1. Seifrid, Thomas, “Platonov, Socialist Realism, and the Avant–Garde,” in Bowlt, John and Matich, Olga, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: The Avant–Garde and Cultural Experiment (Stanford, 1996), 240–44.Google Scholar

2. Seifrid, Thomas, “Pisat’ protiv materii: O iazyke Kotlovana Andreia Platonova,” in Kornienko, N. V and Shubina, E. D., comps., Andrei Platonov: Mir tvorchestva (Moscow, 1994), 306.Google Scholar

3. White, Hallie, “Sequence and Plot in Platonov's Chevengur ,” Slavic and East European Journal 42, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Seifrid, Thomas, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 175 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. E. Tolstaia–Segal, “Ideologicheskie konteksty Platonova,” in Kornienko and Shubina, comps., Andrei Platonov, 56.

6. Kristeva, Julia, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1982), 102.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 72. Note that Kristeva in the above–mentioned essay and Luce Irigaray both regard the maternal or feminine as that which is excluded from the symbolic order (and hence from the very opposition of mind/matter) but which serves as the precondition of that very order. As Judith Butler notes, the feminine is “what must be excluded for that economy to posture as internally coherent.” Butler, , Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993), 38.Google Scholar

8. As the engineer, Prushevskii, in Platonov's Foundation Pit puts it: “And from that time forward he was tortured, stirring near his wall, and he was calmed by the fact that essentially the most central, true construction of substance, from which the entire world and people are combined, had been comprehended by him; all essential science was situated within the walls of his consciousness and what lay beyond was only a dull place which one could forget about striving toward.” Platonov, , Vzyskanie pogibshikh: Povesti, rasskazy, p'esa, stat'i (Moscow, 1995), 184.Google Scholar

9. Bataille, quoted in Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 64.

10. Seifrid, “Platonov, Socialist Realism, and the Avant–Garde,” 243.

11. Natasha Drubek–Meier, “Rossiia—pustotat v kishkakh mira,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1994, no. 9: 261.Google Scholar

12. Platonov, A, “Pushkin—nash tovarishch,” in Vzyskanie pogibshikh, 614–15.Google Scholar

13. Platonov, A, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Kornienko, N. V. and Shubina, E. D., comps., Andrei Platonov: Vospominaniia sovremennikov, material k biografii (Moscow, 1994), 322 Google Scholar. In her commentary to the piece, Kornienko notes that Platonov had originally written “heart” rather than “middle” (the two words serdtse and seredina are related in Russian).

14. Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii.” This key work was written in tandem with Happy Moscow and makes explicit references to certain episodes in it as illustrations of the dialectic.

15. Kristeva, Julia, The Kristeva Reader (New York, 1986), 160–61Google Scholar. Similarly, in The Pillar and the Affirmation of Truth, Pavel Aleksandrovich Florenskii describes the Virgin as the “center of created life, the point of contact between heaven and earth.” In addition, just as Platonov repeatedly identifies his heroine with her heart—the first draft of the novel begins with the sentence, “The beating of her heart occurred so regularly, so resiliently, and so faultlessly that if one could connect the entire world to this heart, it could regulate the flow of events; her cheeks, unable to endure the pressure of her heart, acquired for a long time, for the rest of her life the color of dark, exhausted blood.” Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 12. Furthermore, in a key scene in the novel, Platonov notes “Moskva Chestnova hugged the cold sewage pipe which went down from the upper floor.” Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 36. Finally, as Florenskii notes, concerning the image of the heart: “Thus the church mysticism is the mysticism of the heart. But the heart… has from ancient times been considered the center of the breast. If the breast is the central point of the body, then the heart is the central point of the breast. And it is at the heart that the attention of church mysticism has always been directed.” Florenskii, Pavel, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny: Opyt pravoslavnoi feoditsei v dvenadtsati pis'makh (Paris, 1989), 267.Google Scholar

16. The vertical axis of Stalinist cultural mythology is perhaps best illustrated by the “semantic” character of one of its most visible construction projects. As Mikhail Ryklin notes, one of the main features of the “metro discourse” was its preoccupation with illumination and illusion. The goal of this “illusion” was to create the impression that the passenger was not underground but in a brightly lit palace, located in some unknown place (a kind of realized Utopia). Ryklin, , “'Luchshii v mire': Diskurs moskovskogo metro 30–kh godov,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanack 38 (1996): 156.Google Scholar

17. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 22.

