Platonov's novel, The Foundation Pit, is a bitter critique of Soviet ideology. In the book, the proletarian enthusiasts are materialist, utilitarian, collectivist, and atheist; somewhat paradoxically, they are also future and death-obsessed. Platonov's foundation pit workers inhabit a world which is appallingly similar to Stalin's historical Soviet Union. The pit workers are virulently anti-individualist, anti-bourgeois, anti-priest, and anti-peasant. They imbibe and spread large amounts of socialist propaganda, the tenants of which are almost all related to the violent transformation of society in the service of a mythological future that almost by definition cannot exist. The absurdity of the central project of Platonov's society, a gigantic housing complex for working-class people, scarcely overshadows the absurdity of Stalin's real-life economic plan, including famine-inducing collectivization, super-centralized and unrealistically ambitious five-year plans, industrial giganticism, mass deportations and slave labor, etc. And yet somehow Platonov's book, as illustrated by some of the strange quotes below, seems to explain something serious about the Stalinist project. Notwithstanding its extraordinary violence, Stalinism proved attractive to many Russians precisely because the Stalinist vision was so absolutist, so eschatological, so future-oriented, and so mythological. To quote the Marxist philosopher Althusser, the future lasts forever.
"Happiness will originate from materialism, comrade Voshchev, not from meaning."
"A man who's never seen war is a woman who's never given birth--soft in the head!"
"After all, we're not animals--we can live for the sake of enthusiasm."
"Sadness is nothing, comrade Kozlov," he said. "It means that one class senses the whole world, and anyway happiness is a bourgeois business. Happiness will lead only to shame."
"...in a year's time the entire local class of the proletariat would leave the petty-proprietorial town and take possession for life of this monumental new home. And after ten or twenty years, another engineer would construct a tower in the middle of the world, and the laborers of the entire terrestrial globe would be settled there for a happy eternity."
"Pruchevsky ensured the indestructibility of the future all-proletarian dwelling and felt comforted by the sureness of the materials destined to protect people who until then had lived on the outside."
"At the time of the Revolutio dogs had barked day and night all over Russia, but now they had fallen silent: Labor had set in and the laborers slept in quiet."
"You're lying, you class superfluity!"
"He even began to doubt the happiness of the future, which he imagined in the form of a blue summer lit by a motionless sun"
"I'll go ahead and knock those shepherds and clerks into working class shape. I"ll have them digging so hard that all their mortal element will show on their bare faces."
"...at the same time he felt deeply agitated: Wasn't truth merely a class enemy? After all, the class enemy was now capable of appearing even in the form of dream and imagination!"
"What kind of nerve-ridden intelligentsia is present here that the least sound grows straight into?"
"...he had calculated his revolutionary merits to be inadequate and his daily contribution to social benefit to be minimal."
"You, Kozlov, clearly live on principles of your own and are leaving the working mass behind while you crawl into the distance."
"The working class isn't the tsar," said Chiklin. "It's not afraid of uprisings."
"The proletariat, comrade Voshchev, lives for enthusiasm!"
"And why are you dying, Mama? From being bourgeois--or from death?"
"Ay, you masses, you masses! It's difficult to organize you all into the gruel of communism!"
"But I didn't want to get myself born--I was afraid my mother would be bourgeois."
"And our Soviet power goes deep indeed if children, even when they have no memory of their own mothers, already sense comrade Stalin!"
"That's enough, you petty bourgeois, of you and your grieving...Do you not realize that sorrow among us has been abolished?"
"He believed in a near-at-hand day when the entire proletariat would take on the image and likeness of its own vanguard; this, he knew, would be socialism."
"We no longer feel the heat from the bonfire of the class struggle, but there has to be a blaze..."
"The womb matrix for the house of the future life was already complete..."
"..afraid of being taken for a man who still lived according to the tempos of the epoch of he economy regime."
"..thanks to the disciplinarian calculation that is it better for a thousand men to take a hundred strides than for one man to walk three miles."
"...suffering torment over the solitary cows, sheep, and fowl, since in the hands of an elemental kulak privateer even a goat can be a lever of capitalism."
"I used to be a priest, but now I've detached myself from my soul..."
"It's no use, comrade, for me to live," the priest replied with reason. "I no longer feel the charm of creation."
"Well then?" patiently said the activist from up above. "Or are you going to stand there forever in between capitalism and communism? It's time to get moving..."
"So are these activists of yours sleeping?" "An activist can never sleep," replied Yelisey.
