Bottom-Up Modernity: Andrey Platonov’s Socialist Surrealism

Abstract

The article examines Soviet modernity of the 1920s–1930s via Andrey Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit. That analysis shows how the concepts of time and language may operate as keys to the concept of modernity. Platonov linked time and language to illustrate how time is constituted through language and language through time, whereas various combinations of them constitute heterogeneous processes within one period of time. Three types of “language-time” constellations can be clearly distinguished in the novel: most of all, there is the dominant language of the Soviet system as it established itself through a flood of neologisms to form a new social reality and a new Soviet man; and it is a type of language that corresponds to the temporal mode of the future. Then there is the traditional, native language — the language of the past which is being repressed. And finally, there is the symbolic language of the body, the mute language of the present. This leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the common view, modernity is not singular and not based on a single semantics and a single temporal logic. In fact, there is a bifurcation into a top-down and a bottom-up modernity. The former views the world from the standpoint of a theoretician or ideologist, and the latter forms a picture of the world from the viewpoint of the masses. The paper explores characteristics of these phenomena and describes the essence of bottom-up modernity, which The Foundation Pit presents as a socialist surrealism. Surrealism is understood here as the real way of life for a person from the masses, and it comes about through the dissociation of different languages in speech accompanied by a dissociation of temporal modes. The article takes this path to reveal the potential of Platonov’s prose for theorizing about modernity.