When talking about the contradictions of bodies—and of cadavers, as dead former people—Ed Atkins lights on this little, almost throwaway phrase; that the dead body is “both present and absolutely absent.” I don’t know how or why exactly, but Atkins’ explication of the “heavy, dense matter” and the intense intimacy and subjectivity of describing death had me thinking about Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899 - 1951). Not only because he directed enormous care toward the fragile, knowable body, but because existence—particularly in torpid, dangerous times—makes that fragility even more perishable, more at risk. Quite openly, he teased at the contradictions of Soviet progress; how “inside every poor creature was a sense of some other happy destiny, a destiny that was necessary and inevitable . . . why, then, did they find their lives such a burden and why were they always waiting for something?” The message is clear; that revolutionary fervour (the “happy destiny” of 1917 and all that it would bring) was always delayed, and deferred, from what people really need.
Platonov was no “dissident”. Nor was he a Soviet stooge. He remained, to the end of his life, a passionate socialist; albeit no “fellow traveller” with the Soviet ideal. In an unpublished 1935 article, this former land-reclamation engineer and writer of gently strange stories pleaded for the “quiet work” that the revolution must entail; explaining how he was fearful of empty ideological posturing just as he was fearful of hollow, consumerist pleasures. Ecstatic dance halls and radiant monuments to Stalin were equally painful to this tender theologian of spiritual socialism. The body is weak, &c barely warm enough to survive. The revolution must nourish the soul, albeit gently; and it must build a house in which that soul can thrive.
That article—submitted to the editorial desk of Maxim Gorky in January 1951—was rejected for being “unsuitable” and “pessimistic.” Two months later, it was denounced as “reactionary” by none other than the Writers’ Union. One wonders how Platonov—surrounded by promises, ideological posturing and much-feted acts of Soviet construction—“survived.”
It is no surprise, then, that Platonov’s novels are filled with architectures of appaling violence and crushing indifference; that his novels and short stories obsess about the fate of bodies that were exposed to, torn apart and often outright murdered by these projects of malign construction (monuments, infrastructure, aerodromes and palaces); of the gross and lagging gap between the reality of the quiet, tender and vulnerable human body, and the great idealistic conflagration of the revolutionary ideal.
Architectures like these:
In Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit), a group of workers toil away at the construction of a “House of the Proletariat” - a plan-less building conceived as a shining vessel for the realization of the dreams of “the people”; a building that will encompass and satisfy all dreams, all needs and desires. Throughout the novel, the workers find themselves beleaguered; digging only the building’s ever-descending foundations - a pit into which they pour their failing energies and - eventually - their lives. The message is clear; that, even in 1926, Platonov felt that the human cost of building Communism was too great and too indifferent to the suffering human subject. None - not the workers, the foremen, the party officials - can halt this corrosive obliteration. The prose near spits its contempt for such a harrowing of lives: “let the future be alien and empty, and let the past find peace in graves, in the cramped closeness of bones that had once embraced, in the dust of loved and forgotten bodies that had rotted together.” Instead of the house of the proletariat (“forever under construction yet never constructed”) will be a landscape of rotted graves and empty futures. The pit is what stands between these things; the spatial, un-architectural void that links burial and erasure.
Between 1931 and 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Canal was constructed using forced labour. Casualties were extraordinarily high. On completion, it was found that the canal was too shallow to bear ships. Forced labour was supplied by the mouthy acronynm OGPUGULAG, or the White Sea-Baltic Corrective Labour Camp Directorate.
In Schastlivaya Moskva (Happy Moscow)—a work that remained unfinished, in the dark heat of 1932—we encounter Moscow, the embodiment of the Soviet ideal; hale, muscular and bold. But it is her fate to plummet; literally, from a plane, where she parachutes and joins the ranks of workers excavating the Moscow metro (literally, descending from the great heights of the revolution and into its bloody belly). Here she is comingled, fatally, with the chthonic “fact” of the earth; her leg crushed beneath a collapsing mound of stone and soil. Again, Platonov’s attentiveness to the pit - the sucking void which connects (a tunnel of misery) the graves of history with an empty and alien future. Architectures abound, albeit in the negative - the fringed: from the dark tunnels of the metro to the disordered outskirts of the city; a periphery filled with junk, “empty trousers”, “jackets without wearers”; and - finally - the cramped, depressive workers’ housing to which Moscow is confined, its pipes rocking and thudding with the collective effluvia of its inhabitants. For every marble-clad, radiant metro, for every parade ground and aerodrome, there is a world of waste, rot and decay.
The Moscow Metro under construction, 1931 - 35
In 1934, Platonov was sent as part of a brigade of writers to Turkmenistan - to report on the progress of Sovietization. Aside from his “official” notebooks, there is Dzhan (Soul), perhaps his most mystical and obscure novella. Here, the body is at its lowest ebb; where characters - in the midst of this vast and stony desert - appease their hunger with blades of grass, and drink the scant dew in handfuls of sand. Chagataev, the missionary-like character who comes to build “a happy world of bliss” in this place, fails in this mission; for it has no substance - an anti-architecture of dunes, rock, dead grass and dry earth. In this “blasted” landscape, the small huts they prepare - the “foundations” of the “world of bliss” - become graves, and places of existential agony and longing.
In the 1930s, the Soviets employed local women to put poison in rodent burrowsN. D. MITROFANOV / NATURAL NIDALITY OF TRANSMISSIBLE DISEASES / UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Architecture is the coalescing of energies, trajectories and accelerations. Each built thing takes away and gives back, though rarely with a proportional and satisfying balance. Maybe this is what applied Platonovism might look like; a cautious reminder to build for the soul.