An author might start a novel this way: “On his thirtieth birthday, Voshchev was laid off from his factory job for weakness and woolgathering.” Or he might lay out a whole little scene, with the protagonist thinking about his birthday on his way to work, then being called into the personnel office and told the bad news, with persuasive descriptions of decor and tones of voice. But that’s not how Andrei Platonov does it. Here’s the first paragraph of Kotlovan, in the superb translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, The Foundation Pit
On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life, Voshchev was made redundant from the small machine factory where he obtained the means for his own existence. His dismissal notice stated that he was being removed from production on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.
There’s nothing attractive about those sentences. Their wordiness, their labored syntax, their odd and rebarbative jargon, everything about them seems to want to push you away rather than lure you in. And yet you are drawn in; there’s something about the narrative, some funhouse-mirror quality, that makes you want to see where it’s going. You follow Voshchev to “a beer room for workers from the villages and low-paid categories” where he hears “sincere human voices” and remains “until evening, until the noise of a wind of changing weather; he then went over to an open window, to take note of the beginning of night, and he caught sight of the tree on the clay mound—it was swaying from adversity, and its leaves were curling up with secret shame.” The next morning, Voshchev walks further down the road but is soon exhausted, and at this point comes a sudden irruption of intensity, the kind of thing we hope for from a Russian novel:
A dead, fallen leaf lay beside Voshchev’s head; the wind had brought it there from a distant tree, and now this leaf faced humility in the earth. Voshchev picked up the leaf that had withered and hid it away in a secret compartment of his bag, where he took care of all kinds of objects of unhappiness and obscurity. “You did not possess the meaning of life,” supposed Voshchev with the miserliness of compassion. “Stay here—and I’ll find out what you lived and perished for. Since no one needs you and you lie about amidst the whole world, then I shall store and remember you.
“Everything lives and endures in the world, without becoming conscious of anything,” said Voshchev beside the road. And he stood up, in order to go, surrounded by universal enduring existence. “It’s as if some one man, or some handful of men, had extracted from us our convinced feeling and taken it for themselves!”
Here the words “dead,” “earth,” “meaning,” “endure,” and especially “conscious” are signals of where the novel is going. Who is living and who and what is dead, and can we always tell the difference? Who is conscious, and of what? What meaning can we find, enduring on and in the earth? Soon Voshchev joins a crew of men digging the titular pit, intended for the foundation of a building to house proletarians. But there are many discussions of the novel’s political content (Chandler and Meerson’s Afterword does a good job of summarizing the history and politics involved, though I’ve added a short bibliography below for those particularly interested); what I want to focus on here is the amazing language.
And yet you can’t discuss the language without talking about politics, because politics is the soil it grows out of. Platonov has been called a natural Stalinist; what is meant by that is that he shared the Stalinist belief that life could be radically transformed, that nothing was impossible to truly conscious people who had thrown off the shackles of the bourgeois past. (Of course, in Platonov’s case this came as much from Nikolai Fedorov, with his loony insistence that mankind must become immortal and bring everyone who ever lived back to life, as from Marx and Lenin.) Like a good Soviet citizen, filled with optimism and enthusiasm, Platonov gave up his early career as a writer after the famine of 1921 and spent the next years going around Russia supervising the digging of ponds and wells, the draining of swampland, and the building of power stations. Chandler writes:
And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia. Other writers who visited collective farms did so as members of Writers’ Brigades—and they, of course, were shown only a few model collective farms. Platonov, however, was sent by the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, and he saw what was really happening.
That experience complicated his optimism. He seems still to have retained a belief that the shining communist future was a possibility, but having seen the stupidity, inefficiency, corruption, and brutality that were everywhere on the ground, no matter what the Kremlin planners might intend, he had to respond, to tell the truth as he saw it, and that response involved a complex and brilliant manipulation of the very language the Kremlin used to propagate its ideas. Characters are always talking about “directives” and “backwardness” and “tempo,” regurgitating the catchwords that ceaselessly bombard them from Party organizers, “plenipotentiaries,” and other emissaries from officialdom. One of them asks: “Is it really sorrow inside the whole world—and only in ourselves that there’s a five-year plan?” The five-year plan inside us is one of the things the novel is about; some of the characters are trying to fulfill it by constant work, others by denunciations and violence, and the main viewpoint character, Voshchev, by questioning and introspection, irritating pretty much everyone else (as Platonov irritated the Party, despite his professed devotion to its ideals). By the time the novel heads into increasingly surreal-seeming and deadly territory, you’re so accustomed to the strangeness of the telling that you can’t escape its spell.
