The Modern Novel

Biography

Andrei Platonov was born Andrei Platonovich Klimentov in Iamskaia Sloboda, near Voronezh in 1899. He had a basic education and worked as a manual labourer till the Revolution, when he started writing articles in the local press and also went to university. He started writing and was also involved in local electrification projects and then, after a drought, irrigation. He applied to join the Communist Party but was rejected for being too much of an intellectual. He worked for the Agricultural Commission but, as the task was overwhelming and as he missed his family, who had stayed at home, he took up writing again. After initial success, his works were rejected as being too modernist and his work on collectivisation – Котлован (The Foundation Pit) – was condemned even by Stalin. However, he was partially rehabilitated but, again, he became too modernist and he gave up fiction writing. During the war he contracted tuberculosis and died in 1951. Much of his work was unpublished but was gradually published in the West. He has now been rehabilitated as part of Soviet literature.

Other links

Andrei Platonov
Andrei Platonov: Russia’s greatest 20th-century prose stylist?
Платонов, Андрей Платонович (in Russian)