstraction, and even the most innovative literary works will still need to engage with principles of representation and narrative derived from or shared with realism. It is for this reason that the most significant works of the literary avant-garde were those that began to break down the boundaries between literature and the other arts – whether zaum’s embrace of primal musicality, the posters, manifestos, and agitational and advertising texts of the futurists and LEF, or formalist interest in the possibilities of cinema before the era of sound.37 Platonov’s works betray few of the visual elements that are characteristic of the ornamental prose of Babel’ and Oleša, which betray the pervasive influence of 1920s Soviet visual culture and the attempt to force words to evoke the serendipity of vision. Even the visual impact of the texts published in the first edition of Epifanskie šljuzy seems not to have been of Platonov’s own doing. Isolated from literary life in Moscow and busy with technical work in Tambov, he arranged details of the volume’s publication in letters to his wife and appears to have borne little responsibility of the arrangement of the text on the page, whether in collaboration with the volume’s artistic editor, or through decisions of his own.38 Moreover, as his letters to his wife reveal, Platonov seems to have considered writing an inevitable profanation of his original ideas and a kind of vulgarisation of literary inspiration.39 Reading his side of their correspondence, we gain little sense of any engagement with the ma-teriality of culture that is so fundamental to the aesthetic of the avant-garde.

An obvious corollary of emphasising Platonov’s modernism is that, as Seifrid argues, “one risks denigrating or even ignoring a significant number of his works”.40 The frequent emphasis on works such as and ‘Kotlovan’, along with a tendency to treat modernism simply as a descriptive marker or evaluative term rather than as a dynamic and historically contingent cultural field establishes an interpretative framework that excludes other works from consideration, or at least relegates them to a secondary position in the critical hierarchy. The main implication of defining Platonov as a modernist is, however, that it leads to a widespread resistance to considering him in terms of realism (especially in the West, and also – since perestrojka and the col-


lapse of the Soviet Union – in Russia). In order to understand what might be meant by calling Platonov a realist – or rather, to ask what his relationship to realism might be – we should return to Brodsky for a moment. In ‘Catastrophes in the Air’, the line that Brodsky traces back to Dostoevskij gives rise to European modernism in general, to Platonov in particular. Con-trasted to this is the Tolstoyan line that ultimately engenders socialist realism. Yet Tolstoj was not just the progenitor of proto-socialist-realist works in the 1920s,41 nor was he merely a convenient source for the formulation of socialist realism as a doctrine. He also exerted a profound influence on aspects of Soviet modernism, whether on formalist criticism and concepts of ostranenie and de-automatisation, or on Babel’s aestheticist command of the literary word as such.

The writings of Aleksandr Voronskij are particularly helpful for re-constituting the cultural context of the second half of the 1920s, a crucial phase in the Soviet reception of Tolstoj, and an equally formative period in Platonov’s own artistic formation.42 Voronskij’s criticism can be seen, of course, as part of the process whereby the classics of the past were rein-tegrated into Soviet literary culture, yet his view of Tolstoj was considerably more complex than this particular narrative might suggest. Voronskij’s en-dorsement of the influence of Tolstoj rests on his broader view of art, which rejects verisimilitude and vulgar sociology on the one hand, and aesthetic solipsism on the other, promising instead a philosophical approach that sees art as the mediation of reality through the individual consciousness (first that of the writer, then that of the reader). Writing in Iskusstvo videt’ mir, for instance, Voronskij argues:

. -

43

In art truth comes to be known by means of aesthetic appreciation. Aesthetic appreciation comes about as a result of a feeling that the artist has formed his images in a manner that is true, comprehensible and near to us. But in forming his images in accordance with reality, a genuine artist is never simply a mirror that reflects phenomena in the world, although neither does he merely create them of his own accord. What is the mutual relationship in art between subject and object, artist and reality?


Dismissing much Soviet writing of the time as derivative only of Tolstoj’s realism (particularly when it came to the depiction of warfare and revo-lution), Voronskij proposed a wider and more generous interpretation of his prose as a model for contemporary revolutionary fiction.

