Andrei Platonowitsch Platonow

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Andrei Platonov (1938)

Andrei Platonov ( Russian Андрей Платонович Платонов ., Scientific transliteration Andrei Platonov Platonovič , actually Андрей Платонович Климентов / Andrei Platonovich Klimentow * August 16 . Jul / 28. August  1899 greg. In Voronezh , † 5 January 1951 in Moscow ) was a Soviet writer .

Platonov, whose works anticipated existentialism , was one of the first writers to appear after the October Revolution . Although he was a staunch communist , his works were banned during his lifetime because of their skeptical orientation towards collectivization and other totalitarian manifestations of communism. They could only appear during perestroika . His most important works include the story The Construction Pit (Котлован) and the novel Tschewengur (Чевенгур).

Life

Platonov's tomb in Moscow

Platonov was the son of a train driver and the oldest of ten children. After his youth in various professions and military service in the Red Army , he became an engineer in 1924 and wrote short pieces for local newspapers. He began to publish short stories and poems in the early 1920s, in 1922 his first (and last) volume of poetry Himmelblaueiefe (Голубая глубина) appeared, in the same year his son Plato was born. From 1923 to 1927 he worked as an engineer for electrification and land reclamation in central Russia. Here he witnessed the changes and human tragedies caused by forced collectivization. During his trip to Tambov end of 1926 - the spring of 1927 he created the satirical tale The city Gradow (Город Градов) on the consolidation of the new Soviet bureaucracy , as well as the short story collection The Epiphaner locks (Эпифанские шлюзы), in which publication it from Boris Pilnyak was supported . In 1927 he became a full-time writer in Moscow . He was a member of the Perewal writers' association , which had set itself the goal of resisting the doctrinal cultural functionaries.

Platonov's major works, the novel Tschewengur (Чевенгур) and the short story The Construction Pit (Котлован), were written between 1926 and 1930 at around the beginning of the first five-year plan in 1928. With their implicit criticism of the system, they brought him fierce criticism from party officials. In 1931 the editorial staff of the magazine Krasnaja now received a reprimand from the party leadership for having printed Platonov's story To the advantage (Впрок); namely, criticism of forced collectivization echoes in it. Stalin personally issued a verdict: he wrote the word "scrap" (сволочь / svolotsch) on the edge of the impression.

From then on, Platonov was practically no longer printed. He therefore asked Maxim Gorky , the chairman of the Soviet Writers' Union , for help. Gorky did not respond to Platonov's first two letters; He rejected the story Der Müllwind (Мусорный ветер) sent to him with a third letter in 1934 because of its content, "which borders on a dark nightmare".

During the Stalinist Great Terror in the second half of the 1930s, Platonov's fifteen-year-old son was arrested for "espionage and anti-Soviet activities" and imprisoned in a labor camp, where he fell ill with tuberculosis . This stroke of fate plunged Andrei Platonov into a deep depression, all the more so because he made himself responsible for it. When his son was finally released from prison, Platonov became infected while caring for them. The son told his father that the NKVD secret police had blackmailed him after his arrest: if he did not sign the confession, the parents would go to prison.

During the Second World War , Platonov was used as a war correspondent at the front, where, according to eyewitness reports, he demonstrated bravery and humanity, but his health deteriorated significantly. After the war, again exposed to hostility and defamation from the rulers and literary critics loyal to the regime, he was forced to shift his work from individual literary work to collecting and editing folk tales, and published two anthologies. He died in 1951 and was buried in the Armenian Cemetery in Moscow.

Although he was almost unknown to the general public at the time of his death, his reputation among writers was extraordinarily high. Part of his work was published during the thaw from 1958, but his major works did not appear until the late 1980s. Because of the anti-totalitarian content of his works and his early death from tuberculosis, English commentators called him the "Russian George Orwell ". Platonov is now recognized as a classic of world literature both in Russia and abroad.

