The Call of the Wild

Andrei Platonov is a long-suppressed voice in Russian literature, a writer of startlingly bleak, unsparing judgment on the Communist and Nazi terrors he lived through in the 1920s and ‘30s; yet there is something so joyful and delicate and absurdly hopeful in his writing that the whole heartfelt impulse of the Russian experiment, as well as its corruption by the poverty of the human spirit, seems embodied in his unique prose. His subject is what writer Primo Levi called the demolition of a man: the reduction of the human being to a suffering bundle of flesh; but though Levi was writing of Auschwitz, Platonov’s concern is the Russia of collectivization, famine and unending need, driven by either impossible idealism or brutality.

He was born in 1899 and died in 1951. He served in the Red Army during the civil war and worked as an electrical engineer. Author of many stories, plays and novels, he was sent to a prison camp before the war, but on early release (thanks to the intervention of novelist Mikhail Sholokhov) worked as a war correspondent from 1941 to ’45. After the publication of “The Return” in 1946, Platonov fell from favor in the viciously simplistic postwar ideological climate that also silenced the poet Anna Akhmatova and the prose writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, and he ended his days in poverty. His greatest short novel, “The Foundation Pit,” and many of the stories in this collection, did not appear in Russian until the late 1980s and are still being translated, together with other material still coming to light.

“The Return” is in many ways the least troubling of the short fictions under review. A demobilized soldier suspects his wife of infidelity and is tempted to leave her again to join the much younger woman he met on his way home. But three themes link this story with Platonov’s harsher, more alienated narratives. One is sheer confusion, in the head of the soldier, as to what life is about and how to think about it. As someone asks in another story: Is life meant to be taken seriously, or is it a joke? The soldier’s mental processes are evasive, self-blinding; he cannot see others nor feel compassion. He is in a state of mental panic about his place in life. The second theme is a picture of life after a great upheaval, whether it be war, drought or revolution. Much of Platonov’s writing has an almost biblical feeling of happening in the seven lean years in the desert, or after the spread of pestilence, and it has a corresponding universality that suggests that such devastation and the response to it could happen any time in any place on Earth. The third theme concerns human responsibility, which is delicately plaited into subtle patterns of communication.

In “The Return,” the soldier feels shy around his 12-year-old son Petya, who has taken over running the household. Petya is a foil to his father’s emotional numbness and selfishness yet speaks few direct words and only through silent gestures persuades his father not to leave. Leitmotifs of silence, muteness and dumbness, which have come about either out of human incapacity or following a great shock, run through all the stories, together with a celebration of man’s more satisfying relationship with nature. The child in man and nature are sympathetic to each other, being of one substance. That is what the heart feels, but never far away in these tales is the element of Russian experience that pitted men so harshly and self-destructively against nature. The Soviet conquest of nature forms a bewildering counterpoint to the same ideology’s appeal to moral goodness. Platonov’s characters, when they are not numb, are always engaged in an impossible battle against the natural and political elements to bring more order and decency into human life. Petya in “The Return,” though still a boy, is in the thick of things. He has the heart and zeal of a boy who would be a good Communist, as indeed Platonov was, and he is still human and hopeful.

But much of the puzzlement, many of the “dazed” hearts in Platonov’s fiction come from dismay at seeing hope wiped out. The grand project, whether it is a building or an irrigation scheme, or--a sad side view of human nature--a marriage, goes lamentably and somehow unaccountably wrong. The fiction often literally concerns building something. “The Motherland of Electricity,” written in 1926, alludes to Lenin’s famous equation of Communism with the electrification of the whole country. The engineer-narrator is a good man, a hero even, who shares with us his bittersweet experience of village life paralyzed by famine after the civil war. There is even some wayward humor in the absurd adaptation of a leftover British military motorcycle into a water pump and in the character of the Party secretary who speaks zealously of the bright future in verse while his children clutch their empty bellies. Yet the secretary is no fool, and the humor soon gives way. What we learn from classic Platonov stories in which the tragedy is explicit is that the grand project is a malign, out-of-control fantasy, draining human resources to no end. Platonov’s illustration applies to socialism, but the implication is that this could happen to humans anywhere.

