I finally found Vasily Grossman's introduction to the collection of Platonov's short stories that Grossman worked to publish in 1958, seven years after Platonov's death (and five years after the death of Stalin). There's nothing particularly interesting about Grossman's introduction, except where knowledge of their friendship enhances interest. Grossman is clearly using his introduction to rehabilitate Platonov according to the literary demands of the state at the time, and there's an obvious tension where Grossman attempts to render Platonov's distinctiveness acceptable in that paradigm. Like Platonov at the time of his death, Grossman at the time of writing this introduction was considered largely unpublishable. Here we find Grossman arguing the value and acceptability of his departed friend's once-censored work, while Grossman's own work continued to languish under Soviet censorship.
Preface to the Collected Selected Works of Andrei Platonov
Andrei Platonovich Platonov was born in 1899 in the Yamskaya Sloboda district of Voronezh. Platonov's father was a metalworker. His first emotional impressions, his first awareness of the world (and it is well known that childhood impressions are especially powerful) were bound up with life in this suburban settlement, at once rural and urban, where the poverty and hardship that had come from the city lived side by side with the poverty and hardship that had come from the countryside.
At thirteen, after a brief education at a church parish school and then a municipal school, Andrei Platonov went to work, first as a laborer on a threshing machine, then as a metalworker at a locomotive repair plant — for his father could not feed a family of ten.
In 1919, at twenty years of age, Platonov volunteered for the Red Army: at first he worked as an assistant engine driver on trains bringing reinforcements and ammunition to the front, and later fought with a rifle in hand in fierce battles.
Immediately after the end of the Civil War, the young worker went to study at a Polytechnic Institute. Having become an engineer, he applied his skills to areas of particular importance for the life of the people — land reclamation, dam construction, and the electrification of agriculture. For a time he served as the provincial engineer of Voronezh and chief engineer for the survey and construction of a hydroelectric station on the Don. Throughout his years of engineering work, Platonov fought drought, drained swamps, and built rural power installations. Under his direction, 763 ponds (dams) were built, around 400 wells were dug, 7,600 dessiatines of marshland were drained, and 30 dessiatines of dry land were irrigated.
Platonov began writing in his youth, continued to write while working as an engineer, and shortly after moving to Moscow in 1926 devoted himself entirely to literature.
During the years of the Great Patriotic War, Platonov once again, as in his youth, volunteered for the front, but this time not as an engine driver or a common soldier, but as a correspondent for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. Sparing neither his strength nor his health, he honorably fulfilled his duty as a writer and a soldier.
Soon after the war came days, months, and years of grave, agonizing illness, yet illness did not interrupt Andrei Platonov's work as a writer. With the same diligence with which the thirteen-year-old apprentice metalworker had labored in the factory, the dying master Platonov worked on his manuscript until his very last days.
Such are the principal milestones of Andrei Platonov's working life. And the milestones of a life are also the milestones of a writer's path. A person's labor and character are at the same time the character of his literary labor — and so it is when a writer's work is firmly, naturally bound to the people who gave rise to it, to the land that bore it, to all that constitutes his life, his joy, his grief, his hope, his despair, and his anger. Platonov's character began to take shape during his years in the Yamskaya Sloboda, where factories, railway workshops, lathes, machines, and locomotives stood side by side with village wattle fences and kitchen gardens, and vacant lots overgrown with burdock, where factory and locomotive whistles and the crash of hammers mingled with the singing of cheerful drunkards, the weeping of wronged children, the ringing of church bells, and the laments of beggars. Yet it was precisely in this hard life of the suburban settlement, with its terrible power of idle ignorant masters over the laboring poor, that Platonov's conception of the true working masters of life was born: those who understood their strength not in the domination of one person over another, but in the victory of human labor over the vastness of nature, in the name of life and for the sake of life.
Through exhaustion and ten-hour-a-day labor that was often too great a burden for a boy, there broke through and was born a feeling of admiration for the working man: so poor, so wronged by life, hardened and yet so kind, so mighty and gifted; the working man, creator of that wonderfully beautiful, heroic machine, the locomotive. That childlike, loving admiration for the locomotive lived on in Platonov the adult — an admiration he had carried within him since childhood.
Platonov's character, both as a man and as a writer, took shape and was fully formed during the years of the Civil War and the first decade of post-revolutionary construction. Platonov was a writer who loved the working people with his whole soul, who knew the life of the working class deeply, a writer who sought to make sense of the most complex, and therefore the most fundamental, foundations of human existence; a writer of a kind, humane, and at the same time searingly sarcastic disposition, who passionately championed his own understanding of labor and human suffering, his own particular, distinctly Platonovian understanding of life and death.
