Review: Joy Williams on Andrey Platonov

He is never playful or ironic. He is sincere to the point of pathology, a holy pathology

Andrey Platonov was born in Voronezh 1899 and died in 1951, meaning he spent his youth under Lenin and his mature writing years under Stalin. Difficult times for his genius and radiant peculiarity. He did not enjoy the approval of the massive grinding apparatus that was Russia. Little of his writing passed censorship. The Writers Union which defined and encouraged what was appropriate Soviet literature made his life miserable and most of his work was not published until the eighties, decades after his death. The novella Soul not until 1999.

Joseph Brodsky considered him the equal of Joyce, Kafka, and Beckett, throwing in Faulkner, Musil, and Proust for good measure. He also believe that the suppression of his two novels, The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, set back Russian literature at least fifty years. A surreal writer, not in the literary sense but in a linguistically psychological, eschatological, and absurdist one, Platonov is never playful or ironic. He is sincere to the point of pathology, a holy pathology that moves as easily, as calmly, between the delusions and the concerns of humankind as it does the habits and fidelities of animals, grasses, and stars. His camels and tortoises, sheep, cows, and horses are given full dignity and respect. He perceives them through their souls in the same almost magical manner that he presents his people—characters does not seem the appropriate assignation. He writes from an animal sense of the puzzlement of life, its small dear comforts, the futility of its unrealizable promises. At the same time he writes at the brink of language, of what can be justified, comprehended. The dream of a Communist Eden was real, its implementation absurd. The execution of the plan insured its inherent annihilating madness. Platonov’s language dutifully, tirelessly records the anguished stoicism and ghastly thinking of a village’s residents on the eve of unfathomable change.