Showing posts with label Andrey Platonov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrey Platonov. Show all posts
Monday, January 2, 2012
The Soviet Shining
I just recently watched my favorite horror movie, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Stephen King's invented term, the shining, indicates a predilection for telepathy as well as a supernatural ability to detect traces of previous events, especially violent crimes. In King's horrific tale, a little boy feels the reverberating presence of a triple murder that occurred in the 1920s even as he witnesses the effect this historical tragedy appears to be having on his own father's menacing behavior. I think the shining is a useful metaphor for the relevance of history as an academic discipline or mode of inquiry. The intermingling of past and present lies at the heart of human existence.
King's story--or at least Kubrick's interpretation of that story--includes more than a healthy dose of psychoanalytic theory. Before ever setting out to manage an isolated hotel, Jack Nicholson's son meets with a psychoanalyst. As it turns out, the boy has developed an alternate personality, an invisible friend who lives inside the boy's mouth and speaks through his finger. Tellingly, this invisible friend only arrived on the scene when his angry father dislocated his shoulder. To my mind, the point is that "the shining," or rather the generic connection between past and present, is more psychoanalytic than supernatural. The past matters to us. I relearn this lesson each December 7th, the anniversary of my mother's death. Each year, as the date approaches, I feel vaguely uneasy, vaguely depressed. In fact, this date seems more potent the less I consciously remember its existential significance.
Revolutions are related to this concept of "shining." The past, and in particular the criminal past, bubbles forth. It only takes a little revolutionary telepathy to conjure up the blood of the martyrs to inspire fresh slaughter. In the movie, the Shining, historical pain is the agent of activity and plot in general. Marx famously said that revolutions are the engine of historical change. They come about as a result of past trauma, or a sensitivity to past trauma.
I'll close by making one more strained, tenuous connection between The Shining and Bolshevik Revolution. Take the movie's most important line, delivered by Jack Nicholson. In response to a terrified Shelley Duvall's desperate request to be given the chance to retreat in order to "think things over," Nicholson replies thus: “You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over, what good’s a few minutes more gonna do you now?” The line is powerful because it's not just menacing sarcasm. It's true on a philosophical level. It's offered as Flannery O'Connell wisdom. Here's the translation: You've lived for years with a violent, sarcastic, and generally evil man, and yet you've never been honest or courageous enough to admit this fact and save yourself or even your defenseless son from me. Why start to live authentically now?
Nicholson's devastating truth reminds me of Andrey Platonov's novel, The Foundation Pit. In The Foundation Pit, communist true believers have long ago surrendered the ability to live honestly or authentically. They are busily constructing an enormous hole which will serve as the base of an enormous workers' housing structure, symbol of the proletarian future. Their lives are empty and boring, filled with parades, propaganda, empty ideology, coercion and violence, and meaningless motion and random activity. Platonov's portrayal of Stalinist Russia seems absurdist, but the cruelty and spiritual emptiness of Platonov's invented world is a close parallel of the real political entity he knew. And somehow the citizens of Platonov's commune, who are so ready to destroy kulaks in order to serve a "future" they cannot know, seem in need of a Flannery O'Connell-style epiphany. Or perhaps the reverse is true? Perhaps they see themselves in the role of Jack Nicholson, using extreme violence to help show the kulaks how empty or useless their lives have been? I remember another Flannery O'Connell line. It goes something like this: "She would have been a good woman...If someone had been there to shoot her every minute of her life." Maybe this is what Stalin, and Platonov's Stalinists were really all about. Maybe they believed that Russians could only be good if someone was there to shoot them every minute of their lives...
King's story--or at least Kubrick's interpretation of that story--includes more than a healthy dose of psychoanalytic theory. Before ever setting out to manage an isolated hotel, Jack Nicholson's son meets with a psychoanalyst. As it turns out, the boy has developed an alternate personality, an invisible friend who lives inside the boy's mouth and speaks through his finger. Tellingly, this invisible friend only arrived on the scene when his angry father dislocated his shoulder. To my mind, the point is that "the shining," or rather the generic connection between past and present, is more psychoanalytic than supernatural. The past matters to us. I relearn this lesson each December 7th, the anniversary of my mother's death. Each year, as the date approaches, I feel vaguely uneasy, vaguely depressed. In fact, this date seems more potent the less I consciously remember its existential significance.
Revolutions are related to this concept of "shining." The past, and in particular the criminal past, bubbles forth. It only takes a little revolutionary telepathy to conjure up the blood of the martyrs to inspire fresh slaughter. In the movie, the Shining, historical pain is the agent of activity and plot in general. Marx famously said that revolutions are the engine of historical change. They come about as a result of past trauma, or a sensitivity to past trauma.
