1. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (New York, 1906), 358. Google Scholar

2. Ibid.

3. Marks, Karl, Kapital: Kritika politicheskoi ekonomii, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1960), 337. Google Scholar All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

4. The very first sentence of Gor'kii's address contains a reference to a “two-legged“ ﹛vertikal ‘noe) animal that was converted into a man through the practice of labor. Throughout the text he perceives an animal state as something that should be overcome. Gor'kii's treatment of animal life is exemplified by the following passage: “Dostoyevsky has been called a seeker after truth. If he did seek, he found it in the brute and animal instincts of man, and found it not to repudiate, but to justify. Yes, the animal instincts in mankind cannot be extirpated so long as bourgeois society contains such a vast number of influences which arouse the beast in man.” Gor'kii, Maksim, “Soviet Literature,” in Scott, H. G., ed., Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress (Westport, Conn., 1979), 27. 46.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., 28.

6. In 1919 the Bolsheviks even funded Vladimir Durov, a famous animal trainer and owner of Russia's largest circus, to deliver “the scientific formulation of his achievements in animal training.” Krementsov, Nikolai, “Big Revolution, Little Revolution: Science and Politics in Bolshevik Russia,” Social Research 73, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 1182.Google Scholar According to Krementsov, the blossoming Soviet science in the late 1920s followed the principle of personal patronage, whereby the role of patron was performed by various state agencies such as the People's Commissariat of Public Health (Narkomzdrav) or the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros). The latter never interfered with the direction of research as such. Krementsov, Nikolai L., Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1996), 21.Google Scholar

7. See the discussion of a general animal taxonomy in Bulgakov in Colin, Wright A., “Animals and Animal Imagery in M. A. Bulgakov,” Zeitschrift für Slawistik 36, no. 2 (1991): 220–28.Google Scholar

8. On Pavlov's complex relationship with the Soviet authorities, see Todes, Daniel P., “Pavlov and the Bolsheviks,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 17, no. 3 (1995): 379–418.Google Scholar

9. Pavlov, Ivan, “Osnovy kul'tury zhivotnykh i cheloveka,” Rossiiskii fiziologicheskii zhurnal im. I. M. Sechenova 85, nos. 9-10 (1999): 159.Google Scholar Vsevolod Pudovkin's documentary film, Mekhanika golovnogo mozga (Mechanics of the Brain, 1926), dismantles the humananimal hierarchy and provides a striking and, at times, shocking illustration of Pavlov's studies in classical conditioning (see, for instance, the graphic scene in which a dog is electrocuted). The film comprises several vignettes that suggest a linear interconnection between “lower forms of life” (e.g., a frog) and human life (a child), while a dog and a monkey are used as intermediary entities.

10. Ivanov's experiments are extensively discussed in Rossiianov, Kirill, “Beyond Species: II ‘ya Ivanov and His Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes,” Science in Context 15, no. 2 (June 2002): 277–316.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

11. Orango, half-man and half-ape, serves as a soldier in World War I, becomes involved in newspaper blackmail and stock market speculation, and then turns into a powerful international press baron who aggressively promotes the values of capitalism. However, the remarkable “self-made man” story has a tragic end (for Orango, at least): a worldwide financial crisis ruins him. The protagonist is betrayed, gradually “degenerates“ fully into an ape, and finally is sold by his wife, a Russian émigré and Parisian coquette, to a Soviet circus for the price of $150. There, in the red capital—happy, new Moscow, where the action of the opera takes place—he is exhibited for the amusement of the glorious proletariat. The pinnacle is reached when an edifying chorus invites the audience to laugh at “the fruitless attempt / To control the steering wheel of life / With the hands of an ape.” Dmitri Shostakovich, Prologue to “Orango,” Symphonie No. 4, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, recorded 2 December 2011, Deutsche Grammophon, compact disc booklet, at www.laphil. com/philpedia/music/orango-world-premiere-orchestration-gerard-mcburney-dmitri -Shostakovich (last accessed 1 July 2014).

