When the KGB's 'literary archive' was partially opened in the early 1990s the draft of a previously unknown Platonov work, The Technical Novel, was discoverd in his file. Once known only to a small circle of admirers in Russia and the West, Andrey Platonov. Platonov's major novels The Foundation Pit and Chevengur remained unpublished in Russia until the late 1980s. He died of consumption caught from his teenage son whom he had nursed on his return from the Gulag in 1946. However, like Anna Akhmatova, he came under attack again after the war. During the Great Patriotic War (1941-5) Platonov worked as a war correspondent and once more began to recieve official recognition. His talent was recognised early on by Maxim Gorky, but after initial success his stories were strongly criticised - Stalin is reputed to have written 'scum' in the margin of the story 'For Future Use' (1931).
From 1918 he published articles, verse and essays, passing from the optimism of the pamphlet Electrification (1921), through a science-fiction trilogy, to the stories that began to appear from 1916 onwards in the Moscow journals.
He fought in the Red Army during the Civil War, and then became an electrical engineer and land-reclamation specialist. Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1899-1951), the son of a railway worker, was born near Voronezh.
0 kommentar(er)
