Andrey Platonov: The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution

Description

This book traces the originality of Andrey Platonov’s vision of the Revolution in readings of his works. It has been common in Platonov scholarship to measure him within the parameters of a political pro et contra the October Revolution and Soviet society, but the proposal of this book is to look for the way in which the writer continuously asked into the disastrous aspects of the implementation of a new proletarian community for what they could tell us about the promise of the Revolution to open up the experience of the world as common. In readings of selected works by Andrei Platonov I follow the development of his chronicle of revolutionary society, and from within it the outline of the forgotten utopian dream of a common world. I bring Platonov into a dialogue with certain questions that arise from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and that were later re-addressed in the works of Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy, related to the experience of the modern world in terms of communality, groundlessness, memory, interiority. I show that Platonov writes the Revolution as an implementation of common being in society that needs to retrieve the forgotten memory of what being in common means. Contents......Page 9 Acknowledgments......Page 11 Author’s Note......Page 13 Introduction......Page 15 Chapter One: A Proletarian Existential Realism......Page 33 Chapter Two: Chevengur and the Movement of the Revolution......Page 47 Chapter Three: The Foundation Pit and the Problem of Time......Page 75 Chapter Four: Happy Moscow and Universal Love......Page 91 Chapter Five: Dzhan......Page 105 Chapter Six: “The River Potudan”......Page 121 Chapter Seven: The Ecstasy of War......Page 133 Afterword......Page 143 References......Page 149 Index......Page 155 About the Author......Page 161