12. Eric Naiman, in his book Sex in Public, draws attention to Emmanuil Enchmen's rather bizarre notion of “physiological passports,” conceived in the early 1920s and inspired, in part, by Pavlov's experiments. These “passports” were supposed to numerically reflect bodily functions, pleasures, and desires and treated their bearers as mere “organisms.” For Enchmen, the human being was nothing but a biological entity that had to be regulated by means of a physiological “ration card.” Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), 76–77.Google Scholar

13. Lenin, Vladimir, Filosofskie tetradi, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 55 vols., 5th ed. (Moscow, 1958-65), 29:314.Google Scholar Other fields include the history of philosophy of science, the history of the intellectual development of children, the history of philosophy of language, psychology, and the physiology of the sense organs.

14. Proponents of Cosmism, fuelled by a marked anthropocentrism, provide an alternative to Pavlov's and Ivanov's scientific endeavors. (I thank Eric Naiman for drawing my attention to this point.) Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, Vladimir Vernadskii, and Aleksandr Chizhevskii did manage to find points of contiguity with the Soviet project. Moreover, the acknowledged importance of Nikolai Fedorov's anthropocentric ideas to Platonov should also be recognized while exploring the politico-ideological canvas of the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

15. Marx to Ferdinand Lasalle, 16 January 1861, in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Collected Works, 50 vols. (Moscow, 1975-2005), 41:245.Google Scholar It should be noted that Darwin's famous metaphor—the struggle for existence—finds its roots in political economy, namely, in the works of Thomas Malthus. This particular aspect of Darwin's theory prompted heated debates in Russia. See Krementsov, Nikolai L. and Todes, Daniel P., “On Metaphors, Animals, and Us,” Journal of Social Issues 47, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 71–74.Google Scholar In the essay “Kul'tura proletariata” (Culture of the Proletariat), Platonov, with his distinctive taste for equivocal definitions, describes Darwin's teachings—the “proletarians’ favorite“—as a “culture of organisms.” Platonov, Andrei, Sochineniia: Nauchnoe izdanie, ed. Kornienko, N. V., vol. 1, 1918-1927, bk. 2, Stafi (Moscow, 2004), 90.Google Scholar

16. Quoted in Rossiianov, “Beyond Species,” 286.

17. Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi akademii, nos. 4-5 (1932): 119–20.Google Scholar

18. Stalin, Joseph, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (New York, 1939), 108.Google Scholar

19. Adams, Mark B., “Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940,” in Adams, Mark B., ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (Oxford, 1989), 181.Google Scholar Serebrovskii himself referred to human beings as “one of the animal organisms.” Serebrovskii, Aleksandr, “Antropogenetika i evgenika v sotsialisticheskom obshchestve,” in Levit, S. G. and Serebrovskii, A. S., eds., Trudy kabineta nasledstvennosti i konstitutsii cheloveka pri Mediko-biologicheskom institute 1, no. 5 (1929): 1.Google Scholar

20. Krementsov, Nikolai, “From ‘Beastly Philosophy’ to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union,” Annals of Science 68, no. 1 (January 2011): 78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed However, “some part of Soviet eugenics did survive, but not as ‘eugenics.'” Adams, “Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940,” 188. Due to Nikolai Vavilov's personal efforts, much of the genetic research was relocated to agricultural institutions such as the Vsesoiuznyi institut rastenievodstva (Ail-Union Institute of Plant Breeding).

21. Lysenko, Trofim D., Agrobiologiia: Rabotypo voprosam genetiki, selektsii i semenovodstva (Moscow, 1946), 395.Google Scholar For further discussion of Lysenko's role in the late Stalinist state, see Pollock, Ethan, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, 2006), 41–71.Google Scholar For a discussion of Lysenko's theories in the broader cultural context, see Gasparov, Boris, “Development or Rebuilding: Views of Academician T. D. Lysenko in the Context of the Late Avant-Garde,” in Bowlt, John E. and Matich, Olga, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment (Stanford, 1996), 133–50.Google Scholar

22. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 25.Google Scholar

23. Adams, “Eugenics in Russia, 1900-1940,” 184.Google Scholar

24. Even the empirical sciences in the Soviet Union were not immune to the imaginary, poetic word. Pavlov concluded his lecture on “Foundations of the Culture of Animals and Man” by reciting his own prose poem. Pavlov, “Osnovy kul'tury zhivotnykh i cheloveka,“ 160. It is also notable that the first public assault on eugenics in the Soviet Union took place in the pages of Izvestiia, on 4 June 1930, in literary form: Dem'ian Bednyi's poem “Evgenika” attacked Serebrovskii's initiatives and accused the scientist of antiproletarian sentiments.

25. Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington, 2000), 20.Google Scholar

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27. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 21.Google Scholar

28. There is an apparent link between spontaneity-consciousness and psychoanalytic practices; in the latter, a patient achieves a conscious state and thus redeems the repressed trauma. This is evident in the following quotation from Trotskii's Literature and Revolution: “Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the subsoil Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses and thereby to raise himself to a new plane.” Trotsky, Leon, Literature and Revolution, trans. Strunsky, Rose (Chicago, 2005), 207.Google Scholar

29. Lenin, Vladimir, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, ed. Jerome, V. J., trans. Fineberg, Joe and Hanna, George (New York, 1969), 78.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original.

30. Stalin, J. V., “A Reply to Social-Democrat,” in Collected Works, vol. 1,1901-1907 (Moscow, 1954), 164.Google Scholar

31. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 18. Clark also suggests that “Lenin himself was strongly on the side of ‘consciousness’ in the sense of favoring reason, order, control, technology, and guidance and enlightenment for the masses. His rhetoric is full of imagery about bringing ‘light’ to the ‘darkness’ of the Russian people.” Ibid., 23.

32. Platonov coins the term stikhiinaia soznatel'nost’ in “Satana mysli” (Satan of Thought), an early Utopian scientific musing: “Composers and their orchestras played symphonies of will and spontaneous consciousness in the recreation clubs of mining and irrigation works.” Platonov, Sochineniia, vol. 1, bk. 1, Rasskazy. Stikhotvoreniia, 199-200. He also defines truth (istina) as “consciousness's nature” (stikhiia soznaniia) in “Proletarskaia poeziia” (Proletarian Poetry). Platonov, Sochineniia, vol. 1, bk. 2,163. For a discussion of the spontaneity-consciousness, or nature-science, clash in early Platonov, see Borenstein, Eliot, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 (Durham, 2000), 196–99.Google Scholar For a discussion of the spontaneity-consciousness binary in Platonov's Kotlovan, see Piatt, Kevin M. F., History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997), 144–59.Google Scholar

33. Platonov, , Sochineniia, vol. 1, bk. 2,114.Google Scholar

34. The critical literature on Dzhan is relatively modest in size. Among other works, see Bodin, Per-Arne, “Bibleiskoe, mifkheskoe, utopicheskoe: Analiz povesti Platonova 'Dzhan,'” in Kolesnikova, E. I., ed., Tvorchestvo Andreia Platonova: Issledovaniia i material﹜?, bk. 4 (Saint Petersburg, 2008), 149–56Google Scholar; Bullock, Philip Ross, The Feminine in the Prose ofAndrey Platonov (London, 2005), 123–34Google Scholar; Chalmaev, V. A., Andrei Platonov: Ksokrovennomu cheloveku (Moscow, 1989), 378–406;Google Scholar Geller, Mikhail, Andrei Platonov v poiskakh schast'ia (Moscow, 1999), 340–64;Google Scholar Hutchings, Stephen, “Remembering of a Kind: Philosophy and Art, Miscegenation and Incest in Platonov's ‘Džan,'” Russian Literature 51, no. 1 (January 2002): 49–72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kornienko, Natal ‘ia V., “Andrei Platonov: “Turkmeniia—strana ironii.’ Obraz Turkmenii v sovetskoi i russkoi literature 30-kh godov,” in Alieva, S. U. et al., eds., Natsiia, lichnost', literatura, pt. 1 (Moscow, 1996), 98–122;Google Scholar Seifrid, Thomas, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 183–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skakov, Nariman, “Prostranstva 'Dzhana’ Andreia Platonova,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 107, no. 1 (2011): 211— 30;Google Scholar and Vasil'ev, Vladimir, Andrei Platonov: Ocherkzhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow, 1990), 194–205.Google Scholar

35. Platonov, Andrei, “Soul,” in Soul and Other Stories, trans. Robert, and Chandler, Elizabeth, with Grigoruk, Katia, Angela, Livingstone, Olga, Meerson, and Naiman, Eric (New York, 2008), 87. 52.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., 52.

