In this blog post, we will carefully examine Platonov’s contradictory life and literary trajectory through his major works and biography to understand why he was criticized and banned during his lifetime, and how he was reevaluated after his death.
Platonov’s Life and Work
The history of Andrei Platonov and the reception of his works is as contradictory and ambivalent as the fate of 20th-century Russia itself. Platonov’s greatest paradox is that, despite being a staunch communist by birth and ideology, he was denounced as an anti-Soviet figure and became one of the most strictly banned authors in the Soviet Union. He left behind a diverse body of work spanning various genres, including two novels, numerous short stories, poetry, fairy tales, plays, and screenplays; however, many of his works—including his masterpieces ‘Chebengur’, ‘Happy Moscow’, and ‘Kotlovans’—were never published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.
Platonov’s works, which were subjected to harsh criticism during his lifetime as critics questioned the purity of his ideology, remained unrecognized for a long time after his death. Some of his major works were first published in the West, and Russian readers were only able to discover Platonov after Perestroika. Because of this career trajectory, he was long regarded as the “Soviet George Orwell” or understood as an anti-socialist and enemy of the Soviet Union.
Even after his special “homecoming” in the late 1980s, his fate as a writer was far from smooth. Leaving behind the brief spotlight of the post-Soviet era, his works were sometimes regarded as experimental literature for a select few enthusiasts due to his uniquely obscure language and narrative structure. At the end of the 20th century, there were skeptical views that reading Platonov would end up being nothing more than a passing fad.
However, as time passed and conditions emerged that allowed for a more objective discussion of the socialist experiment, and as new cultural codes began to dominate Russia, Platonov’s literature continues to be read and actively studied as a work in progress. Regardless of the ongoing debate over the failed communist utopian experiment, he is now recognized as a pioneer who opened up a new narrative genre and a philosopher with a unique system of thought, and is being reevaluated as a master of 20th-century Russian prose.
Not only do contemporary Russian writers place Platonov on the same level as Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner and find the roots of their own creativity in his works, but even critics from the Soviet tradition—who once expressed skepticism about his writing—now rank him among the greatest Soviet prose writers, alongside Gorky and Sholokhov. So where do the contradictions in Platonov’s life and art stem from—a man who, though a communist, could not help but be branded an anti-Soviet writer; who, despite his low level of education, is recognized as a profound philosopher; and who, despite being criticized for his imprecise use of language, is acknowledged as a master of prose? Let us begin with this question.
Platonov was born in 1899 in Yamskaia Sloboda, a village on the outskirts of Voronezh, a small-to-medium-sized city in southern Russia, as the eldest of eleven children in a poor working-class family. Due to extreme poverty, he had to enter the workforce from a young age, and in a letter, he recalled, “Life robbed me of my boyhood and transformed me from a child directly into an adult.” The image of him caring for his younger siblings and worrying about making ends meet at a young age recurs in the characters of his novels, particularly in works following ‘Chekhov’s’ ‘Proshana’.
As a boy, Platonov drifted from one job to another—as a day laborer, a railway engineer’s assistant, and a foundry worker at a pipe factory—before enrolling in the Voronezh Railway Institute in 1918. The opportunity for a poor worker to receive a university education was a result of the 1917 Revolution, and since the Revolution paved the way for him to turn to literature, it was only natural that Platonov actively embraced communist ideology.
After 1917, he participated in editing the university magazine and published a relentless stream of diverse works—poems, essays, short stories, and newspaper editorials—arguing for the legitimacy of the revolution and the victory of the proletariat with a direct and impassioned voice. In his early 1920s criticism, he wrote declaratively about the inevitability of the communist revolution and the role of art, while in his prose he used science-fiction devices to unfold dreams of a bright future and global transformation brought about by communism. Envisioning a future beyond the end of history and dreaming of humanity’s conquest of nature and the triumph of science, the narrator of this period emphatically advocates the ideal of world transformation with a voice full of conviction.
Thanks to his positive background as a former worker and his active contributions to local magazines and newspapers, in 1920 Platonov attended the founding ceremony of the All-Russian Union of Proletarian Writers as a representative of Voronezh. His responses to the conference questionnaire reveal a strong sense of self-awareness: while acknowledging his low level of education and lack of time as limitations, he stated that he was not influenced by any particular author and did not belong to any specific literary trend.
However, after witnessing the famine that swept across Russia in 1921, he decided to temporarily halt his literary work and throw himself directly into the suffering of reality. Seeing the land scorched by drought and the starving masses before his eyes, he felt he could no longer remain merely a literary observer. He threw himself into the front lines of the fight against drought—not as a writer, but as an electricification project manager and land reclamation engineer—seeking to put Lenin’s goal of “the electrification of the entire country” into practice with his own hands.