In the philosophical bent of his character, in his voracious curiosity, in his indomitable interest in philosophy, physics, and electrical engineering, the traits of his human and literary character were made manifest. His was the character of a thinker, but a thinker of a singular, exceptional kind, one who had not lost the distinctive qualities that his working-class origins had developed in him: the qualities of a self-made man of the people, a gifted Russian craftsman.
Platonov's favorite characters are created in the image and likeness of the author himself. On the pages of his books we frequently encounter fair-haired children endowed with a worldly wisdom born of harsh need and toil, and alongside them we encounter old men bent with age yet filled with a childlike purity of soul, a childlike wonder and delight before the miracle of life; old men who wished, with a childlike boldness and daring, to understand the mystery of existence. Most often of all, the pages of his books bring us workers and peasants — they are rich in what Platonov himself possesses: mighty diligence, patience, and kindness. Nearly all of them are thinkers, and like true thinkers they are remarkably guileless; within them, it seems, the fair-haired child and the fair-haired wise old man live on together, side by side.
The landscape in Platonov's stories and novellas is striking and distinctive. The trees, leaves, grass, and stalks of rye are not merely depicted, they live their own lives, and Platonov is not indifferent to that life, to this quiet life of grasses and trees. He does not cast a careless glance over it, he is filled with tender, loving sympathy and interest even for this small, humble existence.
Platonov's imagery, the charm of his language, the generous depth of his feelings and thoughts — all of this is wonderfully singular, utterly free of any formula or cliché. The distinctiveness of Platonov the writer is born from the genuine, rather than invented, distinctiveness of Platonov's soul and mind. Herein lies one of the differences between living talent and dead craftsmanship, however skillfully polished and gleaming the standard facets of a craftsman's work may be.
The distinction of living talent lies in the complete absence of even a shadow, not only of indifference and detachment, but of any habitual, settled relationship to what it writes about. Living talent lives, rejoices, and suffers with the full force of its soul and mind, with its whole being, through the joy, anger, struggle, and suffering of the broad circle of its contemporaries. It is them, and they are it. For this reason, living talent can never be indifferent, detached, or even calm.
This distinction manifests itself in the ability — and not merely the ability, but the natural capacity — to express what is common and important and necessary for the lives of a wide circle of people: not through the formulas of literary algebra, or even of higher literary algebra, but through one's own singularity, one's personal feelings, one's own particular arrangement of images, one's own language. That is, through those words that are truly one's own, and which alone are capable of expressing the feelings, the imagery, and the character of the writer.
The third quality that distinguishes a writer from a craftsman is that the writer's distinctiveness is rooted in naturalness rather than affectation, and that only living talent is able to firmly unite and reconcile distinctiveness with naturalness and simplicity.
Works endowed with such qualities possess an important property that justifies the labor and time spent in writing them: in reading such works, a person becomes convinced, comes to understand, and believes that the feelings he experiences as his own personal feelings turn out to exist in another person, in other people — and herein lies one of the remarkable aspects of literature and art: its capacity to make personal feeling communal, to socialize individual impulse, passion, anger, pain, and joy. In this communalizing of his feelings, the reader simultaneously comes to understand them more clearly and more deeply.
Art socializes the spiritual wealth of the individual, making it the possession of all; but at the same time, art enriches a person with the vast inner wealth of other people, unites him with the world, arms him against evil, and makes the world of other people comprehensible and near, regardless of the gulf of space and time, regardless of many differences. A Lapp or a Chukchi reindeer herder reads a book, and by the command of art, Yevgeny from The Bronze Horseman lifts the fur flap and enters the yaranga as a familiar, well-known man, whose fate and suffering are not a matter of indifference to those living in that yaranga standing in the tundra on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.
In a number of his works, Andrei Platonov succeeded in expressing, with living talent, his passionate love for working people, and in conveying the depth and beauty of their inner lives.
The literary legacy of Andrei Platonov includes novellas and stories, only a small portion of which appeared in the books published before the war: The Locks of Epiphany, The Origin of a Master, The Potudan River, and others.
During the years of the Great Patriotic War, Andrei Platonov produced a number of books: Armor, Toward the Setting Sun, Stories of the Homeland, Eternal Glory, A Soldier's Heart, and Beneath the Skies of the Homeland.
In such wartime stories as "Toward the Setting Sun," "One Battle," and others, the writer's love for his homeland is expressed. These stories speak of the strength of the national character, of the courage, diligence, and titanic patience displayed by soldiers and officers at war, and of the remarkable unity that bound the people and the Soviet Army together during the hard years of trial.
In his final years, gravely ill, Andrei Platonov labored tirelessly on the retelling of folk tales. His skillful literary adaptations yielded collections of Russian folk tales, The Magic Ring and Finist the Bright Falcon, as well as a volume of Bashkir Folk Tales.