Fedorov called modern writing “the work of men who have stopped being human and who have become typewriters.” It may be that the style of The Foundation Pit is, in its way, an attempt to revive the “sacred, resurrectional character” of language and thus restore fraternal relations to mankind. There’s never been anything else like it; even Platonov quickly retreated from it (he did, after all, want to be published), and his later works are written in a more “normal” style. But this will always be his masterpiece.
The first paragraph in Russian:
В день тридцатилетия личной жизни Вощеву дали расчет с небольшого механического завода, где он добывал средства для своего существования. В увольнительном документе ему написали, что он устраняется с производства вследствие роста слабосильности в нем и задумчивости среди общего темпа труда.
A few books to help the reader who wants more background:
A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit
The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization
Above all, read Moshe Lewin’s classic The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia
Nikolai Fedorov, with his loony insistence that mankind must become immortal and bring everyone who ever lived back to life
Hat, I pointed out once before at this blog that there is a different way to approach Fedorov’s work. Just go with the flow, man, loosen up ! You’re much too literal-minded here. Maybe Fedorov was personally looney, and believed in everything he wrote – so what ? Forget about that, let his ideas wash over you like the plot of an epic science-fiction novel. These are Russians we’re dealing with, for pete’s sake ! All that crazy stuff in Fedorov, Tsiolkovky et al. is fabulously thought-provoking.
You know why Fedorov thought that everyone who ever lived should be brought back to life, right ? It was because he thought it was unjust that material progress should benefit only those who were born later. Think about it. At least take a look at Obshee Delo sometime.
In that comment I cited one of your own blogs from 2007. There you were appreciative of Fedorov, but apparently you have fallen from the faith again:
“supervising the digging of ..”: yep, supervising is the lark.
Must be because I’m ni kulturny, but that opening graf would put me off the book completely. It seems to me to be literal, word for word, translation of something that may well work in Russian, but (as always, for me) totally fails in English.
At least take a look at Obshee Delo sometime.
Oh, I fully intend to.
There you were appreciative of Fedorov, but apparently you have fallen from the faith again
I don’t know why you say that. I called him loony then and now, and I still have an unreasonable fondness for such loons. I just don’t take them as seriously as you do.
Sigh. “Seriously” is not the point. You are a figure of authority on Russian authors worth reading. Tender souls may be frightened off Fedorov by what you say – but then where would the next generation of loonies come from ? “Theory”, “deconstruction” etc. are in decline, thank God – so we need new talent.
I don’t know why, but I have an unreasonable fondness for these unaffiliated crackpots, burrowing away
I think you’ve got him completely wrong, Language. According to the great (in my opinion) John Gray in Straw Dogs, Fedorov was an absolute disaster for the modern world:
Thanx, Crown. I did say his ideas were fabulously thought-provoking, didn’t I ?
Calling Fedorov a loony is one extreme, but attempting to demonize him is also an extreme. “The Marxian-Federovian cult of technology” is a ludicrous notion. My understanding is that Fedorov was essentially unknown in the Soviet Union after WW 2.
The Russians had no monopoly on destruction of the environment and obsession with technological solutions. Look at the GDR, look at America, look at Vietnam and China – the non-Russian examples are endless.
That’s true–lots of dictators have tried to mess about with their environment and not only dictators, either–but look at a former-communist country like Romania, its environment was ruined. Or look at China with its huge dam projects and its attitude towards global warming. Of course you can say the same about the USA: the environment is less important than the economy. I’d better shut up.
In any case, what I find interesting in Fedorov is how his ideas fit into a larger context of (what I guess I must call) moral philosophy.
According to the Wikipedia article you linked, “Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life.” Doesn’t sound like my kind of thinker. And portraying Fedorov as the dark genius of the twentieth century is even loonier than his own ideas.
Thanks for this, LH. I’ve been wondering whether or not to read Platonov for a while, and now my mind’s made up. Curious as to your thoughts on NYRB in general (the whole alternate-canon thing is vaguely maddening, and very illustrative of the last ten years of publishing), and on Grossman’s Life and Fate in particular. Though maybe you’ve already posted about it, and I’ve missed it.
I think NYRB Books is great; not sure what you mean about the “alternate-canon thing” and the last ten years of publishing. Haven’t read Life and Fate, but I wrote this about Everything Flows:
@ Paul, as Hat says, “There’s nothing attractive about those sentences. Their wordiness, their labored syntax, their odd and rebarbative jargon, everything about them seems to want to push you away rather than lure you in.” It is a very creative translation (not word for word) of the Russian, which sounds just the same way. But whether it draws you in or not — as they say, “one doesn’t argue about taste.”
the whole alternate-canon thing is … very illustrative of the last ten years of publishing
I dunno. What about Knopf’s Blue Jade Library in the ’20s, based on Carl Van Vechten’s suggestions?