Platonov continuously reported to Moscow on the reality of the dying land and the people suffering from famine, and appealed for the sympathy of all humanity through editorials and short stories. His belief that it was the duty of every communist to share in the suffering of those surviving on fake flour and bark bread, and his assertion that humanity must be equal not only in happiness but also in the face of suffering, clearly illustrate his stance during this period.
Believing that communism, together with science and technology, could transform the world and save humanity, he requested government funding to dredge reservoirs and dams, reclaim land, and establish electricity and water supply systems. At the same time, he felt deep despair upon witnessing the inefficiency of bureaucracy and the opulent lifestyles of officials who were out of touch with the people. These experiences as a land reclamation engineer later became the literary foundation for several of his works, including ‘Kotlovans’ and ‘Chebengur’.
Encounter with Real Communism
The years 1926 and 1927 marked a significant turning point in Platonov’s life. In February 1926, he was selected as a member of the Central Committee of the Union of Agriculture and Forestry Workers, and in June of the same year, he moved to Moscow with his family. However, a month later, he was dismissed from his job, which led him to question his career as an engineer.
Nevertheless, in October, he was reassigned as an engineer in the Land Reclamation and Irrigation Department, and subsequently took on the role of head of the Tambov Regional Land Reclamation Department, leaving for Tambov on a business trip. His move from Voronezh to Moscow and his solitary experience in Tambov reborn him as a true writer.
The grim reality of Russia he encountered in Tambov became a source of literary inspiration for Platonov, and he took it upon himself to become a witness and chronicler of his era.
In early 1927, Platonov began to focus entirely on literature, setting aside his other profession. In a letter sent to his wife ○○○ at the time, he wrote, “Wandering through the rural backwaters, I could not believe that somewhere out there lay the splendor of Moscow, art, and literature. But I believe that true art and true ideas can be born even in these backwaters.” As if to prove this point, he churned out a vast number of works “to the point of trembling hands.”
During his brief stay in Tambov, Platonov completed what is known as the Tambov Trilogy. In January, he finished ‘The Path of Ether’, a science fiction novel dreaming of humanity’s salvation through the invention of an electronic multiplication device; he wrote ‘The Gates of Yepipan’, a historical novel depicting the ideology of world transformation and the contradictions of its implementation through the eyes of a British engineer sent to Russia during the reign of Peter the Great; and in February, he completed “The City of Gradov,” a satirical novel dealing with the problems of bureaucracy and utopia.
Platonov wrote to his wife, “As long as my heart beats, my brain exists, and this dark freedom of creation remains within me, the Muse will not betray me.” However, it seems he already harbored a premonition that his Muse might bring about a dark future rather than dazzling literary success. In the works of this period, one no longer hears only the soliloquizing narrator steeped in the pathos of world transformation. While this is partly the result of his search for a new methodology of artistic creation, it is largely due to the author’s growing awareness of the discrepancy between ideology and reality, as well as the contradictions revealed in the process of its realization.
In “The Path of Efir” and “The Gates of Yepipan,” which take the form of science fiction and historical novels, the vague, romantic perception of revolution and world reform is gradually overcome. Instead, the helplessness and sense of defeat of human reason and science in the face of nature, along with the fear of failure, take root as the dominant mood of the works.
In March 1927, Platonov returned to Moscow after completing a business trip. Even in Moscow, he worked tirelessly on works such as “The Secret Man,” “Yamskaya Sloboda,” and “The Builders of the State,” and finally began to immerse himself in writing the novel “Chebengur,” which he would later describe as his “encyclopedia of creativity.” The year 1927 marked Platonov’s successful debut in Moscow, as well as the beginning of his arduous literary journey characterized by his “conflict with the Soviet regime.”
Beginning with the publication of a short story collection in 1927, several episodes of “Chebengur” were published in various literary magazines in 1928, drawing the attention of the critical community. However, this attention was not literary praise but rather a hostile view labeling him an “anti-Soviet.” The decisive catalyst for this criticism was the short story “Makar the Doubtful,” published in 1929. Critics, including Averbakh, then the leader of the Russian Proletarian Writers’ Union (RAPP), read anti-Soviet undertones between the lines of the work, labeling him an anarchist and a nihilist, and branding him a “traitor to proletarian literature.”
Ultimately, attempts to publish ‘Chebengur’ with the help of Litvin–Molotov and Gorky fell through, and by the end of 1929, Platonov had completely abandoned plans to publish the novel.
The critical gaze of the literary world during this period was perhaps inevitable. This was because, following his move to Moscow, Platonov’s works had taken on a distinctly satirical tone. In his novellas and short stories—such as “The Secret Man,” “Makar the Doubtful,” and “Kotlovans”—the setting shifted to the author’s own time or a period close to it, and the portrayal of communist bureaucrats was so realistic that it bordered on the grotesque.