I'll close by making one more strained, tenuous connection between The Shining and Bolshevik Revolution. Take the movie's most important line, delivered by Jack Nicholson. In response to a terrified Shelley Duvall's desperate request to be given the chance to retreat in order to "think things over," Nicholson replies thus: “You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over, what good’s a few minutes more gonna do you now?” The line is powerful because it's not just menacing sarcasm. It's true on a philosophical level. It's offered as Flannery O'Connell wisdom. Here's the translation: You've lived for years with a violent, sarcastic, and generally evil man, and yet you've never been honest or courageous enough to admit this fact and save yourself or even your defenseless son from me. Why start to live authentically now?
Nicholson's devastating truth reminds me of Andrey Platonov's novel, The Foundation Pit. In The Foundation Pit, communist true believers have long ago surrendered the ability to live honestly or authentically. They are busily constructing an enormous hole which will serve as the base of an enormous workers' housing structure, symbol of the proletarian future. Their lives are empty and boring, filled with parades, propaganda, empty ideology, coercion and violence, and meaningless motion and random activity. Platonov's portrayal of Stalinist Russia seems absurdist, but the cruelty and spiritual emptiness of Platonov's invented world is a close parallel of the real political entity he knew. And somehow the citizens of Platonov's commune, who are so ready to destroy kulaks in order to serve a "future" they cannot know, seem in need of a Flannery O'Connell-style epiphany. Or perhaps the reverse is true? Perhaps they see themselves in the role of Jack Nicholson, using extreme violence to help show the kulaks how empty or useless their lives have been? I remember another Flannery O'Connell line. It goes something like this: "She would have been a good woman...If someone had been there to shoot her every minute of her life." Maybe this is what Stalin, and Platonov's Stalinists were really all about. Maybe they believed that Russians could only be good if someone was there to shoot them every minute of their lives...
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The Dzhan (Soul) of Russian Folk
If it weren't for Orlando Figes' review of Andrey Platonov's works in a recent New York Review of Books article my copy of Platonov's book of short stories, Soul and other Stories, might have remained unmolested for years to come. But Figes' authorative review, "A Great Russian Writer in the Communist Cauldron," assures me that Platonov easily makes the short list for the title of greatest Soviet era author.
Platonov, an early enthusiast for the great Soviet experiment, Civil War railway engineer working to keep the Red Army supplied, and probable participant in the forced grain levys that led to the starvation of so many Russian peasants, believed in communism, movement, machines, and the future. However, his enthusiasm faded and his unpublished novels such as Chevenguv (1929) and the Foundation Pit (1930), are an indictment of Stalinism. Even his early work, Epifan Locks (1927), which was warmly received by Gorky, seemed to suggest a critical analogy between Peter the Great and the rising socialist leader.
According to Figes, Chevenguv portrayed a dystopic world in which communists kill bourgeois inhabitants and then live without direction in obscurantism before Cossacks invade an invite suicide. Plotonov's biography reflects the stresses of the Soviet interwar years: in two decades, the writer went from being a true believe, to skeptic, to critic, to social realist (publically, in order to continue writing), and then finally, inevitably, to grief. In 1938 Platonov's son was sent to the gulag as a terrorist; Platonov contracted tuberculosis and died in 1943. Fortunately, a soul (a Russian one at least) can outlive its corporal shell, and many of Platonov's unpublished works have been uncovered since the fall of communism.
Platonov, an early enthusiast for the great Soviet experiment, Civil War railway engineer working to keep the Red Army supplied, and probable participant in the forced grain levys that led to the starvation of so many Russian peasants, believed in communism, movement, machines, and the future. However, his enthusiasm faded and his unpublished novels such as Chevenguv (1929) and the Foundation Pit (1930), are an indictment of Stalinism. Even his early work, Epifan Locks (1927), which was warmly received by Gorky, seemed to suggest a critical analogy between Peter the Great and the rising socialist leader.
According to Figes, Chevenguv portrayed a dystopic world in which communists kill bourgeois inhabitants and then live without direction in obscurantism before Cossacks invade an invite suicide. Plotonov's biography reflects the stresses of the Soviet interwar years: in two decades, the writer went from being a true believe, to skeptic, to critic, to social realist (publically, in order to continue writing), and then finally, inevitably, to grief. In 1938 Platonov's son was sent to the gulag as a terrorist; Platonov contracted tuberculosis and died in 1943. Fortunately, a soul (a Russian one at least) can outlive its corporal shell, and many of Platonov's unpublished works have been uncovered since the fall of communism.
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