Andrei Platonov

Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) was a Soviet novelist, short story writer and essayist born in Voronezh, in central Russia. He wrote in Russian and belongs to the first generation of writers to emerge after the 1917 Revolution. His significance lies in an original prose that, while he never abandoned his communist convictions, questioned from within both the forced collectivisation of agriculture and the official rhetoric of the time.

The son of a railway metalworker, he started working at thirteen, taking on a wide variety of jobs. During the Civil War he worked as a war correspondent for the Red Army, and from 1919 he was publishing poems, articles and criticism in local newspapers. Around 1920 he adopted the pen name Platonov, drawn from his father's patronymic, in place of his original surname Klimentov. After studying electrical engineering, he spent years on electrification and land reclamation projects, an experience that let him see at first hand the peasant uprisings caused by collectivisation. In 1927 he moved to Moscow to devote himself fully to literature.

Between 1926 and 1930 he wrote his two major novels, Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, which carried an implicit criticism of the system and were not published in the USSR at the time. His story For Future Use (1931), about collectivisation, drew harsh condemnation and kept him out of print for years. His writing mixes rural speech with political jargon, draws on Christian symbolism and engages with thinkers such as Nikolai Fyodorov, creating an atmosphere of strangeness close to the absurd. His highly personal style set him apart from socialist realism.

His son was arrested in 1938 during the Great Terror, and the following years were hard for the family. Platonov was able to publish again during the Second World War, thanks to a special permission from Stalin, and worked as a war correspondent. After the publication of The Return in 1946 he was censored again and accused of slander, and he lost any real chance of earning a living from writing. He died in Moscow in 1951, weakened by tuberculosis.

His legacy came slowly. Part of his work was reprinted in the 1960s, during the Khrushchev thaw, and his novels did not appear in full in Russia until the late 1980s. He is now regarded as a singular voice who influenced later writers and is often linked to existentialism and the literature of the absurd.