Even taking into account the tragic foreboding and doubts regarding communist reality that had already begun to emerge earlier, this shift toward satire during this period signifies a certain change in the author’s stance. If we view satire in the Bakhtinian sense as a “negative relationship toward an object,” then for Platonov at that time, objects of blind affection coexisted alongside objects of cynicism. The starting point of Platonov’s tragedy and contradiction was that the temporal and spatial distance necessary for critics and the author to understand that, while the objects of affection and cynicism appeared identical on the surface, they were in fact entirely different, had not yet been established.
The year 1929 was known as the “Year of Great Transformation” under Stalin. Building on his consolidated power, Stalin sought to transform the way of life throughout the Soviet Union; this was an attempt to reorganize not only daily life but also culture and the arts as a whole in a socialist manner. This all-out pressure marked the beginning of a tragedy, particularly for the intelligentsia, and it seems ironic that Platonov, who was perceived as a proletarian writer, suffered the greatest blow.
Why was Platonov unable to adapt to the Soviet utopia he had so ardently desired, and why did his works provoke Stalin’s wrath even more fiercely than those of “bourgeois writers”? It was because he took upon himself the role of a foolish saint—a “Eurozhev”—who spoke the truth of Russian tradition. His writing, which viewed reality through the eyes of a child or an idiot and spoke of it without filter, could not help but enrage the “Emperor’s New Clothes.”
In 1930, as criticism from reviewers intensified, Platonov completed the novella “For the Storehouse (Chronicle of a Poor Peasant)” and wrote several film screenplays. He also began conceptualizing another major work, the novella “Kotlovans.” This work simultaneously depicts the construction of communal housing for the proletariat and the process of rural collectivization. During this period, he wrote almost incessantly about his own era.
After reading “For the Storehouse,” the writer Pazeev harshly criticized the work, claiming it was not a chronicle of the poor peasant but of the rich peasant, and that it was “a curse on the new man, a curse on socialist reform, and a curse on the Party’s general line.” This scathing criticism is also linked to the fact that Stalin himself read the work and was enraged by it. The portrait of the contemporary world projected in Platonov’s works revealed that reality and myth had been inverted, and the protagonists constantly expressed doubts and anxieties about utopia.
Why, then, did Platonov feel compelled to continue writing about his era in a tragic and satirical manner, despite the criticism directed at him? At the end of ‘Kotlovans’, he makes an exception by including an epilogue. Just as the boy in ‘Chevengur’ dies without recovering in the communist utopia, in this novel as well, the girl who symbolized the future of socialism dies of illness. Platonov writes that this death might be his mistake—or rather, that he hopes it is a mistake.
He adds that this mistake stems from his “excessive anxiety and love for the object of his affection.” In other words, communism and the child were beings so dear to him that they also filled him with anxiety and fear.
In the early 1930s, amid a dogmatic social climate, Platonov sent letters of self-criticism acknowledging his errors to the editorial offices of major newspapers and magazines, but his explanations were not published in either ‘Literary Gazette’ or ‘Pravda’. This was because, due to the inherent ambivalence of Platonov’s language, even his words of self-reflection were highly susceptible to being interpreted in a dual and contradictory manner.
In 1931, he sent several letters to Gorky and Stalin, but received no reply. Ultimately, at the Writers’ Union conference held in 1932, Platonov was forced to deliver a self-criticism in which he personally admitted his literary errors.
From late 1931, when he appeared to be in literary silence, he transferred to the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry and began working as an engineer. Although it appeared that he had ceased his literary activities, his subsequent silence—which he described as “for storage”—was also a process of seeking a new path for life and creativity within the Soviet utopia.
Platonov did not question the communist ideology or the process of building the utopia itself; rather, he began writing a novel about the new capital of communism and the new people who would live there. Moscow, the alien space briefly glimpsed through Servinov and Sonya Mandrova at the end of ‘Chebengur’, acquires a new image in the form of Moscow as the capital of world socialism, and through the eponymous female protagonist, Moscow Chesnova.
The novel ‘Happy Moscow’, which he began writing in 1933, was never completed and, like his other works, was first published only in 1991, after the author’s death.
How to Live in Stalin’s Utopia
In the early 1930s, another literary turning point came for Platonov: with Gorky’s assistance, he became a member of a Writers’ Union delegation sent to Turkmenistan. Drawing on this travel experience, Platonov broke free from the previous spatial constraints of southern Russia and Moscow and began writing novels with a “Central Asian theme” that combined the spirit of the entire Soviet Union with that of utopia. Most of the works created during this period—including ‘Zan’, ‘Takir’, and ‘The Sea of Youth’—could not be published within the Soviet Union.