37. Ibid., 60.

38. Ibid., 80.

39. Ibid., 94.

40. Tuan, Yi-Fu, “Animal Pets: Cruelty and Affection,” in Kalof, Linda and Fitzgerald, Amy, eds., The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings (Oxford, 2007), 143.Google Scholar

41. Platonov, , “Soul,” 102.Google Scholar

42. Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, The German Ideology, ed. Arthur, C. J. (London, 1974), 42.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original. In the chapter “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” in Dialectics of Nature, Engels unambiguously declares that “labour created man himself.” Engels, Frederick, Dialectics of Nature, ed. and trans. Dutt, Clemens (New York, 1940), 281.Google Scholar

43. Platonov, , “Soul,” 108.Google Scholar

44. Zhdanov, Andrei A., “Soviet Literature—The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature,” in Scott, ed., Problems of Soviet Literature, 40. Emphasis added.Google Scholar

45. Clark refers to this paradox as a manifestation of social realism's inherent “modal schizophrenia.” Clark, The Soviet Novel, 36–45.Google Scholar

46. Platonov, “Soul,” 108. The principal building in Platonov's oeuvre is arguably the uncompleted proletarian house of Kotlovan. There is an apparent link between the ultimate Soviet domus and the conception of architectural and technological organization as a means of taming the elemental forces of nature, an idea which is present in the theories of Aleksandr Bogdanov, a major theorist of proletarian culture. For a discussion of the relevance of Bogdanov's ideas in Kotlovan, see Malygina, Nina, “Kommentarii,” in Platonov, Andrei, Sobranie, ed. Kornienko, N. V., vol. 3, Chevengur. Kotlovan, ed. Malygina, N. M. (Moscow, 2009), 586.Google Scholar

47. LukÁcs, Georg, The Theory of The Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Bostock, Anna (London, 1978), 64.Google Scholar

48. Platonov, , “Soul,” 112–13.Google Scholar

49. The dramatic dispersal of the people toward the end echoes the beginning of Dzhan, when the narrator describes Chagataev's classmates at a graduation party in the following manner: “The young people sat at the tables, ready to go their separate ways out into the land around them and build happiness for themselves there.” Ibid., 5.

50. Ibid., 102.

51. The Russian word zhivotnoe has a comparable etymology, for it derives from the Old Church Slavonic noun zhivot, meaning life, or the vital animating principle.

52. Platonov, , “Soul,” 76.Google Scholar

53. Wind, a permanent feature of deserts, constantly transforms sand landscapes and, by and large, regulates the deserts’ biological cycles. For about fifty days a year, Kara-Kum has strong winds at a velocity of 15 meters per second and up, while the Ustiurt is subject to squall winds of 24-26 meters per second. Babaev, A. G., Zonn, I. S., Drozdov, N. N., and Freikin, Z. G., Pustyni (Moscow, 1986), 49.Google Scholar

54. “Anima, n.,” etymology, OED Online, at www.oed.com/view/Entry/7734 (last accessed 18 July 2014).

55. Platonov, Andrei, “Dzhan,” Sobranie, ed. Kornienko, N. V., vol. 4, Schastlivaia Moskva: Roman, povest', rasskazy (Moscow, 2010), 111.Google Scholar

56. Artemii Magun suggests that Platonov's “socialist tragedies” always attempt to “overcome the ‘dialectics of nature'; that is, the confrontation between nature and machinery [tekhniki].” Magun, Artemii, “Otritsatel'naia revoliutsiia Andreia Platonova,“ Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 106, no. 6 (2010): 70.Google Scholar

