Platonov had already been criticized for his story called “Doubting Makar,” when he wrote another story, “Profit,” continuing this line, which was printed in the magazine Krasnaya Nov in 1931. Stalin was an attentive reader of all magazines and his sharp observing eye did not allow Platonov’s story to pass unpunished. Although Stalin himself spoke often later about “exaggerations” in the work in the villages, nonetheless he wanted jealously to reserve for himself any right to mention these deficiencies. On Platonov’s story, in Stalin’s red pencil, was written “Scum!” with an exclamation mark.
Platonov’s literary life became more difficult. His prose was now seldom published and he lived by writing short critical reviews. He tried to get these published in a collected edition, but he did not succeed. Thanks to regular denunciations of Platonov by the critic Ermilov—the same man about whom Mayakovsky said in the letter written just before his death: “Sorry I didn’t quarrel with Ermilov"—the already completed volume was killed and scrapped.
It is surprising that Platonov was not arrested; perhaps his personal friendship with Fadeyev and Sholokhov helped him. But in 1938 his fifteen-year-old son Platon was accused of taking part in some kind of alleged counterrevolutionary conspiracy. This boy wrote poetry, by the way, and, judging by reports of those who saw it, very ably. He was given ten years, and sent to the far north, to Norilsk. Platonov wore himself out, haunting all the thresholds there were to haunt, but nothing helped. Then he wrote a letter to Stalin. At this moment Sholokhov came to Moscow to intercede for his own arrested relatives. Stalin received him, and according to rumor Sholokhov spoke up for Platonov’s son, too. The boy returned home in 1940, exhausted, ill with tuberculosis, and he soon died. Platonov must be given credit for the fact that during these most difficult years he did not withdraw into himself, nor become embittered, but continued to write and to turn out some of his clearest writings filled with belief in human goodness, like “Fro,” “The Third Son,” and other stories.
And this was the man who had been called Scum!
In his apartment on Tverskoy Boulevard, Platonov lived right next to Herzen’s house, and when the war began he received an instruction from the Writers Union: “Take care of Herzen’s house.” Platonov carried out the order with the conscientiousness characteristic of him, and during the Fascist bombings he put out sixteen fires on the roof of the building. Then he went to Ufa, where in the confusion of evacuation his manuscript Travels in Humanity was irretrievably lost. But he did not relax behind the lines. Platonov began to work as a war correspondent on the paper Red Star, which was the most popular of all at the front, writing sketches and stories, giving all his strength for the victory of his fatherland. For Platonov this was not just a geographical patriotism. He always hated Fascism, and even before the war he had mercilessly held it up to shame in his stories “An Angel Flew in the Midnight Sky” and “The Dusty Wind.”
The war came to an end. It would have seemed that Platonov had showed his love for his country—although he didn’t need to prove it. He expected, of course, that a great deal would now change in his life. At that time a collection of Russian tales had already been published, worked up by him and protected by Sholokhov’s name as editor. From 1929 until 1941 Platonov had had only one thin little book of his own issued, in 1937!
But after the publication of his short story “Homecoming” in 1946, criticism landed on Platonov again, and his name vanished from the pages of magazines and newspapers. When this story is reread now, it is hard to imagine why this most virtuous of stories was so attacked. For its gloominess, it seems, for its savoring of the darker aspects of the rear during the war…
Platonov died in 1951 as a result of wounds he had received in fighting during the liberation of Czechoslovakia. He left behind him two unpublished novels, Chevengur and Kotlovan, nine un-produced plays, nine unproduced motion picture scenarios, and a great many stories, sketches, and articles which had either never seen the light of day or had not been collected in book form.
Little by little justice has begun publicly to rehabilitate his talent. First one and then another magazine has discovered and still goes on discovering Platonov’s unknown writings for its readers. One of his collections was even printed in an edition of 100,000 copies. “Fro” has been made into a film, and an innumerable quantity of enthusiastic articles have been written about Platonov. I can state with certainty that there is not an educated reader in the U.S.S.R. who does not know Platonov, and not a single professional writer alive in this country who would not pay tribute to his mastery. It is true that he has been unknown abroad until now, because there have been no noisy scandals connected with his name and there are some so-called “specialists on Soviet literature” who have a weakness for just this kind of scandal.
But I repeat—Platonov’s is a delayed-action talent, and it may be that his safety fuse has burned only halfway to the explosion. Why was he held back, throughout his whole life, to a lower rank?
Because in the whole line of his creativity, which continued the great tradition of Russian literature, the tradition of “defense of the so-called little man,” the tradition of “guilt for all,” he was fundamentally contradicting the fashionable Stalinist theory of man as “a screw in the machine of government,” and the proverb which justifies everything: “If you chop wood, chips fly.” He loved locomotives, and he knew how to treat each screw gently so the locomotive would run well. He was concerned with screws and he humanized them; but to treat people as screws would have been intolerable to him. He loved trees, and he understood that every little chip by a merciless axe is a part of the murmuring green greatness. He realized that the theory of the inevitability of sacrificing chips can end up by destroying a whole forest. And although Platonov was disposed, like all men of good character, to forgive the times for blows against himself, he could not forgive them for blows against other people, against the humanity he loved so much, for whose sake he lived and wrote.
It’s sad, of course, that he died so soon. Had he lived, he would have seen that much has changed for the better nonetheless, in the life of our people, although even now we are far from perfection. He would have rejoiced at the return to our people of many names which had been undeservedly slandered.
He would have rejoiced over the flight of a Russian into space, although he probably would have reminded us that not everything has yet been put in order here on our sinful earth; after all, he was originally an organizer of the good exploitation of the land.
He would have rejoiced over the success of the novel The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, and he would have rejoiced over the appearance of such new names in our literature as Aksyonov, Kazakov, Solzhenitsyn, Akhmadulina, Voznesensky, Okudzhava, Chukhontsev, Brodsky, and many others, just as he once was glad about V. Nekrassov’s first novel, In the Stalingrad Trenches. Some things, too, would have distressed him, and he would have said so openly in what he wrote, just as he did before he died.
But he is no longer here, and it is up to a new generation of Russian writers to say what he has left unsaid.
His declaration, made when he was young, can serve as a final answer to all his critics:
“You talk about a great virtuous Beauty and her pure sons who know her, see her, and exalt her. You place me in the gang of her detractors and defamers, people unfit and powerless to look at her, as if I should leave the house of beautiful art, and not muss Beauty’s white clothing. There’s no place there for someone dirty, like me. All right. I’ve walked this earth for twenty years and I haven’t met the person you’re talking about—Beauty. This may be because she lives outside the earth, and only a few better people have seen her, not I. But I think this is not so: the reason why I haven’t met Beauty is that she doesn’t exist as someone separate, by herself. She is the property of all of us, and mine, too. Beauty is all the days and things there are, and not something elevated, unattainable, and proud. The reason why I’ve met but never thought about Beauty is that I’m used to her, as to my mother, whom I will remember very well when she dies, but whom I forget now because she’s always in my heart. I live and don’t think, while you, reasoning all the time, are not living, and you don’t see a thing, not even Beauty, which is as inseparable from man, and as true to him, as his bride. You love very little, and see little. I am a man. I was born on this wonderful living earth. What are you asking me about? About what Beauty? Only the dead can ask about her—for the living there is no ugliness. I know that I am one of the most insignificant of people. You have no doubt noticed this, but I also know another thing: the more insignificant a creature is, the more glad it is for life, because it is least deserving of it. The very smallest mosquito is the happiest spirit. You would not be capable of noticing this. You are legal and worthy people, while I only want to live as a man. For you being a man is just a habit— for me it is joy, a holiday…