Alongside the Central Asian theme, a new trend distinct from his earlier work emerged in Platonov’s writing from the mid-1930s onward. Unlike the abstract reflections on utopia, revolution, and communal life of the 1920s, he shifted his focus to concrete life, love, human beings with bodies and names, and issues of sexuality. The work that best reveals this shift in the author’s stance is “The Potudan River,” and a collection of short stories bearing the same title, including this piece, was published in 1937. While some critics viewed this as a “reconciliation with Stalin’s utopia,” the lyrical language and new narrative style evident in the work suggest it is more appropriate to interpret this not as a mere gesture of reconciliation, but as the author’s journey toward a more mature artistic vision.
Leaving behind the brief joy of publication, the most tragic event of Platonov’s life struck in 1938. His fifteen-year-old son, Platon, was arrested on charges of anti-government conspiracy and sentenced to exile in Siberia. The depth of Platonov’s affection for his son is evident in a letter he sent to his wife in the mid-1920s. In that letter, he wrote of his son Platon, “I love him so much and cherish him so dearly that I am afraid—I am afraid of losing him.” The author’s anxiety about whether a communist utopia could coexist with “future generations”—an anxiety that had previously manifested in his earlier works through the motif of a child’s death—became a reality through his own son.
Platon was able to return from exile in early 1941 with the help of the writer Sholokhov, but he died of tuberculosis in 1943, bringing his short life to an end.
In the early 1940s, the Soviet Union was in the midst of the turmoil of World War II. Platonov served as a war correspondent on the front lines; this period was perhaps the only time the author was relatively free from ideological disputes. In 1946, shortly after the war, he published the short story “Ivanov’s Family (Homecoming).” Written after a long silence following his service as a war correspondent, this work was one that Platonov himself was convinced conformed to the principles of Socialist Realism.
However, the work drew harsh criticism. Yermilov, then editor-in-chief of the Literary Gazette and a heavyweight in the literary criticism world, declared the story a “cursed short story,” while Pazeev vehemently denounced Platonov as a “false and filthy storyteller.”
The core of the criticism lay in the attitude of the protagonist, Ivanov. Why did Captain Ivanov hesitate to return home and not go straight back? Why did he mingle with another woman instead of going to the home where his wife and children were waiting, and why, even after returning home, did he suspect his wife, feel alienated from his home, and try to leave again? A protagonist who displayed such conflict and hesitation did not fit the unconditional heroic homecoming narrative of the time. Platonov abandoned the ideological aspiration of the “open heart” from his ‘Chebengur’ days and, as he stated in ‘Homecoming’, pursued a concrete mode of communication that sensed the lives of others through a “bare heart.” However, the postwar literary landscape demanded that war heroes return home with dignity, and the image of the indecisive Ivanov was far removed from the ideal of humanity that society could accept at the time. This is why Yermilov fiercely condemned him as a “shameless father.”
Nevertheless, this criticism was not permanent. In 1964, Yermilov reflected on his own stance and admitted that his critique of “Homecoming” had been a mistake. He confessed, “I was unable to enter Platonov’s unique artistic world. I did not know how to hear his distinctive poetic language, nor his sorrow and joy regarding humanity. I approached his work with a yardstick far removed from the real-life complexities of life and art.”
However, the criticism at the time was devastating to Platonov. Following successive attacks from the literary establishment, he was unable to continue his major creative work; after abandoning the novel he had labored on his entire life, he passed away having left behind only a few fairy tales and plays. Platonov died of tuberculosis on January 5, 1951, just like his son, and was buried next to his son’s grave in the Armenian Cemetery in Moscow.
For a long time after his death, his works remained unpublished, but starting in the 1970s, his major works, including ‘Chebengur’ and ‘Kotlovans’, began to be translated in the United States and various European countries. About a decade later, during the Perestroika era, Platnov’s long-awaited “homecoming” finally reached readers in his homeland.
Introduction to “Chebengur”
‘Chebengur’ is Platonov’s masterpiece and his only completed full-length novel. The work depicts proletarians who have never even read Marx’s “Capital” coming to understand the revolution on their own and voluntarily building communism. While the process of revolution and the construction of communism was typically explained in the language of the intelligentsia and a small group of leaders, Platonov depicted how workers, peasants, and the uneducated embraced the revolution and realized the ideology in their own way, through their own eyes.
In this novel, nameless figures are depicted as fleeting as weeds; though they are sometimes portrayed comically, behind that humor lies the author’s deep compassion and empathy for the vulnerable. A sense of self-awareness—that the author himself is inseparable from them and is one of them—permeates the entire work.