Significantly, the other writer recommended by Voronskij was Proust, who figures in Iskusstvo videt’ mir not as the reviled modernist he was to become in the wake of the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, but as an artist who – like Tolstoj – correctly depicts not so much reality itself, as the processwhereby reality is perceived by the individual consciousness: “

, , --

” (“The reader is in fact convinced that the author is not making anything up, but truthfully reconstructing the most precious scenes and events from his childhood and youth”).44 Voronskij’s interest in Tolstoj was, however, far from unequivocal. He rejects, for instance, Tolstoj’s theory of art as infection, preferring to concentrate on his fiction as the best and most generative ex-ample of his aesthetic practice. Similarly, his anxiety that Tolstoj’s prose can occasionally confuse reality and representation leads him to temper Tolstoj’s mimeticism by reference to other nineteenth-century models: “ -

-, -

, ,” (“The art of the revolution ought to be able to

achieve an organic fusion of the realism of Tolstoj with the romanticism of Gogol’ and Dostoevskij, once it has freed the former from its excessive admiration of reality, and the latter from its gloomy misanthropy, pessimism and scepticism”).45

If Voronskij’s account of Tolstoj’s realism appears to be influenced by elements of modernist theory and practice, then this is because he reveals realism to have been much closer to what we take to be modernism in the first place. Moreover, Voronskij’s understanding of Tolstoj’s fictional prac-tice establishes a mode of realism that may help to account for certain aspects of Platonov’s own prose style. To be sure, Platonov’s philosophical pessi-mism is quite alien to the spirit of optimism that Voronskij attributes to Tolstoj’s and Proust’s profound love of reality and concomitant commitment to depicting it in artistic form. Yet Voronskij allows us to see that Platonov was a sensitive and imaginative pupil of a form of realism learnt, in part at least, from the example of Tolstoj, and which was as concerned with the means as much as the object of representation. As a through-going dualist, Platonov is as in debt to “the seer of the flesh” as to the “the seer of the spirit”, to borrow Merežkovskij’s famous distinction between the two writers. If we have attended to the influence of Dostoevskij on Platonov, we need to find equal room for the influence of Tolstoj.46 The irony is, of course, that it


was precisely Platonov’s acute and attentive apprenticeship in a realism derived from Tolstoj that was to set him at odds with socialist realism. Offi-cial literary policy was Tolstoyan (and, indeed, realist) in name only, lacking the self-reflective and self-questioning elements that are so characteristic of Tolstoj’s exploration of how – and even if – reality can be adequately me-diated through art.

It is this sense that Platonov’s realism was both wider and more in-ventive than socialist realism (and thus, close to the kind of realism repre-sented by Tolstoj) that has led to him being seen so often as a modernist. Yet this privileging of modernism rests, I would argue, on an impoverished understanding of both the theory and practice of realism, and of Russian realism in particular. Platonov himself proposed a salutary account of the risks inherent in such an impoverished account of realism, and offers us a potential justification for seeing his works in terms of a widely extended form of realism. The following quotation, from a memoir first published in 1985, constitutes one of Platonov’s frankest statements of his artistic views:

--

– – –

– --

–47

Some critic reproached Platonov for not being a realist but a dyed-in-the-wool formalist, claiming that his zaum’ was closer to psycho-pathology than to psychology.

“What an eccentric!” said Platonov with a quiet and short chuckle. “What an abject understanding of realism. Stand a person in the middle of a number of mirrors – how many reflections will there be? Count-less! And not one will be the same as another. Each one will reveal in its infinite mimetic variety his character, the internal structure of his soul, his holy of holies, at times unknown to the person himself. What sort of formalism is this? It is realism in action, not creeping, but with an unlimited sense of space, accessible most of all to literature and possibly also cinema… What an eccentric! He is utterly without imagination. And imagination is the first sign of talent, perhaps even reason.”


As with all memoirs, one should be cautious about taking such statements at face value. The whole thrust of post-Stalinist criticism had been to efface Platonov’s earlier reputation as a formalist by presenting him as a psychological realist, and this account is consistent with this particular tendency. Moreover, it is perfectly clear why, even in his own lifetime, Platonov would have sought to present himself as a realist at a time when he was subject to considerable criticism on both ideological and aesthetic grounds. Yet there is much that is of interest here. Platonov’s appeal to the “ ” (“infinite mimetic variety”) that results from placing reality in front of the mirror of artistic representation suggests parallels with Voronskij’s rejection of a reductive form of mimeticism that saw art merely as a direct reflection of the world. Similarly, Platonov’s allusion to cinema suggests an interest in the visual elements of realism that recalls the centrality of sight to Voronskij’s aesthetics (just as his appeal to the imagination suggests Voronskij’s emphasis on the crucial role of the artist in mediating between reality and its representation). In its simultaneous defence of realism and its attempt to widen the terms of what might constitute that same realism, Platonov’s views recall, perhaps, Do-stoevskij’s oft-cited claim about his own literary style: “ -

: , , -” (“People call me a psychologist:

that’s not true, I am merely a realist in the highest sense of the word, that is to say I depict every depth of the human soul”).

