East and West in the Work of Andrei Platonov

The belated recognition that the reading intelligentsia is now giving the name of Andrei Platonov has a bitter tone. During his life, if his work was treated seriously at all, it was, as a rule, for the purpose of demonstrating its "errors." One critic wrote in 1937: "Platonov seems to pick up and inject into his work that which Soviet literature discarded and swept out — biologism, ‘immediate impressions,’ a romanticizing of those who have suffered wrongs, naturalism, and tongue-tie. …" This was considered a normal tone toward Platonov. Even in the 1920s, when there was a certain tolerance in the attitude toward the still young Platonov, he was most often regarded as merely a talented eccentric, whose particular fantasies in any case were "out of date." In the 1930s he was confidently exposed. In the 1940s he was merely named as long since and irrefutably exposed. Platonov was silent — he died, unknown, in 1951.