Thanks Mab. Nice to feel there are two approaches to this.
Actually, Paul, I sympathize. I read the Foundation Pit in college and hated it. HATED IT. Yuck. Puke. Couldn’t stand it. But then Robert Chandler had questions about the Russian as he was doing a new translation, and I passed them on to a Russian translator friend who knew Platonov very well, and WHAMO PRESTO BAM a new world opened for me. It doesn’t surprise me that Hat, who is the Reader From Heaven, (that is, the reader every writer dreams of) got it. I think we mortals have to read 50 pages or so with a suspension of disbelief (and a bottle of Maalox). But if you stick it out, you might be surprised. Or not. But I think Platonov is worth the effort.
Oh, I’m sure I would have hated it in college too. I’ve come to many things late in life, beets, Cecil Taylor, and Platonov among them.
I suppose if I could be brought to listen to, and be interested in, if not like, Schnittke, I might get into Platonov if only via the companion book…
Schnittke ! No effort involved in appreciating his music, I would have thought. But not a “companion book” <*shudder*> on his music.
However, I wouldn’t go straight from Mozart to Schnittke – you might have a nervous breakdown.
I meant to say that I love the way you wrote this post, Language. One of your best.
Wow, thank you. I spent several days trying to compose it, then released it into the wild with a sense that I hadn’t managed to say anything like what I wanted to say.
Besides finding the discussion of Platonov very interesting, I especially liked the way the abrupt beginning worked. Just saying.
I read Platonov a long time ago on the recommendation of Joseph Brodsky. I thought then, and still do, that The Foundation Pit is one of the most powerful books of the 20th C. Maybe my reading of Russian history, especially about the Soviet state and its strange Marxist-Leninist jargon prepared me for it, but Platonov’s use of that jargon seemed absolutely appropriate and brilliant from the get-go.
I agree with Mr Crown. It’s a great post. Perhaps I’m looking at it from the angle of a translator, but what I liked is that you pointed out the other ways an author might have approached the beginning. But Platonov didn’t do X or Y or Z. He did something else. Why? Why does it sound so strange? There was a reason for that; what is it?
Well, I am not as old as Hat even now (and never will be). I still can’t stand beets (every so often, my beet-loving wife induces me to try ’em, but nope, they still taste like beets to me), and I can’t stomach this sort of prose even for a paragraph, never mind a whole book. Perhaps because I have to read, decipher, and act upon far too much of this kind of thing.
<rant>Just the other day I received a rejection notice from a government department for a multi-page form that I had mailed them, telling me that I had failed to complete the form. I thought, “Oh well,” and unfolded the enclosure to see which entries were blank. They all were. Instead of returning my form with some indication of what I had done wrong, they sent me an entirely virgin form!</rant>
“You did not possess the meaning of life,” supposed Voshchev with the miserliness of compassion.
This appears to be one of those insane said-bookisms-in-translation that you denounced back in 2012: inserted, rationalized, quipped, and the like.
I’ve read Platonov in the tenth grade and did not like it at all then. Perhaps it wasn’t the right age to appreciate his prose.
Skimmed a few pages of the Foundation Pit now, there are pretty good quotes throughout, if anything else. I like this one, for example:
“A man who wasn’t in the war is like a woman who didn’t give birth – he lives like an idiot”
Learned an interesting historical tidbit too.
In conversation between older crippled vet and Voshev where the above quote occurs, they refer to the WWI as “the real war”.
Presumably, young Voshev has seen the Russian Civil War as everyone in Russia, but didn’t consider it the “real war”.
Such attitude appears to have been common – to people accustomed to realities of the World War, the Russian Civil War, with its indisciplined militias and lack of trench warfare and million-sized armies seemed like a toy conflict, despite millions of victims (mostly from disease and starvation, relatively few died from warfare directly)
rom Dorothy Sayers, “The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club” – it’s the 1920s and two young ex-officers are considering a much older veteran at the Club.
A pair of spindle shanks with neatly-buttoned shoes propped on a footstool was all that was visible of General Fentiman.
‘Queer, isn’t it,’ muttered his grandson, ‘to think that for Old Mossy-face the Crimea is still _the_ War, and the Boer business found him too old to go out. He was given his commission at seventeen, you know — was wounded at Majuba—’
I don’t know if this was also true of the Napoleonic wars in early 19th century Britain. In the literature people seem to talk about “fighting in the Peninsula” rather than “in the War” tout court.
to people accustomed to realities of the World War, the Russian Civil War, with its indisciplined militias and lack of trench warfare and million-sized armies seemed like a toy conflict
Toy conflict or no toy conflict, my maternal granfather, who had taken part in WWI, went missing—I think he was killed—during the civil war. Mother was a posthumous child.
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