18. Ibid., 14.

19. Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York, 1995), 115.Google Scholar

20. Here Platonov's use of thresholds functions analogously to the image of the window in Boris Pasternak's poetry, which repeatedly enacts the “central themes of ‘unity, ’ or ‘contact’ between the small–scale, everyday manifestations of life and the universe.” Zholkovsky, Aleksandr, Themes and Texts: Toward a Poetics of Expressiveness (Ithaca, 1984), 139.Google Scholar

21. Seifrid, Andrei Platonov, 188.

22. “Released from the Air Force, Moskva spent her evenings alone; she did not go to visit Bozhko anymore and she did not invite her friends over. She would lie down with her stomach on the windowsill, her hair would hang down and she would listen to the noise of the universal city… .When Moskva hung out of her window during the evenings of solitude, people passing by would cry out greetings to her from below…. He expected to see Moskva Chestnova somewhere, her dear hair hanging down out of the open window of the tram, while her head lay on the windowsill and slept on the wind of movement.” Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 14, 45.

23. Ibid., 15.

24. Andrei Platonov, “Skripka,” Izbrannoe (Moscow, 1966).

25. Ibid., 269. Emphasis added. The hand as an icon of the human ability to consciously manipulate and master matter is repeatedly rejected by Platonov. Thus the narrator remarks of “Sartorius's” music: “Why did the dead and pitiful substance of the violin produce from itself surplus living sounds, playing not a particular theme but more deeply than any theme and more skillfully than the hand of the violinist?” (278).

26. Platonov, “Skripka,” 269.

27. Ibid., 271. It is perhaps worth noting that the idea of a “natural” exchange or barter analogous to the interaction of various parts of the natural world (e.g., earth and sky, city and country, human and nature, artist and crowd) seems preferable to Platonov to an exchange mediated by money. Thus the narrator notes of Sartorius's music that “into his case streamed an almost continuous pay; Sartorius felt ashamed and did not know what to do with the money, as if he were a beggar” (272). Here the public's “continuous pay” compromises music/art's potential for spontaneously uniting separate realms of existence.

28. Ibid., 278. Emphasis added. Platonov's evocation of a mystical communion between nature and humankind or the individual and the collective ( “From that point on Sartorius remained in Moscow. The throng itself aroused his mental energy, and he went among people as if seduced, and he felt their body [sic] exuding warmth” [272]), recalls the enthusiasm of such Silver Age figures as Viacheslav Ivanov and Georgii Chulkov for a new kind of collective consciousness, a “psychic unity, resting on the passions and the instincts and evoked by art,” which would displace the rational self–interest of classic liberalism.” Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Introduction,” in Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), 5.Google Scholar

29. Platonov, “Skripka,” 281.

30. Ibid., 273.

31. Naiman, Eric, “'Iz istiny ne sushchestvuet vykhoda': Andrei Platonov mezhdu dvukh utopii,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1994, no. 9: 246.Google Scholar

32. Eric Naiman discusses the importance of early Proletkul't-inspired theories aimed at ushering in a New Biology. He goes on to show that with the advent of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the introduction of a diverse socialist/capitalist economy, the issue of sexuality became a site for the production and projection of anxieties concerning the purity of the revolution. These anxieties, in turn, brought about renewed attempts to delimit sexuality either through abstinence/asceticism (what Naiman characterizes broadly as the “discourse of castration “) or by a concomitant demonizing of the female organism. See Naiman, , Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997).Google Scholar

33. Gol'dshtein, Aleksandr, Rasstavanie s nartsissom: Opyty pominal'noi ritoriki (Moscow, 1997), 156ff.Google Scholar

34. Igor’ Smirnov uses the term masochistic kenosis to denote Stalinist literature/culture's promotion of a masochistic refiguring of absence as presence. Smirnov, , Psikhodiakhronologika: Psikhoistoriia russkoi literatury ot romantizma do nashikh dnei (Moscow, 1994), 249.Google Scholar

35. Gol'dshtein, Rasstavanie s nartsissom, 158–59. For the same reason, it is tempting to see Stalinism as the perfect realization of Russian modernism's attempts to unify all opposites within a kind of “Dionysian” synthesis. A. Etkind describes the preoccupation of various Silver Age figures from Vladimir Solov'ev to Viacheslav Ivanov to Mikhail Bakhtin with collapsing the fundamental categories of rationality in terms of a widespread Dionysian complex. Etkind, , Sodom i Psikheia: Ocherki intellektual'noi istorii Serebrianogo veka (Moscow, 1996), 245.Google Scholar

36. Naiman, Sex in Public, 33.

37. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 18.