Completed in 1928, this novel was first published not in Russia but in France and Italy in 1972, and it was not until 1978 that a complete translation was published in London. In the author’s homeland, it was not until 1988—60 years after its creation—that it reached readers. This publishing history helps explain why “Chevengur” was long read as an anti-Soviet or anti-socialist novel.
To answer the question of whether this work was actually a system-critical, anti-regime novel, we must first carefully examine Platonov’s ideology and stance toward the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Despite his blind passion and faith in the revolution, he consistently maintained a negative and satirical view of the process of realizing real socialism, particularly the newly emerging communist bureaucracy. Therefore, his attitude toward communism can be summarized as one of love-hate, and this ambivalent relationship is clearly reflected in ‘Chebengur’.
Gorky once told Platonov that the work would be impossible to publish due to its “lyrical yet satirical” nature; this oxymoronic description accurately captures the author’s attitude that permeates the entire work. The novel is imbued with Platonov’s characteristic lyricism, yet reveals a sharp satirical gaze throughout.
“Chekhov” is often called the “laboratory” or “encyclopedia” of Platonov’s creative work, as it condenses the various concerns he was experimenting with at the time, both in form and content. Against a fragmented narrative structure, the external themes of ideology and utopian construction unfold in connection with existential questions regarding death and its overcoming, the relationship between the self and the other, and women and sexuality. Blending the forms of the coming-of-age novel, the adventure novel, and the ideological novel, this work is composed of a combination of individual episodes, some of which were even published separately as short stories.
While this fragmented and experimental narrative structure may weaken the long-breath narrative typical of conventional novels, it simultaneously demonstrates that Platonov was not merely an ideological writer but also an experimental pioneer of modernist fiction in terms of form. Writers such as Brodsky and Anatoly Kim have compared Platonov to contemporary Western masters like Joyce and Proust, citing his original language and experimental narrative form.
Part 1: The Origin of the Master
The novel is divided into three main parts and approximately 45 episodes. Part 1, “The Origin of the Master,” unfolds the childhood of the protagonist, Sasha Dvornov, in the form of a coming-of-age novel.
The story is told chronologically, beginning with the suicide of his biological father, a fisherman, and his difficult childhood as an adopted son of the Dvornov family, through his encounter with Zakhar Pavlovich and his experiences during the revolution, culminating in his growth into a communist. Through Sasha’s biological father and Zakhar Pavlovich, the author presents the themes he was deeply preoccupied with, such as life and death, and the relationship between humans and machines.
Sasha’s biological father was a fisherman who threw himself into the lake to see death with his own eyes and to live within it. After his father’s death, Sasha is adopted into the poor, large Dvornov family.
Prosha, the Dvornovs’ biological son—selfish and cunning—and Sasha, with his other-oriented and contemplative nature, possess contrasting dispositions and demonstrate entirely different ways of life from childhood onward. Although an orphan, Sasha feels compassion and empathy for all living things—“all living creatures, the frail grasses blooming in the yard, the wind, and even the locomotive”—while Proshka is portrayed as someone who “loves no one but his own family” and clearly senses the boundary between self and other. He constantly reminds Sasha that he is an “outsider” with no family ties, and even persuades his soft-hearted father to send Sasha out to beg.
Meanwhile, Zahar Pavlovich, the wanderer and mechanic who takes Sasha in as his adopted son, loves machines—especially locomotives—more than people, and dreams of saving the world through machinery. Later, Sasha becomes a precious presence to Zahar Pavlovich—who had no family and loved only machines—to the point where he fears losing him.
Sasha continues his spiritual quest at Zahar’s home, and when the revolution breaks out, he joins the Communist Party alongside his adoptive father. Part 1 concludes with him being dispatched to the Steppe region in accordance with party orders due to the ensuing civil war. Part 1, “The Origin of the Craftsman,” serves as the starting point and origin of the questions the author was grappling with at the time, centering particularly on the philosophical nature of life and death, the sense of being an orphan cast alone into a strange world, and the relationship between humans and machines. The lake into which Sasha’s father threw himself—seeking to prove life through death—exists as a single origin that encompasses all these issues.
Part 2: A Journey with an Open Heart
The protagonists in Platonov’s works of the 1920s are generally portrayed as characters without families or homes, and without any particular destination in mind. “Chebengur” also relies on the motif of the road, which conveys a longing for distant places and a yearning for open spaces.
Part 2, in particular, primarily depicts the journey of Sasha and his comrade Kofunkin as they wander in search of communism. Like the protagonists of an adventure novel, the two wander here and there in search of an ideal, encountering a variety of people. In the title of Part 2, “A Journey with an Open Heart,” the “open heart” serves as a space to be filled with love for others, becoming a metaphor unique to Platonov that a communist must possess.
