Technological Animism in the Novels of Andrei Platonov

Issue #798

In his novels, Soviet writer Andrei Platonov effects a conciliation between bodies warped and souls kindled by the revolution, in a manner both satirical and tragic, that celebrates socialism’s promise while conscientiously documenting its failures. Trained as an engineer, his fiction employs Newton’s Third Law of Motion (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) to link the socialist and metaphysical worlds, where a falling off in one precipitates a comparable transformation in the other. Flesh and spirit, perpetual cycling through varying states of collapse, manage to find reinforcement in the warmth of human, animal, and mechanized compassion, a latent world of understanding whose empire harrows even death.

Platonov endows technology with a quiescent animism that shades into mystical reverence, veiled by a dark humor that conceals a deeper inquietude. The industrialized state is a powerful machine, whose manmade (and thus effable) technology enables the Party to more efficiently exploit labor, provide for the material needs of the people, and bury whole villages in a single motion of the will. It is overwhelming not only in its capacity for destruction but also in its frailty. Like their creators, machines succumb to natural rot and and the inevitable decomposition of time.

This technological animism links the living gods of socialism with the unseen spirits of pre-Christian pagan Rus. Like their tenebrous predecessors, mechanized forms in the Soviet paradigm both impede and assist mankind through the perils of growth and survival. Platonov recognized with troubled eyes the state’s glorification of the engineer and the mechanized man, and his work is characterized by a skeptical (and often wounded) hope in their ability to make people better and happier. In a world were factories and industrialized farms are the new colossi, he reminds us of imperfection, despair, lust, greed, love, ambivalence; our troubling humanity is captured in a language of sympathy wholly unique to Platonov, whose tragic burlesques and melancholy satires startle the reader with real possibilities of grace and the reality of worlds falling apart, where people drift past each other like souls parachuting through the burning stratosphere.

His prose, sparse, strange, and redolent of a subterranean turbulence, is like a musical score that belies all pretense of understanding, underwritten by the fear that what unites bodies is sorrow and decay. Platonov recognizes that the grief of this passing moment is a longing for a memory that never was, which is yet more real than the passion of our day. His characters seem forever trapped in the interstices between the ache of time and the dull throb of sensation. The infinite allusions in the texts are rabbit holes whose intertextuality is a breeding ground for the twentieth century’s labyrinthine network of devastation and hope, horror and salvation.

Tied in with his implied theory of technological animism is the desire to use modern science and industrial advances to effect the resurrection of the dead. In the context of Soviet Futurism and forward-looking state propaganda, this seems like an oddly conservative venture. But for Platonov the present and the past are one; he recognizes that time moves differently for the different peoples, nations, and classes of the USSR, and he concentrates on these differences in his work to counter the cultural and social leveling that had abandoned those who could not keep up. Like Mandelstam, he is interested in the people progress leaves behind, their voices silenced by the noise of time.

Platonov sees a dying world where the desire for progress is a destructive force that also carries within itself the mechanics of healing and rebirth. It is a breathtaking vision, startling in its violent compassion, random catastrophe, and unsentimental grief.

Yet there is always a lingering presence, an indefinable phenomenon, that distills some small measure of reassurance from so much confusion and misfortune. Halfway through The Foundation Pit, we (the author, narrator, and reader) realize that there is a bear living amongst the people of the village like a regular proletarian. The narrator comments on the strangeness of his being hitherto unseen and/or ignored, but leaves it at that. Like the bear in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, whose appearance augurs both death and resurrection, the presence of Platonov’s bear manifests itself in an equally complex manner. He is a productive blacksmith and terrifying government informant, responsible for both the most bestial and humane moments in the book. When he strokes the face of dead young girl with his powerful, gentle paw, a sublime moment has passed whose providence is not of this realm. And yet we feel it so strongly in our bones. His is the animism of an older world that haunts our rational industrial age and its deceptively arcane technology.