38. Platonov, Kotlovan, in Vzyskanie pogibshikh, 184.

39. In Russian the expression po tu storonu (on the other side) has distinct metaphysical connotations. Moreover, since in the course of several pages the author uses this expression to describe both the residential house and the Utopian institute, one can only assume that he views the two realms as essentially homologous. In other words, for Platonov both realms represent the ideal “other world. “

40. In his seminal work on the culture of the 1920s and 1930s, Vladimir Papernyi also notes that during the 1930s, boundaries, borders, and hierarchies of all kinds acquired a kind of mythological importance as markers of a clearly defined and delimited self. This is expressed in everything from the exaggeratedly triumphant construction of the entrance gates fronting various subway stations (as if to underscore the significance of one's passing from the upper to the underworld) to the heightened attention paid to national boundaries. The end result of this tendency is, as Papernyi notes, an almost Manichaean division of the world into the forces of absolute Evil and absolute Good. Papernyi, , Kul'tura “Dva” (Ann Arbor, 1984), 64–65, 156.Google Scholar

41. Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” 320.

42. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 34.

43. Stalin quoted in commentary to Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 64.

44. In the published version she is altogether orphaned.

45. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 9.

46. Ibid., 67.

47. Cf. Platonov's original version: “The story of a girl without father or mother about a cow. There are not many cows, after all; people eat them. The cow has legs on all four sides. Cutlets are made from cows, everyone gets one each, but potatoes grow separately. Cows give milk on their own; other animals try but they cannot. It is too bad that they cannot, it would be better if they could. The little girls ate their fill of cutlets; they are lying and sleeping themselves. I am bored.” Ibid., 67.

48. Ibid., 26.

49. Etkind, A., Khlyst (Moscow, 1998), 70.Google Scholar

50. Smirnov, Psikhodiakhronologika, 89.

51. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 37.

52. Consider the following example from “The River Potudan' “: “The father in the meantime—by the month of March—unhurriedly made a large dresser as a present for the young people, similar to the one that had been in Liuba's apartment when her mother was still more or less Nikita's father's fiancée. The old carpenter watched life repeat itself, coming full circle for the second or third time. One could understand it, but it probably was not possible to change it, and sighing, Nikita's father put the dresser on a sledge and took it to the apartment of his son's fiancée.” Platonov, A., Vzyskanie pogibshikh (Moscow, 1995), 435.Google Scholar

53. Here I am once again relying on Smirnov's model of the Oedipal dilemma, according to which each stage of the child's development is marked by its parting with one form or another of natural necessity in order to affirm its status as a “cultural” being. Smirnov, Psikhodiakhronologika, 89–90.

54. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 55.

55. Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” 322.

56. Ibid.

57. As Eric Naiman notes, throughout the NEP, pleasure was identified as a “weapon of the bourgeoisie” and was infinitely more reprehensible than the sexual act itself, since it could not be recuperated through sublimation—through productive rechanneling. Naiman, Sex in Public, 138.

58. Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” 320.

59. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 322.

60. Ibid., 57.

61. Ibid., 55.

62. Ibid., 39.

63. Ibid., 30. Etkind, Sodom iPsikheia, 214–21. Etkind, Khlyst, 87. The interest that sectarian religious practice (particularly that of the skoptsy) held for a number of cultural figures of the entire modernist period is abundantly documented in this book.

64. E. Tolstaia–Segal, “Naturfilosofskie temy Platonova,” Slavica Hierosolymitana, 1979, no. 4: 239.Google Scholar

65. Mihailovic, Alexandar, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin's Theology of Discourse (Evanston, 1997), 126.Google Scholar

66. Gol'dshtein, Rasstavanie s nartsissom, 158–59.

67. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 48.

68. As discussed by Naiman, Eric, “Andrei Platonov mezhdu dvukh utopii,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1994, no. 9: 242.Google Scholar

69. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 27.

70. Ibid., 13.

71. Platonov, “Skripka,” 280. Olga Meerson's recent claim that the story represents a typical example of Soviet ideological propaganda misses the point. The critic portrays the piece as a demythologizing of the artist, an attempt to show that the “mysticism of art… is only a superstructure above the basis of the iron laws of the most material engineering, and even in the very achievements of art the musician is merely a pathetic consumer of the by-products of the engineer's labor—one who accidently takes credit for someone else's achievement.” Meerson, Olga, Svobodnaia veshch': Poetika neostraneniia u Andreia Platonova (Berkeley, 1997), 50 Google Scholar. Read in its proper context, the story emerges not as a paean to Soviet engineering but as an almost mystical reflection on the resilience of base matter, on that which history and ideology have discarded in order to construct the new world.