This perspective shares similarities with the philosophical notion that self-denial—necessary for the acceptance of the other—is a prerequisite for love, as it seeks to achieve the wholeness of the self and the other through the complete acceptance of the other. For Platonov, “love” was synonymous with comradeship, and the concept of wholeness was believed to be realizable within communism.
Part 2 begins with a scene in which Sasha, having survived a train accident during the civil war and returned home, falls ill with a fever and teeters on the brink of death. While convalescing, he becomes close with his neighbor, the young girl Sonya, and Zahar speculates that they might even marry. However, Sasha sets out again to seek true communism in accordance with the Party’s orders, and the two part ways when Sonya is assigned to teach in a rural village.
While wandering through the steppes, Sasha finds himself in mortal danger at the hands of an anarchist unit, but is saved by Kofunkin, a self-proclaimed knight of communism. Platonov’s characters in the 1920s generally represent different modes of perception—reason, emotion, and action. As a speculative protagonist, Sasha represents emotion, symbolized by the heart, while Kofun’kin is a man who speaks through action, serving as the hands and feet of the collective.
Kofunkin, who resembles Don Quixote, is a pilgrim journeying to the grave of Rosa Luxemburg, a symbol of communism. He expresses respect and affection for Sasha, an intellectual of working-class origins, and their relationship is sometimes portrayed as going beyond simple friendship or comradeship.
Unlike in Moscow, the two wander through various rural villages across Russia where communism has taken shape in different ways. They encounter various communities—such as Petropavlovka, home to a farmer who believes himself to be God; Hanskie Dvoriki, where every member has renamed themselves after a famous figure; a commune of the poor who have attained high office since the revolution; and a revolutionary estate guarded solely by Knight Pasinchev without any leadership—and come face to face with the many faces of communism.
In this section, the novel’s setting shifts between Soviet reality and mythical spaces. The hamlets, villages, and cities the protagonists pass through are named after actual villages near Voronezh, yet are sometimes depicted as fictional spaces.
Alongside the various faces of communism, the protagonists’ contradictory and sometimes duplicitous attitudes toward women and sexuality are another important theme in Part 2. In Platonov’s novels of the 1920s, women generally appear only as symbols of motherhood or sexuality, or as non-existent ideological entities. Platonov, who defined sexuality through bourgeois notions from the early days of the revolution, long held negative or contradictory views of women, and this stance is reflected in ‘Chebengur’.
Sasha leaves his first love, Sonya, whom he has met again on his wanderings, and sets off alone; the very next day, in an unnamed village, he spends the night with Pekla Stepanovna, a woman old enough to be his mother. The phobia regarding sex felt by Platonov’s protagonists—who are unable to embrace the women they love—and their process of overcoming it are explored with even greater nuance in his later works.
Not only Sasha, but Kofunkin as well is unable to touch real women, worshipping only Rosa Luxemburg—a symbol of ideology who is already dead. The scene in his dream where his mother calls Rosa a “whore,” and the episode in Part 3 where the Moscow intellectual Servinov has relations with Sonya at his mother’s grave, demonstrate that for Platonov at the time, female sexuality was closely linked to ideology and motherhood.
Part 3: Chebengur’s Utopia and the Debate
In Part 3, Sasha and Kofun’kin finally arrive at Chebengur, a communist paradise built on earth. Chebengur is a self-sustaining utopia, a place built by twelve Bolsheviks—including Chepurny—through their own efforts after driving out the bourgeoisie.
Before Sasha and Kofun’kin arrive, the Bolsheviks “purify” the city by executing the bourgeoisie. They expect that, with the advent of communism, history will begin anew; even the sun will “work hard” as never before, and no one will die here. This image of communism can be read as a fusion of Marxist communism and the apocalyptic myths unique to the Russian people.
They drive out the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie and bring new residents—the so-called “other humans”—to the now-empty Chebengur. However, Chebengur is less a space intended to showcase a realized utopia than a place set up to discuss utopia itself.
Key characters—including Sasha and Kofunkin, various communists met during the journey, and Prosha, whom he had parted ways with in childhood—reunite in Chebengur to engage in direct dialogue and debate about communism and utopia. In particular, the conversation between Sasha and Prosha about communism is highly revealing.
Prosha speaks of the infinite nature of human desire and its impossibility of fulfillment, arguing that rather than satisfying desire, if one gradually deprives people of it to reduce their desires, humans will eventually learn to endure. Furthermore, he states that the ideal in any organization is for only one person to think, while the rest live “thoughtlessly” following that one person, revealing his aspiration to become that very first leader.
Sasha questions that logic. “Why is that necessary, Prosha? Then you’ll probably have a hard time. You’ll be the unhappiest person, and you’ll be afraid to live alone at the highest point, separated from everyone else. The proletariat lives through one another—what do you think you’ll rely on to survive?’ For Sasha, communism was both an ideology and a religion, and his proletarian comrades were a surrogate family for him, an orphan; thus, Prosha’s desire to become a solitary leader was difficult to comprehend.