An unwillingness to take full account of the realist impulse in Platonov stems, then, from a broader tendency to juxtapose realism and modernism (almost invariably in favour of the latter), as well as an understanding of realism that can at times appear narrow and restrictive (especially if realism is taken to mean socialist realism). Within modernism itself, the organic con-nections between, say, symbolism and the avant-garde are routinely ob-served. Likewise, relations between the avant-garde and socialist realism have been asserted and, in part, accepted, as have links between socialistrealism and elements of symbolism.48 Yet it remains fully to transcend the seemingly fundamental discontinuity between realism and modernism, and to see that many of the features associated with the literature of modernism and the avant-garde can be traced back to diverse aspects of nineteenth-century realism, whether in an emphasis on the reality of everyday existence and a concomitant interest in the aesthetic representation of byt, the vocation of the artist in Russia, or the complex relationship between idealism (political and philosophical) and representation.49

Arguments in favour of Platonov’s modernism have traditionally rested on his inventive approach to language, as well as on elements of the absurd in his approach to narrative and description. Yet where, in modernism proper


(and especially the avant-garde), such features bespeak an attempt to shift the emphasis in literature from the depicted object to the means of representation, in Platonov we find a more ambiguous relationship between language and the world. Recent research has revealed much about the genesis of Platonov’s works and forced us to reassess the balance between imagination and reality in his prose. A good example of this trend would be the edition of ‘Kotlovan’published in St Petersburg in 2000, where the accompanying notes confirm Platonov’s debt to party resolutions, newspaper reports and political events more thoroughly and decisively than ever before. As the editors observe: “ [...]

” (“the anno-tations […] reveal the novella’s relationship to the specific realities of the epoch depicted in it and the work of the writer himself”).50 In his introduction to the edition, Valerij V’jugin does not directly refer to modernist and realist approaches to reading Platonov, yet his account of the paradoxical nature of Platonov’s writing nonetheless lends itself to consideration in such terms:

-.51

There is something more to the present-day sense of the paradoxical nature of Platonov than the unusual nature of the literary form that the artist has come up with. At its heart there is a dramatic link to the absurdity of the era itself, with an evident analogy to the processes that accompanied the collapse of the old Russia and the birth of the new one.

Viewed in this light, the avant-garde elements in Platonov’s writing stem less from his own imagination, than from an attempt to depict the absurdity of his times with a strange sense of fidelity and literalism (and, indeed, to evoke the traumatic experience of inarticulate idealists forced to deal with the fatal consequences of their actions). If Boris Groys is right in his claim that the ultimate representative of the Soviet avant-garde was Stalin himself, then what we find in Platonov’s works is potentially a combination of a bizarre, quasi-modernist content and a means of representation that has more in common with realism than we might at first be inclined to suspect.

Such an interpretation runs the risk, of course, of reiterating accounts of Platonov’s life that see him as little more than an idiosyncratic chronicler of his terrible age and attribute to his prose the kind of mimeticism it so em-phatically challenges. It also underestimates the extent to which his prose is simultaneously a vehicle for the reflection of historical events, as well as an


exploration into the philosophical underpinnings of those same events. Yet a more capacious understanding of realism – or, rather, of the relationship between realism and modernism – might offer a more complete and flexible account both of Platonov’s contribution to Russian literature of the 1920s and 1930s, and of his place in modern Russian literature more widely. It may also offer new perspectives on the various distinct phases in Platonov’s literary career, helping to integrate the works of the Voronež period, the masterpieces of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the engagement with socialist realism thereafter into one overarching whole. The point is emphatically not to establish conclusively what sort of a writer Platonov is – realist, socialist rea-list, symbolist, modernist, avant-gardist, even proto-postmodernist or what-ever else comes to mind. Rather, to consider the dynamic relationship be-tween the seemingly antithetical aesthetics in Platonov’s works is to discern something of his contribution to an evolving literary culture (one from which he was albeit often excluded).52 As in the case of the image of the icon of St George that has been repainted to depict Trockij in ‘ ,time and distance have begun to reveal the hidden origins of Platonov’s writings that have been temporarily overlaid by the gaudy colours of the intervening ages.