72. Platonov, Vzyskanie pogibshikh, 443.

73. Similarly, in Happy Moscow the narrator provides an unflattering description of a marketplace where the eternal accessories of everyday life are bought and sold in which the words waste and goods are spoken in the same breath: “Further on they were selling sculptures, cups, plates, trivets, forks, pieces of some sort of balustrade, a ten-pood weight, the last private dry–salters were sitting on their haunches, … even further on there stretched shoemakers, working right on the spot, and old food-selling women with cold pancakes, pirozhki, stuffed with meat waste [otkhody], packing glands, warmed in iron pots beneath padded jackets of deceased elderly husbands, with pieces of wheat kasha and everything that satisfies the hunger of the local public, which could eat any kind of goods that would only be swallowed and nothing more.” Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 53.

74. Eric Naiman, “The Inadmissibility of Desire,” Russian Literature 23 (1988): 352.

75. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 74.

76. Ibid., 76.

77. Naiman, “Inadmissibility of Desire,” 339; M. Zolotonosov, “Lozhnoe solntse: ‘Chevengur’ i ‘Kotlovan’ v kontekste sovetskoi kul'tury 1920–kh godov,” in Kornienko and Shubina, comps., Andrei Platonov, 250–51. Such a stance may, in fact, be intimately tied to the innermost structure of the writer's psyche, with its almost obsessive privileging of the other as self or subject and concomitant objectification of the self. As Slavoj Žižek notes: “Otbrosy tela sakralizuet tot, kto v samom sebe razlichaet ob “ekt.” Quoted in Smirnov, I. P., Roman tain Doktor Zhivago (Moscow, 1996), 19.Google Scholar

78. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 16.

79. Ibid., 42.

80. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 74. In his essay on “Ulysses in the Russian Looking–Glass,” Sergei Horujy describes Platonov (alongside Joyce) as a writer of the Eleusinian (as opposed to the Orphic) type, with his mythology returning to the Earth, “of pushing in and down.” He goes on to note that unlike the symbolists with their “disparagement of the corporeal element as opposed to the spiritual,” for artists like Platonov the “theme of corporeality, the life of the body, is most important… and developed by them with keen attention.” Horujy, “Ulysses in the Russian Looking–Glass, “Joyce Studies Annual: 1998 (Austin, 1988), 107.

81. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 27.

82. In his Filosqfiia khoziaistva, Bulgakov writes: “And I attribute all of the changes in the life of my body—both those of a normal and those of a pathological character—to the workings of the same self–identical force and energy—my corporeal organism, in which there arise, develop, and disappear all of these so varied, sometimes mutually contradictory and even seemingly mutually exclusive phenomena.” Bulgakov, Sergei, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1993), 119.Google Scholar

83. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 43.

84. Maston, Jeffrey, “Is the Fundament a Grave?” in Hillman, David and Mazzio, Carla, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1997), 134.Google Scholar

85. Kassil', Lev, Metro (Moscow, 1936), 17 Google Scholar. For a detailed description of the poetics of the Moscow subway, see Ryklin, ‘ “Luchshii v mire': Diskurs moskovskogo metro 30–kh godov,” 156–58.

86. This is made clear in a minor scene where Moskva washes her hair after having been hospitalized: “Everyday she would wash her head because she always felt the dirt in her hair, and she would even cry from chagrin that the dirt never went away [prokhodit].” Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 44.

87. Ibid., 36.

88. Ibid., 47.

89. Ibid., 43.

90. White, “Sequence and Plot in Platonov's Chevengur,” 104.

91. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 49. Note that in “The River Potudan',” as well, it is the acceptance of time's progression (by both the father and the son) that allows at least the partial fulfillment of the protagonists’ desires at the end of the story.

92. Svetlana Semenova, “Voskreshennyi roman Andreia Platonova: Opyt prochteniia Schastlivoi Moskvy,” Novyi mir, 1995, no. 9: 216.

93. Cf. the following statement made by Stalin at an all-union industrialist conference in 1931: “It is time to get rid of the moldy, outmoded emphasis on not intervening in production. It is time to master a new emphasis that is appropriate for the contemporary period: intervening in everything.” Stalin, quoted in Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” 323.

94. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 20, 19.

95. Naiman, Sex in Public, 144.

96. Tolstaia-Segal, “Ideologicheskie konteksty Platonova,” 56.

97. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 33, 32.

