The Portable Platonov

Andrei Platonov was born in Yanskaya, Sloboda, Russia. An engineer and land-reclamation specialist, Platonov was also a writer. He His first poems were published in the 1920s. Stories and folk tales followed. He became a member of the Pereval group of the 1920s and early 1930s. This group of writers was influenced by the humanistic, cultivated ideas of the critic Voronsky.

After World War II, the more extreme proletarian writers and critics of the time vehemently attacked Platonov for what was considered his ideological mistakes. Platonov was forced to stop publishing. Russians knew only a portion of his real output until the 1960s when he became popular again.

During the 1970s, publication of Platonov's writings in the West revealed him to be an important figure in modern Russian prose. His key novels, The Fountain Pit (1975), and Chevengur (1978), explored the bitter ironies of a land of triumphant socialism-a new Utopia-which systematically deforms language. Profoundly pessimistic, the novels reveal a man deeply skeptical of attempts to remold human nature and highly sensitive to the dark underside of Stalin's grandiose economic projects.

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