One certainly should decide for oneself with whom to go; and Russian fiction obviously flocked to the former, prodded in that direction, we shouldn't forget, by history and her ironclad agent: the Polizeistaat. And normally it would be unjustifiable to pass judgment on such a choice, made under such circumstances, were it not for several exceptions, the main one being the career of Andrei Platonov. But before getting to him, it would be only prudent to emphasize once more that at the turn of the century, Russian prose was indeed at a crossroads, at a fork, and that one of those two roads wasn't taken. Presumably too many things were happening on the outside to waste that famous mirror of Stendhal's on scrutinizing the contortions of one's psyche. The vast, corpse-strewn, treachery-ridden historical vistas, whose very air turned solid with howls of ubiquitous grief, called for an epic touch, not for insidious questioning —never mind that that questioning could have prevented this epic sight.
If anything, this idea of a fork, of a road not taken, can be somewhat helpful to an average reader in his distinguishing between two great Russian writers, in putting him on alert whenever he hears about the "traditional values" of the Russian literature of the nineteenth century. The main point, though, is that the road not taken was the road that led to modernism, as is evidenced by the influence of Dostoevsky on every major writer in this century, from Kafka on. The road taken led to the literature of socialist realism. To put it differently, in terms of guarding its secrets, Providence suffered some setbacks in the West but it won in Russia. However, even knowing as little as we do about Providence's ways, we have a reason to assume that it may be not entirely happy with its victory. That is at least one explanation for its gift to Russian literature of Andrei Platonov.
3
If I refrain from stating here that Platonov is a greater writer than Joyce or Musil or Kafka, it's not because such ratings are in poor taste or because of his essential unavailability through existing translations. The trouble with such ratings is not poor taste (when was that ever a deterrent to an admirer?) but the vagueness of hierarchy that such a notion of superiority implies. As for the inadequacy of available translations, they are that way through no fault of the translators; the guilty party here is Platonov himself, or rather, the stylistic extremism of his language. It's the latter, along with the extreme character of the human predicament that Platonov is concerned with, that makes one refrain from this sort of hierarchical judgment, for the above-mentioned writers were not exposed to either extreme. He definitely belongs to this echelon of literature; yet, on those heights there is no hierarchy.
Platonov was bom in 1899 and died in 1951 of tuberculosis, which he contracted from his son, whose release from prison he had eventually won, only to have his child die in his arms. From a photograph, a lean face with features as simple as a mral landscape looks at you patiently and as though prepared to take in anything. By education a civil engineer (he worked for several years on various irrigation projects), he began to write rather early, in his twenties, which coincided with the twenties of this century. He fought in the civil war, worked for various newspapers, and, although reluctantly published, achieved a great reputation in the thirties. Then came the arrest of his son on charges of anti-Soviet conspiracy, then came the first signs of official ostracism, then came World War II, during which he was in the army working for the army newspaper. After the war he was silenced; a short story of his published in 1946 invited a full-page pogrom by the top critic of Literaturnaya Gazeta, and that was it. After that he was allowed only occasional freelance ghostwriting jobs, such as editing some fairy tales for dildren; beyond that, nothing. But then his tuberculosis worsened and he couldn't do much anyway. He and his wife and their daughter lived on his wife's salary as an editor; he'd moonlight as a street sweeper or a stagehand in a theater nearby.
He wasn't arrested, although that review in Litera- turnaya Gazeta was a clear sign that his days as a writer were numbered. But they were numbered anyway; the top honcho in the Writers' Union administration even refused to endorse the secret police's case against Platonov, both because of his grudging admiration for the man and because he knew that the man was ill. Regaining consciousness after a bout with his illness, Platonov would often see by his bedside a couple of men gazing at him very keenly: the state security was monitoring the progress of his illness to determine whether they should bother with this character, and whether the Writers' Union official's stubbornness was justified. So Platonov died of natural causes.
All of this, or most of it, you'll no doubt find in various encyclopedias, forewords, afterwords, in dissertations about his work. By the standards of the time and the place, it was a normal life, if not an idyllic one. However, by the standards of the work Platonov did, his life was a miracle. That the author of The Foundation Pit and Chevengur was allowed to die in his own bed can be attributed only to divine intervention, if only in the guise of a fraction of scruples surviving in the men from the administration of the Writers' Union. Another explanation could be that neither novel had ever been in circulation, since both were presumably, in Platonov's view, works in progress, temporarily abandoned, much in the same way as Musil's The Man without Qualities. Still, the reasons for which they were temporarily abandoned also should be regarded as divine intervention.
Chevengur is some six hundred pages long; The Foundation Pit is one hundred and sixty. The first is about a man who, in the middle of the civil war, gets it into his head that there is a possibility that socialism has already emerged somewhere in a natural, elemental way; so he mounts his horse, which is named Rosa Luxemburg, and sets off to discover whether or not that is the case. The Foundation Pit takes place during collectivization, in some provincial landscape where for quite some time the entire population has been engaged in digging a vast foundation pit for the subsequent erection of a many-storied brightly lit building called "socialism." If from this idiotically simpleminded description one concludes that we are talking about yet another anti-Soviet satirical writer, with perhaps a surrealistic bent, one should blame the description's author, as well as the necessity for making the description; the main thing one should know is that one is wrong.
For these books are indescribable. The power of devastation they inflict upon their subject matter exceeds by far any demands of social criticism and should be measured in units that have very little to do with literature as such. These books never were published in Soviet Russia and they never will be published there, for they come closest to doing to the system what it has done to its subjects. One wonders whether they will ever be published in Russia, for apart from concrete social evil, their real target is the sensibility of language that has brought that evil about. The whole point about Andrei Platonov is that he is a millenarian writer if only because he attacks the very carrier of millenarian sensibility in Russian society: the language itself—or, to put it in a more graspable fashion, the revolutionary eschatology embedded in the language.