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Platonov's originality is particularly evident in his extremely unusual, expressive language, which is unique in Russian literature. He uses "wrong" grammatical constructions and numerous Christian symbols, combined with ideological terms that are not understood by the population, to create an atmosphere of meaninglessness, supported by surprising and sometimes fantastic plots . This exploration of the meaninglessness is a hallmark of existentialism and the absurd .

Although his works generally take a materialist position, they are stylistically far removed from socialist realism , which is focused on simple language and direct plots. According to the translator Gabriele Leupold , "the excavation pit" is characterized by "stylistic inconsistencies" in the "impossible mixture of languages" of the former Soviet Union: foreign words, economic terms from Karl Marx , borrowings from the office language of the Tsarist Empire and Church Slavonic , enriched by numerous vulgarisms . According to Leupold, Platonov's protagonists do not speak this new language, which seems strange to the reader. Platonov had hidden his characters "criticism of the regime".

Russian editions

German editions (selection)

  • The happy Moskva . Translated by Renate Landa (later Reschke) and Lola Debüser. Berlin, Volk und Welt 1993, ISBN 3-353-00966-3 . (Only discovered in the 1990s.) New edition 2019 in revised translation, Suhrkamp, ​​epilogue Lola Debüser. Review of the novels by Jörg Schieke , MDR December 17, 2017, How a socialist superwife questioned Stalin's system - Andrei Platonov's novel "The Happy Moscow River" in a new translation
  • In the Beautiful and Grim World , Selected Prose, 2 volumes. Berlin, Culture and Progress, 1969
  • On the way to Tschevengur . Darmstadt, Luchterhand 1973.
  • Chevengur . Berlin, Volk und Welt, 1990, ISBN 3-353-00621-4 .
  • The shoemaker's wife as Tsarina: fairy tales . Berlin, children's book publisher, 1975.
  • The coaching suburb: collected stories . Unabridged edition Frankfurt a. M. Ullstein, 1985, ISBN 3-548-20507-0 .
  • The Epiphany Locks , Early Novellas. Berlin, Volk und Welt, 1986, ISBN 3-353-00004-6 .
  • Müllwind , Stories 1. Berlin People and World, 1987, ISBN 3-353-00147-6 .
  • The journey of the sparrow , stories 2. Berlin, Volk und Welt 1988, ISBN 3-446-15203-2 .
  • The excavation , the Juvenile Sea , Dshan , novels. Berlin, Volk und Welt, 1989, ISBN 3-353-00511-0 .
  • A reader's thoughts , essays. Leipzig and Weimar, Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1979.
  • The tragedy of the 14 red huts. Pieces, prose, letters, notes . Berlin, Oberbaum, 1992, ISBN 3-926409-94-0 .
  • The people of Dshan: stories, letters, photos, documents . Berlin, Oberbaum, 1992, ISBN 3-926409-79-7 .
  • On the first socialist tragedy , essay. Translated by Michael Leetz. In: Sense and Form . 6/2016, pp. 800-803.
  • About improving the climate . Translated from the Russian by Volker Weichsel. In: Utopia and Violence. Andrei Platonov. Writing the modern (= Eastern Europe , issue 8-10 / 2016). Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-8305-3658-1 ( online ).
  • The excavation pit , with comments and an afterword and translated by Gabriele Leupold , Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-518-42561-9 .
  • Letter to a Stranger (1927). Translated by Michael Leetz. In: Berliner Debatte Initial , issue 1/2017, pp. 61–64, ISBN 978-3-945878-52-1 .
  • Man and the Desert (1924), Light and Socialism (1921). About the first socialist tragedy. Manuscript (1934). Translated by Michael Leetz. In: Third Nature - Technology Capital Environment. Edited by Steffen Richter and Andreas Rötzer. 1/2018, pp. 169-177. ISBN 978-3-95757-458-9 ( online ).
  • Chevengur. The hike with an open heart. Translation by Renate Reschke. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-42803-0 ( reading sample ).
  • Dshan, or The First Socialist Tragedy. Prose ∙ essays ∙ letters. Edited and translated by Michael Leetz. Quintus, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-947215-36-2 .
  • Early Writings on Proletarianization 1919-1927. Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2019. ISBN 978-3-85132-948-3 .

