Biography Platonov Andrei Platonovich
(1899 – 1951)
(1899-1951) – prose writer, publicist, critic.
He was born in the family of a locksmith at railway workshops. He studied at the parish school, then at the school. Still a teenager wrote poetry, which after the revolution were printed in newspapers and magazines. At the same time he acted as a prose writer, critic, publicist. Member of the Civil War. He graduated from the Voronezh Polytechnic Institute (1924).
In 1921 the first poems were published, in the same year the first publicistic book of Platonov “Electrification” was published, in 1922 – the book of poems “Blue Depth”. In 1927 he moved to Moscow, where in the same year he published the first collection of stories “Epifan Locks”, which brought him fame.
In 1928 there were two more books by Platonov – “Meadow Masters” and “The Secret Man”. Since 1926 he has been working on a great novel about the revolution
For Platonov – the poet, publicist, prose writer – is characterized by a complex, tragically intense perception of man and nature, man and other people. The revolution, in the writer’s understanding, is a deeply folk, organic and creative process that brings reason and beauty into a person’s relationship with the “beautiful and violent world.” The writer and his heroes, as well as all those who “learned to think during the revolution,” are concerned with philosophical questions. Platonov sees the world through the eyes of a working man, painfully and tensely comprehending his life, his place in it, his interrelations with nature (in work, in creativity, in the creation of machines through which man conquers the elemental forces of nature). There is a new poetics in which the artistic vision of the writer is realized: a new hero, most often a worker, a craftsman, reflecting on his craft, about the meaning of life; unusual vocabulary and style. The “improper” flexibility of Platonov’s
In 1926, Platonov wrote a satirical novel “The City of Grades”, in 1929 – stories “The State Resident” and “The Doubtful Makar”, in 1931 – the story “Vprok”. Criticism found Platonov’s inappropriate and even harmful satire. It almost stopped printing. But he continues to work. Writes the story “Garbage Wind”, the novella “The Pit,” “The Juvenile Sea,” tries in drama (“High Voltage”, “Pushkin in the Lyceum”).
In 1936, Platonov began to collaborate in the magazines “Literary Critic” and “Literary Review” (under the pseudonyms F. Manov, A. Firsov, under his real name – Klimentov). Here are published his critical articles, reviews and two stories “Immortality” and “Fro”.
From October 1942 until the end of the war Platonov as a special correspondent for the newspaper “Red Star” is on the fronts of the Patriotic War. His correspondence and stories are published in newspapers and magazines, published in separate collections.
In the last years of his life, the writer, despite the serious illness, worked hard: he wrote screenplays, stories, and worked on folk tales. After Platonov’s death, a large manuscript heritage remained.
Today, Andrei Platonov is experiencing a special situation that is not often met with a writer posthumously, when a new look is created for him (for readers, for art, for history and the future). From the strange, “marginal”, even “holy fool”, a harmful literary phenomenon (as criticism defined it during his lifetime) to a remarkable master – in the view of the literature of the last thirty years – he ascends to a high circle of classics. Many of his works have appeared in full view relatively recently. Without “Chevengur”, the writer’s only novel, without stories “The Pit,” and “The Juvenile Sea,” Plato’s work is incomplete. The artistic world created by the writer – and especially the world of these works – amazes, makes you torment yourself with thought and feeling; and who fascinates, and who dazzles,
It is necessary to open any story or story writer – and the reader will soon pierce a sad sound, languishing over the land of Platonov. Everything dies on this earth: people, animals, plants, houses, cars, paints, sounds. Everything grows old, old, smoldering, burning – all living and inanimate nature. On everything in his world lies the seal of “tormented by death.”
Complete communism was organized in the city of Chevengur, but this communism is absolutely special – the communism of the people’s utopia. To realize the secret aspirations of the soul – that is how Communists understood Chevengurtsy. A monastery of spiritual fellowship is established, a monastery of absolute equality: no domination of man over man – neither material nor mental – no oppression. This destroys everything – property, personal property, even labor as a source of acquiring something new. All except the comrade’s bare body. Only subbotniks are permitted, when gardens and houses are torn to the root, there is a “voluntary damage to the petty-bourgeois inheritance”.
