The roots of Russian millenarianism are essentially not very different from those of other nations. This sort of thing always has to do with this or that religious community's anticipation of its oncoming peril (less frequently, but as well, with the presence of a real one) and with that community's limited literacy. The few who read, and the still fewer who write, normally get to run the show, suggesting as a rule an alternative interpretation of Holy Writ. On the mental horizon of every millenarian movement there is always a version of a New Jerusalem, the proximity to which is determined by the intensity of sentiment. The idea of God's City being within reach is in direct proportion to the religious fervor in which the entire journey originates. The variations on this theme include also a version of an apocalypse, ideas of a change of the entire world order, and a vague, but all the more appealing because of that, notion of a new time, in terms of both chronology and quality. (Naturally, transgressions committed in the name of getting to a New Jerusalem fast are justified by the beauty of the destination.) When such a movement succeeds, it results in a new creed. If it fails, then, with the passage of time and the spread of literacy, it degenerates into utopias, to peter out completely in the dry sands of political science and the pages of science fiction. However, there are several things that may somewhat rekindle soot-covered embers. It's either severe oppression of the population, a real, most likely military peril, a sweeping epidemic, or some substantial chronological event, like the end of a millennium or the beginning of a new century.
If only because the species' eschatological capacity is always one and the same, there is not much point in going on about the roots of Russian millenarianism in great detail. Its frnits, too, were not of such great variety, except for their volume and for the influence their volume exerted on the language of the epoch in which Platonov happened to live. Still, talking about Platonov and that epoch, we should bear in mind certain peculiarities of die period that directly preceded the arrival of this epoch in Russia, as well as elsewhere.
The period—the turn of the century—was indeed a peculiar one because of its climate of mass agitation fueled by the incoherent symbolism with which this chronological non-event—the turn of the cenhiry—was invested by a variety of technological and scientific breakthroughs, by the spread of means of communication, causing a qualitative leap in the masses' self-awareness. It was the period of great political activization: in Russia alone by the time of the Revolution there were more political parties than in today's America or Great Britain. Along with that, it was the period of a great upsurge in philosophical writing and in science fiction with strong utopian or social-engineering overtones. The air was filled with expectations and prophecies of a big change, of a new order of things coming, of restructuring the world. On the horizon there was Halley's comet, threatening to hit the globe; in the news, military defeat at the hands of the yellow race; and in an undemocratic society it's usually one step from a czar to a messiah or, for that matter, to the Antichrist. The period, to say the least, was a bit on the hysterical side. So it's indeed small wonder that when revolution came, many took it for what they had been looking for.
Platonov writes in the language of the "qualitative change," in the language of a greater proximity to New Jerusalem. More precisely, in the language of paradise's builders —or, as in the case with The Foundation Pit, of paradise's diggers. Now, the idea of paradise is the logical end of human thought in the sense that it, that thought, goes no further; for. beyond paradise there is nothing else, nothing else happens. It can safely be said, therefore, that paradise is a dead end; it's the last vision of space, the end of things, the summit of the mountain, the peak from which there is nowhere to step^^xcept into pure Chronos; hence the introduction of the concept of eternal life. The same actually applies to hell; structurally at least, these two things have a lot in common.
Existence in the dead end is not limited by anything, and if one can conceive that even there "circumstances condition consciousness" and engender their own psychology, then it is above all in language that this psychology is expressed. In general, it should be noted that the first casualty of any discourse about utopia—desired or already attained —is grammar; for language, unable to keep up with this sort of thought, begins to gasp in the subjunctive mood and starts to gravitate toward categories and constructions of a rather timeless denomination. As a consequence of this, the ground starts to slip out from under even the simplest nouns, and they gradually get enveloped in an aura of arbitrariness.
This is the sort of thing that is happening nonstop in Platonov's prose. It can safely be said about this writer that his every sentence drives the Russian language into a semantic dead end or, more precisely, reveals a proclivity for dead ends, a blind-alley mentality in the language itself. What he does on the page is approximately as follows: he starts a sentence in a way familiar enough that you almost anticipate the tenor of the rest. However, each word that he uses is qualified either by epithet or intonation, or by its incorrect position within the context, to the extent that the rest of the sentence gives you not so much a sense of surprise as the sense that you have compromised yourself by knowing anything about the tenor of speech in general and about how to place these words in particular. You find yourself locked in, marooned in blinding proximity to the mean- inglessness of the phenomenon this or that word denotes, and you realize that you have got yourself into this predicament through your own verbal carelessness, through trusting too much your own ear and the words themselves. Reading Platonov, one gets a sense of the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language and that with each new— anyone's—utterance, that absurdity deepens. And that there is no way out of that blind alley but to retreat back into the very language that brought one in.
This is perhaps a too laborious—and not terribly accurate or exhaustive (far from thatl )—attempt to describe Platonov's writing technique. Perhaps, too, effects of this sort can be created in the Russian language only, although the presence of the absurd in grammar says something not just about a particular linguistic drama but about the human race as a whole. All I have tried to do is to highlight one of Platonov's stylistic aspects that happens to be not so much even a stylistic one. He simply had a tendency to see his words to their logical—that is absurd, that is totally paralyzing—end. In other words, like no other Russian writer before or after him, Platonov was able to reveal a self- destructive, eschatological element within the language itself, and that, in tum, was of extremely revealing consequence to the revolutionary eschatology with which history supplied him as his subject matter.
In casting a sort of myopic, estranged glance at any page of this writer, one gets a feeling of looking at a cuneiform tablet: so densely is it packed with those semantic blind alleys. Or else his pages look like a great department store with its apparel items turned inside out. This by no means suggests that Platonov was the enemy of this utopia, of this socialism, of the regime, collectivization, etc.; not at all. It's just that what he was doing with the language went far beyond the framework of that specific utopia. But then this is what every language inevitably does: it goes beyond history. However, what's interesting about Platonov's style is that he appears to have deliberately and completely subordinated himself to the vocabulary of his utopia—with all its cumbersome neologisms, abbreviations, acronyms, bureaucratese, sloganeering, militarized imperatives, and the like. Apart from the writer's instinct, this willingness, not to say abandon, with which he went for newspeak, indicates, it would seem, his sharing of some beliefs in the promises the new society was so generous with.