literature

in order of appearance

  • Witali Schentalinski : The risen word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Translated from the Russian by Bernd Rullkötter. Gustav Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1996, ISBN 3-7857-0848-3 , pp. 419-436.
  • Robert Hodel , Jan Peter Locher (ed.): Language and narration with Andrej Platonov . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-906759-83-0 .
  • Stephan-Immanuel Teichgräber: The deconstruction of socialist mythology in the poetics of Andrej Platonov . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-631-33928-3 .
  • Pia-Susan Berger -ügel : Andrej Platonov: the novel “Ščastlivaja Moskva” in the context of his work and his philosophy . Sagner, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-87690-603-2 .
  • Konstantin Kaminskij: Electrification as an institution and a phantasm. Andrej Platonov's prose method between technical apparatus and Soviet administrative apparatus . In: Nina Frieß (Hg): Textures - Identities - Theories. Results of the working meeting of the Young Forum Slavic Literary Studies in Trier 2010 . Universitätsverlag, Potsdam 2011, ISBN 978-3-86956-072-4 , pp. 101-117 ( online ).
  • Robert Hodel: The violent discourse of politics as a literary model in Andrej Platonov and Vladimir Sorokin. In: Laura Burlon, Nina Frieß, Katarzyna Rózanska, Peter Salden (eds): Crime - Fiction - Marketing. Violence in contemporary Slavic literatures . Universitätsverlag, Potsdam 2013, ISBN 978-3-86956-271-1 , pp. 65–86 ( online ).
  • Michael Leetz: "The first one who really understood everything". Andrei Platonov, the writer of the future. In: Sinn und Form , issue 6/2016, pp. 790–799 ( reading sample ).
  • Manfred Sapper, Volker Weichsel (ed.): Utopia and violence. Andrei Platonov. Writing the modern (= Eastern Europe , issue 8-10 / 2016). Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-8305-3658-1 ( reading sample ).
  • Hans Günther: Andrej Platonow: Life work effect. Berlin, Suhrkamp 2016, ISBN 978-3-518-46737-4
  • Michael Leetz: "I decided to check whether the weak truth conquers the strong untruth". Andrei Platonov's letter to a stranger. In: Berliner Debatte Initial , Issue 1/2017, ISBN 978-3-945878-52-1 , pp. 55–60.
  • Andreas Breitenstein, NZZ Platonow believed in the necessity of the communist utopia and at the same time relentlessly traced its failure «

Web links

Commons : Andrei Platonow  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Kasack : The classics of Russian literature . Düsseldorf 1986, p. 158.
  2. ^ Ulrich M. Schmid : Communism as will and madness . In: NZZ , August 12, 2017.
  3. ↑ Boris Frezinskij: Pisateli i sovetskie voždi . Moscow 2008, p. 525.
  4. ↑ Vitaly Schentalinski : The resurrected word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Bergisch Gladbach 1996, p. 424.
  5. ↑ Vitaly Schentalinski: The resurrected word. Persecuted Russian writers in their final letters, poems, and records. Bergisch Gladbach 1996, p. 435
  6. ↑ Konstantin Kaminskij: Disturbance signals in the socrealistic norm system. The Andrei Platonov case. In: Constructed Realities - Normal Deviations ( Open Access ) ; Wiesbaden 2010, pp. 63-78.
  7. ↑ “Old-age poverty is programmed”. Interview by Thomas Urban . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 3, 2020, p. 19.
personal data
SURNAME Platonow, Andrei Platonowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Klimentow, Andrei Platonowitsch (real name); Климентов, Андрей Платонович (real name, Russian); Платонов, Андрей Платонович (Russian); Platonov, Andrej Platonovič (scientific transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION soviet writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Voronezh
DATE OF DEATH 5th January 1951
Place of death Moscow