To “hug all the martyrs of the earth and put an end to the movement of misfortune in life,” Chevengur collects the most unfortunate people of the earth – “other”, homeless vagabonds, without a father who grew up, mother abandoned in the first hour of his life. When Chepurny’s head sees a lot of “other” on the hill at the entrance to Chevengur – almost naked Chevengurians Chepurny sees a lot of “others” on the hill at the entrance to Chevengur – almost naked, in dirty rags, no longer covering the body, but some of his remains, “worn by labor and etched with acrid grief” – it seems to him that he will not survive from the pain and pity. Once there are such, you can not be happy. The heart is ready to give up everything to save them. Because the level of the well-being of the world must be measured by them, and not teshitsya average figure, fraudulent and immoral.
In the “Chevengur” – the entire Platonov with his “idea of life.” The road that emerges at the end of the narrative can lead Chevengur out of a state of impasse. The road is the highest value in the novel, in it – overcoming oneself, purification, openness to the future, hope for finding new ways. The heroes of the novel try to firmly organize their idea, but they painfully hit the limits of the possible, yearn, are ashamed of the pitiful results of their zeal – and are eager to go.
Platonov also calls on the path: “… the drowsy person was leaving ahead, not seeing the stars that shone above him from the dense height, from the eternal, but already attainable future, from the quiet order where the stars moved like comrades-not too far away, not to forget each other, not too close, not to merge into one and not to lose one’s difference and mutual vain interest. “
The heroes of the story “The Pit” believe that by building a “single common proletarian house” they will live a fine life. Exhausting, exhausting forces work – is digging a pit, excavated under “the only obscheproletarskogo house instead of the old city, where even now people live in a courtyard fenced way.” This is a dream home, a house-symbol. Having collapsed to the floor after a day’s work, people sleep in a hurry, “like the dead.” Voshchev (one of the main heroes of the story) “peered at the sleeping person’s face – does not he express the unrequited happiness of a satisfied person.” But the sleeper lay dead, his eyes were deeply and sadly hidden, and his cold legs stretched helplessly in worn working trousers. barracks there was no sound, no one saw dreams and did not talk with memories,
Workers believe in “the onset of life after the construction of large houses.” Therefore, they give themselves to the work without any rest, sucking the juices from the body. For the sake of the future life you can suffer and suffer. Each previous generation suffered in the hope that the next will live worthily. Therefore, people refuse to finish their work on Saturday: they want to bring a new life closer. “Until the evening long… that life should not be lost in vain, we will do a better thing.” We are not animals, we can live for the sake of enthusiasm. ”
With the advent of the girl Nastya, the digging of the excavation seems to acquire some certainty, meaningfulness.
Nastya is the first resident of a dream house, not yet built a symbol house. But Nastia dies of loneliness, restlessness, and lack of warmth. Adult people who saw in it the source of their lives, did not feel “how the world around them should be gentle… that she was alive.” The construction of a dream house turned out to be inconsistent with the life of a particular person, for whose sake, for which everything seemed to have been accomplished.
Nastya died, and the light that glittered in the distance dimmed. “Voshchev stood in bewilderment at this subdued child, and he no longer knew where now there would be communism in the world, if he was not at first in a childlike sense and in a convinced impression. Why now needs the meaning of life and truth of universal origin, if there is not a small, a faithful person, in which truth would become joy and movement? “
Platonov believed that someone else’s trouble should be experienced in the same way as one’s personal, remembering one thing: “Humanity is one breath, one living warm creature.” One person suffers pain, one dies all. – the body… We will be humanity, not a person of reality. “
Many years later, E. Hemingway, who admired Platonov’s “The Third Son”, will find an epigraph for the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in the poems of John Donne, an English poet of the seventeenth century, who speak of the unity of mankind in the face of grief and death: “There is no man who was like an island, by itself, each person is part of the mainland, part of the land, and if the wave drifts into the sea a cliff, Europe will be less… The death of every man belittles me, for I am one with all mankind, and therefore do not ask never, for whom the bell tolls, he rings for you. ”
One can only marvel at the deep consonance of humanistic motives, and in almost direct coincidence of lines:
“The death of every man belittles me, too” and “one dies – all die.” Indeed, Andrei Platonov can rightfully be referred to as a true artist:
… You are a hostage to eternity
Time is in captivity.
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