NOTES

1 Cited in: Tomas [Thomas] Langerak, Andrej Platonov: materialy dlja biografii 1899-1929 gg., Amsterdam, 1995, p. 24.

2 Cited in: E. Šubina, “Ja pomnju ich, ty zapomni menja…”, in: Andrej Platonov: Vospominanija sovremennikov, Eds. N.V. Kornienko, E.D. Šubina, Moskva, 1994, pp. 6-12 (p. 6).

3 I. Kramov, ‘Platonov’, in: Andrej Platonov: Vospominanija sovremennikov,pp. 130-136 (p. 131).

4 ’ “Vprok”’, in: Andrej Platonov: Vospominanija sovremennikov, pp. 281-285 (p. 285).

5

Sojuze sovetskich pisatelej 1 fevralja 1932 g.’, in: Andrej Platonov: Vospomi-nanija sovremennikov, pp. 293-317 (p. 306; emphasis added).

6 Ibid., p. 306.7 Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit, Cambridge, 1992,

p. 15.8 T.A. Nikonova, ‘Otzyv rukopisi sbornika statej “Tv

Platonovskij vestnik, 2009, No. 4, pp. 10-22 (p. 11). The report was written by Aleksandr Dymšic.


9 V. chudožestvennom mire Andreja Platonova)’, in: Andrej Platonov, -ch tomach, Vol. 1, Moskva, 1984, pp. 5-22 (p. 11).

10 ” (Vyraženie v proze)’, in: Andrej Platonov: M , Eds. N.V. Kornienko, E.D. Šubina, Moskva, 1994, pp. 10-46 (p. 32). The article was originally published in Problemy chudo-

, Vol. 2, Moskva, 1971, pp. 310-350.

11 Andrej Platonov, ‘Kotlovan’, Student, 1969, Nos. 13-14, pp. 5-113.12 Michail Geller, ‘Ob Andree Platonove’, in: Andrej Platonov, , Paris,

1972, pp. 9-22 (pp. 21-22).13 Elena Tolstaja- , in: Andrej Plato-

nov: M , pp. 74-83 (p. 82). The article was originally published in Russian Literature, 1981, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 231-280.

14 This argument concerns official culture only, where there could be no mention of politically unacceptable works. A proper study of how Platonov circulated in samizdat and what his influence on underground circles might have been remains to be written. Nonetheless, works such as and ‘Kotlovan’ were not entirely unknown in the public sphere, although reference to their existence was largely confined to scholarly works. As early as 1967, for instance, Lev Šubin mentioned the existence of as yet unpublished and ‘Kotlovan’ (‘Andrej Platonov’, Voprosy literatury, 1967, No. 6, pp. 26-54[pp. 31 and 39-40]).

15 Although it dates from after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Victor Erlich’s chapter on Platonov (‘Utopia as Apocalypse: The Anguished Quest of Andrey Platonov’) in his Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition(Cambridge, MA, and London, 1994, pp. 178-197), can be seen as indicative of this trend, inasmuch as it synthesises traditions of existing scholarship rather than exploring emerging critical trends. My account of the modernist underpinnings of much Western scholarship differs somewhat from that proposed by Seifrid, who is more inclined to see Western interest in Pla-tonov’s allegedly anti-Soviet (or rather, anti-Stalinist) politics as the obverse of Soviet socialist-realist criticism:

Mikhail Geller […] treats Platonov in essentially the same manner as his Soviet counterparts by characterizing his works as both an auto-biographical account of disaffection with Stalinism and a chronicle of the horrible failure of utopia endured by the Soviet people. The assumption of “realism” also underlies the conventional western view of Platonov as a social and political satirist. (Op. cit., p. 16)

16 Joseph Brodsky, ‘Catastrophes in the Air’, in: Less Than One: Selected Essays, Harmondsworth, 1986, pp. 268-303.

17 Iosif Brodskij, ‘Predislovie’, in: Andrej Platonov, Kotlovan, Ann Arbor, 1973, pp. 5-7, reprinted in Andrej Platonov: M , pp. 154-156. The pre-


face was translated by Carl Proffer in: Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit,Trans. Thomas P. Whitney, Ann Arbor, 1973, pp. ix-xii.

