Andrei Platonov (Russian: Андрей Плато́нов) (1899-1951) was the pen name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov, a Russian writer of the Soviet period whose works anticipate existentialism. Platonov was one of the early writers who emerged after the Russian revolution. Although he was a Communist, his works were banned in his own lifetime for their skeptical attitude toward collectivization and other Stalinist policies. His famous works include Chevengur, a dystopian novel. 1899 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... 1951 was a common year starting on Monday; see its calendar. ... The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) (Russian: (СССР)   listen?; tr. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views the individual, the self, the individuals experience, and the uniqueness therein as the basis for understanding the nature of human existence. ... The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a political movement in Russia that climaxed in 1917 with the overthrow of the Provisional Government that had replaced the Russian Tsar system, and led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, which lasted until its collapse in 1991. ... This article is about communism as a form of society and as a popular movement. ... In the Soviet Union, collectivisation was a policy introduced in the late 1920s, of consolidation of individual land and labour into co-operatives called collective farms (Russian: колхоз, kolkhoz) and state farms (sovkhozes) with the goals to increase the agricultural production, to put it under the control of the state, as... Iosif (usually anglicized as Joseph) Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин), original name Ioseb Jughashvili (Georgian: იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი; see Other names section) (December 21, 1879[1] – March 5, 1953) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union. ... A dystopia (or alternatively cacotopia) is a fictional society, usually portrayed as existing in a future time, when the conditions of life are extremely bad due to deprivation, oppression, or terror. ... A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ...

Life

The son of a metalworker and the eldest of ten children, Platonov was born in a village near the town of Voronezh. After spending his adolescence in various trades and serving in the Red Army, he became an engineer in 1924, writing short pieces for newspapers. He began publishing stories and poems in the early 1920s, while working as a land reclamation expert in central Russia. Here he witnessed the disease and upheaval caused by forced collectivization. By 1927 he went to Moscow to write full-time. He was a peripheral member of the Pereval peasant writers group, and produced the short story collection The Locks of Epiphany. Voronezh (Воро́неж) is a large city in the south of Central Russia, not far from Ukraine. ... Red Army flag The short forms Red Army and RKKA refer to the Workers and Peasants Red Army, (Рабоче-Крестьянская Красная Армия - Raboche-Krestyanskaya Krasnaya Armiya in Russian), the armed forces organised by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918. ... Collective farming is an organizational unit in agriculture in which peasants are not paid wages, but rather receive a share of the farms net output. ... Saint Basils Cathedral Moscow (Russian/Cyrillic: Москва́, IPA:   listen?) is the capital of Russia, located on the river Moskva, and encompassing 1097. ...

He produced his two major works, the novels 'Chevengur' and 'The Foundation Pit', between 1926 and 1930, overlapping slightly with the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928. These works, with their implicit criticism of the system, drew much official criticism, and although a chapter of 'Chevengur' appeared in a magazine, neither were published in full. Other short stories which did appear contributed even more to the decline of his reputation. Five-Year Plans or Piatiletkas (пятилетка) were a series of nation-wide centralized exercises in rapid economic development in the Soviet Union. ...

In the Stalinist Great Purge of the 1930s, Platonov's son was arrested at the age of fifteen, and exiled to a labor camp where he contracted tuberculosis. When he was finally returned, Platonov himself contracted the disease while nursing him. During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), Platonov served as a war correspondent, but his disease grew worse, and after the war, he ceased to write fiction, instead putting out two collections of folklore. He died in 1951. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Tuberculous lungs show up on an X-ray image Tuberculosis is an infection with the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which most commonly affects the lungs (pulmonary TB) but can also affect the central nervous system (meningitis), lymphatic system, circulatory system (miliary TB), genitourinary system, bones and joints. ... The Russian Revolution Main article: Russian Revolution During World War I, Tsarist Russia experienced famine and economic collapse. ... World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: Immense human sacrifice, fierce indoctrinations, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons - the atom bomb being the ultimate. ... A war correspondent is a journalist who covers stories first-hand from a war zone. ...

Although he was relatively unknown at the time of his death, his influence on later Russian writers has been considerable. Some of his work was published or reprinted during the 1960s' Khrushchev Thaw. Because of his political writings, perceived anti-totalitarian stance, and early death of tuberculosis, some English-speaking commentators have called him "the Russian George Orwell". In Soviet history, Kruschevs Thaw or Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period between the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, when repressions and censorship reached a low point. ... George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell was a British author. ...

Writing

Platonov's writing has strong ties to the works of earlier Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky. He also uses much Christian symbolism. Fyodor Dostoevsky. ... Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament writings of his early followers. ...

His 'Foundation Pit' uses a combination of peasant language with ideological and political terms to create a sense of meaninglessness, aided by the abrupt and sometimes fantastic events of the plot. Joseph Brodsky considers the work deeply suspicious of the meaning of language, especially political language. This exploration of meaninglessness is a hallmark of existentialism and absurdism. Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 – January 28, 1996), born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Russian:Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский) was a Russian-American poet, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-1992. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views the individual, the self, the individuals experience, and the uniqueness therein as the basis for understanding the nature of human existence. ... Absurdism is a philosophy stating basically that the efforts of man to find meaning in the universe will ultimately fail because no such meaning exists (at least in relation to man). ...

Although his works generally take a materialist stance, denying the importance or existence of the soul, he is stylistically very distinct from Socialist Realism, which focused on simple language and straight-forward plots. Materialism is the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are comprised of material. The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most famously by... Stalin as an Organiser of the October Revolution by Karp Trokhimenko Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style of realistic art which has as its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism. ...

List of works

• The Sky-Blue Depths (verse)
• Locks of Epiphany (short stories)
• Meadow Craftsmen
• The Innermost Man
• Chevengur (novel)
• The Foundation Pit (novel)
• The Sea of Youth (novel)
• Fourteen Little Red Huts (play)
• Soul (novella)
• The Potudan River (short stories)
• Happy Moscow (unfinished novel)

References

• The Literary Encyclopedia: [1]
• Mirra Ginsburg, translator's introduction to The Foundation Pit, 1975.

External links

• Some texts by Andrei Platonov in the original Russian