57. Platonov, “Soul,” 22, 28. Platonov's notebooks from the period during which he was working on Dzhan are full of references to animals that consistently dismantle the human-animal hierarchy. For example, “Humanity—without being ennobled by animals and plants—will perish, decline, and fall into spiteful despair, like a lonely person in loneliness“; “It is also necessary to write about animals: they have a lot of freedom of will, independent intelligence, etc.“; “About animals, about animals—a whole world of consisfreedom and happiness is lying in vain.” Platonov, Andrei, Zapisnye knizhki: Materialy k biografii, ed. Kornienko, N. V. (Moscow, 2000), 155.175.Google Scholar

58. Giunter, Khans [Hans Günther], Po obe storony utopii: Konteksty tvorchestva A. Platonova (Moscow, 2012), 145–61.Google Scholar Other classifications of animal life in Platonov's works are made by Konstantin Barsht and Annie Epelboin. Barsht sees animals as mere bodies devoid of consciousness and implies that the animal form comprises a “catastrophic deviation” from its human counterpart. Barsht, Konstantin, “Chelovek, zhivotnoe, rastenie, mineral: Antropologicheskaia kontseptsiia A. Platonova,” Europa Orientalis 19, no. 1 (2000): 138.Google ScholarEpelboin's reading is more nuanced, and she interprets Platonov's various animals (such as the horse Proletarskaia Sila from Chevengur and the bear Misha from Kotlovan) as highly conscious ideological agents who display inherent class instincts. Annie Epelboin, “Metaphorical Animals and the Proletariat,” in Angela Livingstone, ed., “A Hundred Years of Andrei Platonov,” special issue in 2 vols., Essays in Poetics: The Journal of the British Neo-Formalist Circle 27, vol. 2 (2002): 174,178,180.

59. Costlow, Jane and Nelson, Amy suggest that “the often unacknowledged interaction between humans and other animals profoundly influenced the symbolic and the real in ways that sometimes worked with, but often compromised, the hegemonic aspirations of the state and its official ideology.” Costlow, Jane T. and Nelson, Amy, eds., Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh, 2010), 115.Google Scholar Oksana Timofeeva acknowledges the significance of the connection between animal “politics” and the Soviet project, but she does not explore further reverberations. Timofeeva, Oksana, “Bednaia zhizn': Zootekhnik Viskovskii protiv filosofa Khaideggera,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 106, no. 6 (2010): 96.Google Scholar Moreover, the critic tends to follow the convention of defining animal solely through a problematic, anthropocentric prism: “A Platonovian animal is a secret human, who suffers because its mind is unuttered, unacknowledged, and hidden in the body.” Timofeeva, “Bednaia zhizn',” 104.

60. Derrida, Jacques, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 379.Google Scholar

61. The case of zoophilia described in Dzhan arguably constitutes an extreme form of this destruction of the human-animal borderline. See Platonov, “Soul,” 38.

62. It should be noted that the human body is a rather negative category in early Platonov, especially in his polemical journalistic texts, where the body is pronounced bourgeois and something that ought to be overcome by proletarian consciousness. See Platonov, Andrei, “Dostoevskii” and “Kul'tura proletariata,” Sochineniia, vol. 1, bk. 2, 45–46, 99Google Scholar; and “Pitomnik novogo cheloveka” (Nursery of the New Man), Sobranie, ed. Kornienko, N. V., vol. 1, Usomnivshiisia Makar: Rasskazy 1920-kh godov, Stikhotvoreniia, ed. Malygina, N. M. (Moscow, 2009), 29.Google Scholar

63. Derrida, Jacques, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2 vols., trans. Bennington, Geoffrey (Chicago, 2011), 1:31.Google Scholar

64. Platonov, , “Soul,” 26.Google Scholar

65. Vultures, more so than any of the other beings described in the novella, demonstrate the strongest sense of kinship.

66. A dog that Chagataev encounters in an abandoned village is the only exception to the tendency to desire human companionship and unity which most of the animals show: “The dog looked greedily and sadly at the people. Its dark, difficult hope lay in a desire to eat all these people when they died.” Platonov, “Soul,” 104.

67. Other striking examples of politically conscious animals in Platonov's oeuvre include the bear Misha, who hunts kulaks, and the horses who collectivize themselves in Kotlovan. The novella seems to suggest that only animals can evolve into true proletarians, as the humans in Kotlovan expire in futile labor, sleep in coffins, or vainly seek the meaning of life.