18 Brodsky, op. cit., p. 273.19 Ibid., p. 275.20 Ibid., p. 277.21 Ibid., p. 277.22 Ibid., p. 280.23 Ibid., p. 278.24 As Evgeny Dobrenko has argued with respect to various treatments of Soviet

modernism:

The only thing that unites them is an approach to early Soviet aesthetic theories derived from the positions of these theories themselves. […] In other words, it is as if scholars were still carrying on the ideological debates that remained unsettled in the 1920s, playing roles and seeing in the material they are analysing a convenient opportunity either to affirm their own political views or to refute the views of their opponents. (Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories, Trans. Jesse M. Savage, Evanston, 2005, p. xv)

For a specific study of the Russian avant-garde (particularly Charms and Chlebnikov) which argues that “avant-garde studies have always been under the avant-garde’s influence, providing intellectual support for this movement, rather than offering independent expert opinion” see Lada Panova, ‘Marketing the Avant-Garde: Co-opted Scholarship?’, Russian Literature, 2010, Vol. 68, Nos. 3-4, pp. 345-368 (p. 346).

25 Seifrid, op. cit., p. 18.26

Sojuze sovetskich pisatelej 1 fevralja 1932 g.’, p. 307.27 See, for instance, Valerij V’jugin, Andrej Platonov: Po

stanovlenija i voljucii stilja), Sankt-Peterburg, 2004, and ‘Kak pisal Platonov , in: “Strana filosofov” Andreja Pla-

tonova: problemy tvor , Vypusk 6, Ed. N.V. Kornienko, Moskva, 2005, pp. 564-602.

28 See, for instance, Robert Hodel, Erlebte Rede bei Andrej Platonov: Von ‘Vzvezdnoj pustyne’ bis , Frankfurt am Main, 2001, and Sprache und Erzählung bei Andrej Platonov, Eds. Robert Hodel, Jan Peter Locher, Bern, 1998.

29 Tolstaja-Segal, op. cit.; Ayleen Teskey, Platonov and Fyodorov: The In-fluence of Christian Philosophy on a Soviet Writer, Amersham, 1982.

30 The locus classicus of this argument is Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde,Frankfurt am Main, 1984.

31 Langerak, op. cit.; N.M. Malygina, Andrej Platonov: Po tika “ -nija”, Moskva, 2005, especially pp. 24-69.


32 Ben W. Dhooge, ‘Priem jazykovoj deformacii: Platonov, Charms, Chlebni-kov’, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Vol. 63, 2009, pp. 283-325, and ‘G.O. Vinokur’s “New Class Approach”: A Possible Model for A.P. Platonov’s Poetic Language?’, Russian Literature, 2012, LXXII-II, pp. 153-200. I am grateful to Dr Dhooge for letting me see a pre-publication copy of the latter article.

33 Jacques Catteau, ‘De la métaphorique des utopies dans la littérature russe et de son traitement chez Andrej Platonov’, Revue des études slaves, 1984, Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 39-50.

34 For a detailed consideration of the relationship between Platonov’s personal letters and his literary work, see Natal’ja Kornienko, ‘ pistoljarij i tekst Platonova: opyt real’no- -literaturnogo kommen-tarija’, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Vol. 63, 2009, pp. 327-355, and ‘“Pis’ma o ljubvi i gore”: pis’mo i tekst’, in: Archiv A.P. Platonova, Vol. 1, Ed. N.V. Kornienko, Moskva, 2009, pp. 377-397.

35 Tomas [Thomas] Langerak, ‘Ob odnom “techRussian Literature, 1999, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp.

207-2 Ivan (Za-metki o tech chsja ljudej)”’, in: Archiv A.P. Pla-tonova, pp. 52-80.

36

“ ”), –

– -

–-

.