This debate is linked to the fearful premonition of the possibility of a “communism without humans,” a theme that had recurred in earlier works. The landscape of Chebengur and the conversations taking place there vividly illustrate the gap between the ideological promises of communism and actual human conditions.
Sasha’s anxious premonition is further intensified by the boy’s death. The sick boy who arrived in Chebengur passed away without surviving a single day, despite the Bolsheviks’ efforts. In a utopia, the death of a child can be seen as a symbolic device foreshadowing its potential collapse.
As summer passes and winter approaches, various problems arise in Chebengur, where people must survive solely on the power of nature without labor. The “other people” felt too lonely to live on comradeship alone; food was in short supply, and problems such as illness and the cold emerged. The Bolsheviks bring in women who can fulfill the roles of wives or daughters, and the “other people” eventually form family-like units. The people of Chebengur rely on one another and survive through their mutual support. However, this paradise of comradeship is doomed to destruction—though not through self-destruction.
At the end of the novel, Chebengur is destroyed by an unknown external army, and Kofunkin and his comrades are killed. Sasha, the sole survivor, returns to his hometown to find his father, who drowned in a lake, and walks into the very lake where his father had thrown himself. Prosha weeps alone before the entire estate of Chebengur, which is now entirely his.
Zakhar Pavlovich, who has only just arrived in Chebengur after searching for Sasha, asks Prosha to find Sasha, just as he did in their childhood, and Prosha sets out on the road, promising to find him. As time and space return to the beginning of the novel, they leave open the possibility that Chebengur’s utopia—which could not be realized here and now—might just be possible there.
Let us discuss Platonov and language, and the materiality of existence and death. The greatest obstacle to properly reading “Chebengur,” yet also its greatest pleasure, is the author’s unique language. Platonov’s language is not only the material of the novel but also, in itself, the novel’s protagonist and ideology. In particular, this work reveals the author’s unique conception of language, and his distinctive use of language—closely linked to his worldview—unfolds in a fascinating manner.
For Platonov in the 1920s, language was the “substance of existence,” just as humans and ideology were. Language, not as an intangible, ethereal logos, but as a tangible entity, becomes the most important element in Platonov’s novels. In ‘Chebengur’ as well, the characters who perceive communism as a tangible entity understand not only ideology but also language as a substance possessing particles that can be touched and sensed.
Platonov’s distinctive conception of language is concretely manifested in his early prose work ‘A Story of Many Interesting Things’ (1923). The protagonist, Ivan, builds a “common home” for all that has survived after the collapse of human civilization, and, as in Genesis, he wishes to name them as his first act. As a first step, Ivan reflects on the essence of existence; through this process, he realizes that “every soul’s power has its own word (name),” and further, stating that “if speech was once the soul, then writing was the mark of beasts,” he attempts to understand language by separating it into “speech” and “writing” and viewing them as opposites.
To him, speech was the substance of the living, while writing was the domain of the dead and the mark of beasts. Therefore, while the protagonist feels the inevitability of the act of naming, he rejects the imposition of names. Since a name is the substance of existence and must inevitably be found within every living being, Ivan wishes to hear their names from existence itself and listens intently to that voice.
In ‘Chebengur’, Sasha also reflects on language in a manner similar to Ivan. For Sasha, the space where she could sense the existence of the Other and contain it was an “empty heart through which the wind blows, and into which life flows in and out every day”; the author describes such an open heart as an essential qualification of a communist. In Sasha’s spiritual quest, the open heart—always an anxious, unfilled void—serves as a place to accept the Other into oneself.
Sasha did not bestow “strange names” upon the nameless lives of the Others entering him, nor did he wish for them to “remain unnamed.” Rather, Sasha simply hoped to hear their names through his own mouth, rather than through deliberately contrived designations. The metaphor of the “empty heart” signifies a process far more complex than the universal mode of thought that regards love as the recognition and affirmation of the other as an equal to oneself.
Sasha’s stance bears significant similarity to a philosophical conception of love that holds “the self-negation of existence” as a prerequisite for accepting the other; only when this is achieved can the other be affirmed and the unity of self and other realized. Platonov presents Sasha’s “empty heart”—which resembles Christ’s self-sacrifice—as a fundamental qualification of a communist.
Meanwhile, the novel also depicts the opposite situation, where the essence of existence is threatened by an imposed name, rather than a process of seeking a name that corresponds to the essence of existence. The residents of the village of Hanskie Dvoriki, which Sasha and Kofunkin visited, abandon their original names and change them to Christopher Columbus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Mehring, and others in order to “live a life befitting the revolution and the reform of the world.” Unlike Ivan or Sasha, who listen to the voices of others to sense the essence of existence and embrace it into their own empty space, a new attempt emerges here: the expectation that the essence of existence will change through artificial name changes.