68. Platonov, , “Soul,” 119–20.Google Scholar

69. Ibid., 146.

70. Aristotle, , Politics, trans. Jowett, Benjamin (New York, 2005), 4.Google Scholar

71. Philosophers continue to argue about what Aristotle's apparently fundamental term nature stands for. In Physics he defines it as “a principle or cause of being moved and of being at rest.” Things that are not natural and exist “from other causes” are called artifacts. An artifact reveals human workmanship and modification, as distinguished from a natural object. While the inherent principle of motion or of stationariness governs natural entities, artifacts always involve intentional agency: “They are products of art.” Aristotle, , Physics, trans. Hardie, R. P. and Gaye, Russell Kerr (Stilwell, Kans., 2006), 17.Google Scholar For further readings, see Falcon, Andrea, Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity (Cambridge, Eng., 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keyt, David, “Three Fundamental Theorems in Aristotle's Politics,“ Phronesis 32, no. 1 (1987): 54–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lang, Helen S., The Order of Nature in Aristotle's Physics: Place and the Elements (Cambridge, Eng., 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72. Aristotle, Politics, 4.

73. Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, 1998), 1.Google Scholar

74. Ibid., 2. See also Aristotle: “When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.” Aristotle, Politics, 4.

75. Agamben suggests that “it is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, 124. Pavlov's and Ivanov's experiments, which treated humans as merely biological bodies, in some way prepared the ground for the Stalinist ideological leap.

76. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105. Emphasis in the original.

77. Platonov, , “Soul,” 24.Google Scholar

78. There are direct references to sacred or bare life in Dzhan. For example, Chagataev feels “sympathy for all poor life” of his native land and “cared for everything that existed, as if it were sacred.” Ibid., 22,29.

79. Ibid., 33.

80. Ibid., 33-35.

81. Ibid., 132-33.

82. The concepts of the collective and the individual are extensively and exhaustively discussed in Kharkhordin, Oleg, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999).Google Scholar

83. Aristotle, , History of Animals: Books I-III, trans. Peck, A. L., vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 15.Google Scholar

84. Platonov, , “Soul,” 143.Google Scholar

85. Aristotle uses an analogy infused with bodily references when he discusses the primacy of the city-state: “The state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that. But things are defined by their working and power; and we ought not to say that they are the same when they no longer have their proper quality, but only that they have the same name.“ Aristotle, Politics, 5.

86. Platonov, , “Soul,” 92.Google Scholar

87. This idea is further developed in Schastlivaia Moskva (Happy Moscow, 1933-36), which was written at the same time as Dzhan. In the novel, Sambikin claims that he has discovered the exact location of the human soul—it is found in an empty space in the intestine, somewhere between undigested food and excrement. Platonov, Andrey, Happy Moscow, trans. Robert, and Chandler, Elizabeth, Livingstone, Angela, Burova, Nadya, and Naiman, Eric (London, 2001), 74.Google Scholar

88. Platonov, , “Soul,” 130.Google Scholar

89. Ibid., 105-6.

90. Edgar, Adrienne Lynn, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, 2004), 42.Google Scholar

91. Platonov, , “Soul,” 13.Google Scholar

92. Ibid., 118.

93. Ibid., 105.

94. Ibid., 21.

95. Ibid., 130, 30, 54, 67.

96. Ibid., 131.

97. Victoria Bonnell argues that photomontage, as an agent of verisimilitude, is “the quintessential application of socialist realism in the visual sphere.” Bonnell, Victoria E., Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997), 40.Google Scholar

98. Other notable examples of propaganda art depicting Stalin in the same manner include Genrikh Futerfas's Stalin's Followers! Widen the Front of Stakhanov's Movement! (1936), Aleksandr Gerasimov's The Speech of I. V. Stalin at the Sixteenth Party Congress (1935), and a number of other posters by Gustav Klutsis, such as The Victory of Socialism in Our Country Is Guaranteed (1932), With Lenin's Banner (1933), and Cadres Decide Everything (1936).

99. Platonov, “Soul,” 130.

100. Ibid., 132.