If, in what follows, we refer to the traveller as myself (“I”), then this is for concision of expression, and not because we admit that weak-willed observation is more important than exertion and struggle. Quite the opposite – in our time the wandering observer is the least important thing and little more than vermin, since he is not a direct participant in the cause of creating communism. Moreover, even the true observer who sees things as they really are can have no existence in our time, as he finds himself outside of labour and the structure of the proletariat. Truly valuable observation can occur only from a feeling of vital work in the organisation of socialism.(See ‘Vprok. Bednjackaja chronika’, in: Andrej Platonov, firnyj trakt: Povesti 1920-x- a 1930-ch godov, Moskva, 2009, pp. 284-350 [p. 285])


37 See, for instance, Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Literary Experiments, 1900-1930, Princeton, 1984.

38 See ‘Pis’ma iz Tambova. 1926-1927 gg.’, in: Archiv A.P. Platonova, pp. 443-480.

39 Writing to his wife about ‘ firnyj trakt’ on 27 January 1927, Platonov claimed: “ , -

. – !” (“I must vul-garise and modify my thoughts so that acceptable works come about. That’s right – vulgarise!”; ibid., p. 467).

40 Seifrid, op. cit., p. 18.41 Platonov’s notebook for 1931 contains the following revealing line: “

, – ” (“don’t forget that Tolstoj and his Fadeevs are idealists”; Andrej Platonov, Zapisnye knižki: Materialy k biografii, 2nd Ed., Moskva, 2006, p. 74).

42 On Platonov and Voronskij, see Malygina, op. cit., pp. 50-53 and 66-67. For a study that reads Platonov within the context of 1920s neo-realism, see T.T. Davydova, Russkij neorealizm: Ideologija, po aja voljucija,Moskva, 2005.

43 A. Voronskij, Iskusstvo videt’ mir: Sbornik statej, Moskva, 1928, p. 11.44 Ibid., p. 40.45 Ibid., pp. 51-52.46 See, for instance, Audun J. Mørch, The Novelistic Approach to the Utopian

Question: Platonov’ -Utopian Legacy, Oslo, 1998. An initial attempt to explore the connection between Platonov and Tolstoj can be found in my own article, ‘Andrei Platonov’s Happy Moskva: Tolstoi, Stalin and the Soviet Self’, in: Happiness Soviet Style: Petrified Utopia, Eds. Marina Balina, Evgeny Dobrenko, London, 2009, pp. 201-215.

47 A. Javi , ‘Dumy ob Andree Platonove’, in: Andrej Platonov: Vospominanija sovremennikov, pp. 23-30 (p. 28).

48 The principal work here is, of course, Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, Trans. Charles Rougle, Princeton, 1992. See also Irina Gutman, ‘The Legacy of the Symbolist Aesthetic Utopia: From Futurism to Socialist Realism’, in: Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, Eds. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, Stanford, 1994, pp. 167-196. On Platonov specifically, see Tho-mas Seifrid, ‘Platonov, Socialist Realism, and the Legacy of the Avant-Garde’, in: Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, Eds. John E. Bowlt, Olga Matich, Stanford, 1996, pp. 235-244.

49 For a crucial work that achieves just this, see Stephen C. Hutchings, Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday, Cambridge, 1997.

50 V.Ju. V’jugin (with T.M. Vachitova, V.A. Prokof’ , in: Andrej Platonov, Kotlovan: Tekst, material tvor eskoj istorii, Sankt-Peter-burg, 2000, pp. 140-162 (p. 140).


51 V.Ju. V’jugin, ‘Povest’ -nova’, in: Platonov, Kotlovan: Tekst, material tvor eskoj istorii, pp. 5-18(p. 5). See also Natal’ja Dužina’s detailed commentary, Putevoditel’ po povesti A.P. Platonova ‘Kotlovan’, Moskva, 2010. Compare Robert Hodel’sdescription of evengur as

-

-an artistically

created world which is perceived by the reader as an epic-unreal, dreamlikespace. At the same time, present in this space are facts and realities of Russian and Soviet life which give this space concrete form and prevent its complete transformation into metaphor”; ‘Perevody romana problem irreal’no-real’nogo prostranstva’, Russian Literature, 1999, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 171-184 (p. 171).

52 For a revealing study of Lermontov as a writer who defies the earlier romantic/realist dichotomy, see Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, A Fallen Idol is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transmission, Stanford, 2007.

platonov and theories of modernism

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