“The Epifan Locks” takes up a theme from Russia’s history, the way in which the country’s rulers from Peter the Great to Stalin repeatedly tried to enhance its waterways. Platonov was involved as an engineer in such an early Soviet project and, like his contemporary Boris Pilnyak in Pilnyak’s neglected, prophetic novel “The Volga Flows to the Caspian Sea” (1932), Platonov despaired at what he saw. The character of an English engineer, Bertrand Perry, realizes the hopelessness of the project and his own future soon after arriving in Russia. He sees the truth of a country that is naturally abundant but wild. Russia’s rulers and its people are wild--it is a favorite Platonov epithet--and foreigners who live there for any time, like Perry and his team, feel themselves going the same way. They decline physically and mentally, so that they seem to live in a state of impaired consciousness, closer to the animal and vegetable kingdoms than to what was once the better remnant of the human. There is no redemption: Perry is sodomized by his executioner, on behalf of a tsar disappointed with his failed canal. In his final moments, the Englishman is so dazed by the horror that his full human consciousness is already in retreat, helping to ease him into death; but there is something about his character that has driven him to take on the Russian burden, which suggests a Christian epiphany.

It is important to remember the “it could happen anywhere” element in Platonov’s fiction and insist on its universality. When Maxim Gorky read the brutally tragic “The Rubbish Wind,” he felt that the “black delirium” produced by its unreal content meant it could never be published, but although that story of human disintegration is Russian, the occasion for Platonov’s despair is Nazi Germany. An erudite man, Albert Lichtenberg, already crazed when the story begins, grows feral with grief at the inhumanity of the world at the same time as the animal fur that grows over his SS-inflicted wounds keeps him alive long enough to perform a last act of kindness by offering his own body as food. Lichtenberg scoffs at the proud self-hood of Descartes and at 19th century optimism, which have brought culture to this brutish nadir. In a story set seemingly “after God,” Lichtenberg’s intelligence and sensitivity, literally crushed underfoot, produce one devastating sentence after another.

“A Roman priest came out onto the porch of the Catholic church, excited, damp and red--an ambassador of God in the guise of a man’s urinary appendage. Then old women appeared from the church, women in whom once-seething passions now oozed like pus, and in whose wombs the parts of love and motherhood now rotted away in sepulchral darkness. . . . The small bells on the tower still went on ringing, carrying completed prayers up over the church’s tormenting Gothic summit and into a dim sky that had been clouded over by the sun’s fierce heat. What the eternal bells were saying was the same as what the books and newspapers wrote about, what the music sang about in the night-time cafes: ‘Waste away, waste away, waste away!’ ”

“The Epifan Locks” and “The Rubbish Wind” end so abruptly, with the willful dismemberment of a life and a guarantee that the inhumane will continue, that they seem initially unsuccessful as stories. We forget how closely the form of fiction, even experimental fiction, is finally tied to our vision of the human. When our vision of the human collapses into senselessness and bestiality what ends to stories can there be which are not as shocking and as alien in substance as a boot is to the head?

Platonov’s characters long for a more efficient human life, so that trains may run and populations be fed, only the train of reason must not run away with itself. Platonov takes pity on the frightened animal in man, the beast who is willing, but can’t quite understand, still less express, its confusion and anguish. “The Potudan River” reflects harsh Russian conditions but is essentially a study in the creaturely need for love and company and how, against this background, a young man struggles with his impotence.

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We understand perhaps why Platonov, unlike many of the great Russian writers who have struggled to come to terms with a reality they also love, is not a satirist. He is not really interested in man in society or in character but in man in nature and individual instances of the human soul. He is ready to console us when he sees that soul happily finding its place in nature, among the furry creatures, branches and stones of the here and now. He likes the prospect of human substance being absorbed back into the soil and the soul transmigrating. The name “Potudan” suggests in Russian crossing into another world, and this, in the end, is what Platonov gives us, with his mixture of mind and nature: a uniquely beautiful prospect on a far horizon, probably seen in delirium, of the alleviation of human suffering.