This is also a metaphor for their own era, in which the essence of individual existence is threatened by the language imposed by real-world communism. In Part 3 of the novel, the figure of Prosha—who designates Chebengur’s new residents as “other humans” and conceives of himself as a lonely autocrat organizing and controlling them—clearly reveals the ideology of oppression that arbitrarily defines and objectifies the other.
In fact, Platonov’s stance regarding the language of existence that Sasha pursues and the language of the era surrounding the protagonists seems clear. However, he leans more actively on the language of the era—that is, the “language of utopia”—rather than the voice of existence he affirms, and he also had the protagonists speak in “the language of their own era.” As Brodsky pointed out, unlike other writers of his time, Platonov wrote in the language of his era and, furthermore, subordinated himself to that language.
The author actively incorporated the language used in party manifestos, posters, and documents into his novels, and these are repeated through the characters’ dialogue and the author’s narration. The fear of the language of the era—represented by text or documents—and the soliloquy and coercive ideology it conceals paradoxically led the author to write his novel in that very language. The author’s fear of this foreign language is expressed ironically through the various characters who accept and use it as a matter of course, without finding it “strange” at all.
Ultimately, the characters who memorize and use the language of utopia are unable to even question their own linguistic norms and lose the very ability to think for themselves. Thus, the language of the era manifests as speech devoid of a thought process, which the author depicts as a common phenomenon found among those who “learned to speak during the revolutionary period.”
The process by which the characters learn language to speak in a manner corresponding to the essence of socialism, and the process by which the author writes his novel in the language of the era, demonstrate an example of the objectification and reification of contemporary language. Platonov’s language, sometimes called “elegant stammering,” is a process of seeking the language of existence, but it is also a tool for reflecting the linguistic particularities of his own era.
The impossibility of dialogue between the “language of existence” and the “language of utopia” as depicted in the novel, along with the soliloquy-like nature of the author’s narration that encompasses it all, reveals the dead end of writing that could not communicate with its era. The author’s anxiety—born of a longing for a language capable of coexisting with utopia and enabling communication, coupled with a premonition of the impossibility of such coexistence—likely compelled him to subordinate himself to the language of the era.
To put it in Platunov’s terms, he was able to fill his “empty heart” with “courageous sorrow” for the object of his love; thus, he could argue for the possibility of an era of strange myths—an era in which communism might exist without humans, a narrative space where only forced monologues could exist, and a world where unity with the universe might be impossible. And paradoxically, this was possible precisely because he was a true communist.
In the fall of 2002, as I wandered aimlessly through the small towns of southern Russia featured in ‘Chebengur’—such as Voronezh, Novohopersk, and Liski—I resolved that one day this book must be published in Korea. Even as nearly a century had passed since the 1917 Revolution, the utopias that the poor and powerless had built with their own hands remained fossilized in those cities. Even though communism had ended long ago, the city centers were still called Revolution Square, and in the very center stood, without fail, a statue of Lenin, while the monument commemorating the fifth anniversary of the revolution, erected in 1922, stood there without a single speck of dust. In these cities on the southern Russian frontier, history seemed to have come to a standstill.
However, I did not actually expect this novel to be translated into Korean. Although the translation was already somewhat complete at that time, I did not think it could be edited and published to a standard where readers could actually read it. The first reason I considered it impossible was precisely because of Platonov’s “unique” language. It was a jumble of expressions open to multiple interpretations, phrases lifted directly from the slogans and mottos of the 1920s, and words and sentences that even Russians found difficult to understand and deemed incorrect. Scholars call this “elegant gibberish,” but from a translator’s perspective, that gibberish was torture—and at times, it felt like torture. I couldn’t help but wonder how readers would receive expressions like “living the main life,” “thinking about thought,” and “designed to complicate life.” In fact, it’s still difficult to say that this problem has been satisfactorily resolved. Perhaps it’s impossible to resolve it completely.
Another reason I thought publication would be impossible was that the novel itself was akin to the confession of a true proletarian writer who loved communism like a religion. Ironically, it was precisely for this reason that Platonov was ostracized in the Soviet Union and inevitably denounced as an enemy of socialism. The novel’s protagonists viewed and understood the revolution like fools or children; while dreaming of a communist world where everyone was equal, they ruthlessly eliminated those who held different ideologies. The Bolsheviks, depicted by Platonov through a childlike lens, could not reconcile themselves with the reality of the Soviet Union at the time, where a new ruling class was emerging and bureaucracy was rampant. Consequently, they had no choice but to live within the utopian space of Chebengur, a world entirely alien to the Soviet Union.