98. Ibid., 32.

99. Groys, Boris, “Die gebaute Ideologic,” in Noever, Peter, ed., Tyrannei des Schönen: Architektur der Stalin–Zeit (Munich, 1994), 18.Google Scholar

100. Smirnov, Psikhodiakhronologika, 277.

101. Ibid., 279.

102. L. Kassil', ChudopodMoskvoi (Moscow, 1936), 13.Google Scholar

103. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 43.

104. Smirnov, Psikhodiakhronobgika, 247.

105. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 43.

106. Ibid.

107. Naiman, “Andrei Platonov mezhdu dvukh utopii,” 245–46.

108. Quoted in Naiman, “Andrei Platonov mezhdu dvukh utopii,” 246.

109. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 17.

110. There is a strong precedent in Platonov's earlier work for the kind of self–censorship (and by extension, self–mutilation) that climaxed in the mid–1930s. For instance, in what some scholars consider the original draft of Platonov's novel Chevengur (entitled “The Builders of the Country,” 1925–26), the author portrays individual consciousness (personality, “truth “) as that which must be “diluted” in the water of society in order to exist: “'Truth!’ Dvanov was astounded, ‘it's like in the soil; salts are nourishing, but only if they are diluted by something … tasteless, helpless, otherwise the salts destroy the plant. It's necessary for the individual to be (diluted in the water of so) [sic] dissolved in the water of society—then it's alive.'” Platonov, “Stroiteli strany,” in Iz tvorcheskogo naslediia russkikh pisatelei XX veka: M. Sholokhov, A. Platonov, L. Leonov (St. Petersburg, 1995), 318. It is worth noting that in Happy Moscow the same adjective (helpless) is used by Sartorius to describe the state of matter/the human body vis–à–vis various illusory revolutionary attempts to transform it. The conclusion, then, would seem to be that the self can only achieve genuine selfhood by being “diluted” (during the 1930s the metaphor of “diluting” would become that of “mutilation “) in the tasteless, “helpless” water of that which exists outside it, just as in Happy Moscow the soul or spirit must inhabit the “helpless” state of matter.

111. See A. Gol'dshtein, Rasstavanies nartsissom, 157.

112. Naiman, “Andrei Platonov mezhdu dvukh utopii,” 247.

113. Cf. the short story “The River Potudan',” in which the timeless, Utopian maternal womb— “the only place in the entire world “—yields to the place for defecation and the dumping of waste (the latrine and the garbage dump), both of which function as a marker of time's inexorable passage and the ceaseless cycles of life.

114. The above quote, taken from Daniil Kharms's notes, is outfitted with the following characteristic example of castration: “Example: A man wanted to become an orator but fate cut out his tongue and the man became mute. But he did not give up; he learned to hold little boards with phrases written in large letters and to roar where necessary and howl in accompaniment where necessary, and by the same token influence his listeners more effectively than would have been possible using ordinary speech.” Kharms, Daniil, Menia nazyvaiut Kaputsinom: Nekotorye proizvedeniia Daniila Ivanovicha Kharmsa (Moscow, 1993), 224).Google Scholar

115. Gasparov, B. M., “Poeticheskii iazyk Pushkin kak fakt istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanack 27 (1992): 246.Google Scholar

116. Cf. Kharms's description of the man who wanted to become an orator even though his tongue had been cut out.

117. Platonov, A, “Pushkin i Gor'kii,” Lileraturnyi kritik, 1937, no. 6: 36 Google Scholar.

118. Paperno, I, “Pushkin v zhizni cheloveka Serebriannogo veka,” in Gasparov, Boris, Hughes, Robert P., and Paperno, Irina, eds., Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley, 1992). 23.Google Scholar

119. As Groys notes in “Die gebaute Ideologic “: “The most important principle of dialectical materialism in its Leninist–Stalinist redaction which congealed and took root during the mid–1980s was the so–called law of unity and the battle of opposites. According to this law, two contradictory statements both possess validity: ‘A’ and ‘Not–A’ do not exclude each other but are part of a dynamic relationship.” Groys, “Die gebaute Ideologic,” 16.

120. Platonov, Schastlivaia Moskva, 42.

121. Quoted in Vasil'ev, Vladimir, Andrei Platonov: Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow, 1990), 259.Google Scholar

122. Cited in Lipovetskii, M., Russkii postmodernizm: Orherki istoricheskoi poetiki (Ekaterinburg, 1997), 40.Google Scholar