It would be false as well as unnecessary to try to divorce Platonov from his epoch; the language was to do this anyway, if only because epochs are finite. In a sense, one can see this writer as an embodiment of language temporarily occupying a piece of time and reporting from within. The essence of his message is languace is a millenariam device, history isn't, and coming from him that would be appropriate. Of course, to get into excavating the genealogy of Platonov's style, one has inevitably to mention the "plaiting of words" of centuries of Russian hagiography, Nikolai Leskov with his tendency to highly individualized narrative (so-called "skaz"—sort of "yarn-ing"), Gogol's satirical epic sway, Dostoevsky with his snowballing, feverishly choking conglomeration of dictions. But with
Platonov the issue is not lines of succession or tradition in Russian literature but the writer's dependence on the synthesizing (or, more precisely, supra-analytical) essence of the Russian language itself, conditioning—at times by means of purely phonetic allusions—the emergence of concepts totally devoid of any real content. His main tool was inversion; and as he wrote in a totally inverted, highly inflected language, he was able to put an equals sign between "language" and "inversion." "Version"—the normal word order—came more and more to play a service role.
Again, very much after Dostoevsky's fashion, this treatment of language was more befitting a poet than a novelist. And, indeed, Platonov, like Dostoevsky, wrote some poetry. But if Dostoevsky, for his Captain Lebyadkin poem about the cockroach in The Possessed, can be considered the first writer of the absurd, Platonov's verses earn him a niche in no pantheon. But then scenes such as the one in The Foundation Pit where the bear-apprentice at some village's smithy is enforcing collectivization and is more politically orthodox than his master put Platonov somewhat beyond the status of a novelist as well. Of course, it could be said that he was our first properly surrealist writer, except that his swealism wasn't a literary category tied in our mind with an individualistic world view but a product of philosophical madness, a product of blind-alley psychology on a mass scale. Platonov wasn't an individualist; quite the contrary: his consciousness was determined precisely by the mass scale and both the impersonal and the depersonalizing character of what was happening. His novels depict not a hero against a background but rather that background itself devouring a hero. And that's why his surrealism, in its turn, is impersonal, folkloric, and, to a certain degree, akin to ancient—or for that matter any— mythology, which, in all fairness, should be regarded as the classical form of surrealism.
It's not egocentric individualists whom both the Almighty and literary tradition automatically endow with a crisis-prone sensibility but traditionally inanimate masses that express in Platonov's works the philosophy of the absurd; and it is due to the numerical vastness of its carriers that this philosophy becomes far more convincing and utterly unbearable in its magnitude. Unlike Kafka, Joyce, and, let's say, Beckett, who narrate quite natural tragedies of their "alter egos,» Platonov speaks of a nation which in a sense has become the victim of its own language; or, to put it more accurately, he tells a story about this very language, which turns out to be capable of generating a fictitious world, and then falls into grammatical dependence on it.
Because of all this, Platonov seems to be quite untranslatable, and, in one sense, that's a good thing: for the language into which he cannot be translated. Still, the body of his work is very substantial and relatively diverse. Cheven- gur and The Foundation Pit were written, respectively, toward the end of the twenties and in the beginning of the thirties; Platonov remained operational for quite some time after that. In this sense, his case could be regarded as that of Joyce in reverse: he produced his Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners a^tcr Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. (And, as we are at this moment on this subject of translation, it is worth recalling that sometime in the late thirties one of Platonov's short stories was published in the United States and that Hemingway was extolling it. So it is not entirely hopeless, although the story was very third-rate Platonov; I think it was his "The Third Son.")
Like every living creature, a writer is a universe unto himself, only more so. There is always more in him that separates him from his colleagues than vice versa. To talk about his pedigree, trying to fit him into this or that tradition of literature is, essentially, to move in a direction exactly opposite to the one in which he himself was moving. In general, this temptation of seeing a literature as a coherent whole is always stronger when it's viewed very much from the outside. In this sense, perhaps, literary criticism indeed resembles astronomy; one wonders, though, if this resemblance is really flattering.
If there is any tradition of Russian literature, Platonov represents a radical departure from it. I, for one, don't see either his predecessors, save perhaps some passages in The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, or his successors. There is a sense of terrific autonomy to this man, and much though I'd like to link him to Dostoevsky, with whom he perhaps has more in common than with anyone else in Russian literature, I'd rather refrain from doing so: it would illuminate nothing. Of course, what screams to be pointed out is that both Chevengur and The Foundation Pit thematically, at least, can be regarded as sequels to Dostoevsky's The Possessed because they represent the realization of Dosto- evsky's prophecy. But then again, this realization was supplied by history, by reality; it wasn't a writer's conjecture. For that matter, one can see in Chevengur, with its central character's passage through the lands in his search for the organically emerged socialism, and with his long soliloquies to a horse called Rosa Luxemburg, an echo of Don
Quixote or Dead Souls. But these echoes reveal nothing either—except the size of the wilderness in which one cries.
Platonov was very much on his own, and in a big way. His autonomy is the autonomy of an idiosyncratic metaphysician, a materialist, essentially, who tries to comprehend the universe independently, from his vantage—or disadvantage—point of a small muddy provincial town lost like a comma in the infinite book of a vast, sprawling continent. His pages are studded with people of this sort: provincial teachers, engineers, mechanics, who in their godforsaken places entertain their huge homemade ideas about world order, ideas that are as mind-boggling and fantastic as these men's own isolation.
I have gone on about Platonov at such length partly because he is not very well known in this country, but mainly in order to suggest that the mental plane of regard of contemporary Russian prose is somewhat different from the rustic view of it generally entertained in the West. The uniformity of the social order doesn't guarantee that of mental operation; an individual's aesthetics never completely surrenders to either personal or national tragedy, no more than it surrenders to either version of happiness. If there is any tradition in Russian prose, it is one of searching for a greater thought, for a more exhaustive analysis of the human condition than is at present available, of looking for a better resource to ladle from to endure the siege of reality. But in all that, Russian prose is not that different from the vectors of other Western and Eastern literatures: it's a part of Christian civilization's culture, and neither the best nor most exotic part at that. To regard it otherwise amounts to racism in reverse, to patting the poor relation on the shoulder for his decent conduct, and that should somehow be stopped: if only because this attitude encourages sloppy translations.