Andrey Platonov: Utopia as a private matter. On the writer’s first ‘five-year plan’ in literature

Abstract

The article is concerned with the stylistic particularities of A. Platonov’s early works (the novellas The Sluices of Epiphany [Yepifanskie shlyuzy], The Innermost Man [Sokrovenniy chelovek], and For Future Use [Vprok]), characterized by a new kind of consciousness inspired by socialist utopia. In the opinion of the critic V. Kozlov, it is during the first Soviet five-year plan that Platonov’s style emerges as uniquely recognizable thanks to, among other things, his personal experience as a land amelioration engineer — a job he took under the birth name of Klimentov. Kozlov argues that a life in utopia as personally experienced by the first Soviet social and scientific activist and administrator finds its way into the personalities of Platonov’s characters as well as his plots and inimitable language of narration. However, by the end of the five-year period, the writer had unambiguously deviated from the path of the official Soviet literature. The reason being that, while the Soviet utopia had been conceived as a social and political project, Platonov’s works demonstrate that an individual may experience their private Soviet utopia, which often dramatically, if not tragically, differs from the collective idea.