Andrei Platonov

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Andrei Platonov was born on the outskirts of the city of Voronezh, in 1899. After the Revolution, in 1918, he joined the electrotechnical department of the railway polytechnic. However, his attempt to join the Communist Party was brief - criticism of the “official revolutionaries” in a satirical article resulted in the expulsion, in 1921, of the “unstable and fickle element”. That same year, he published his first book — Electrification; the following year, his first volume of poems — A profundeza azul. From 1927 onwards, he settled in Moscow, and the next two years could perhaps be considered the most prosperous of his literary life. However, the year 1929 brought the first adverse winds to Platonov's destiny: his novels The State Citizen and Makar the Doubtful were completely devastated by literary critics. In the autumn of the same year, Andrei Platonov, sent on a mission by the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, travels through the provinces of Central Russia. His impressions result in the plot for the novel A Cavacação, where the author narrates the “apocalypse of collectivization” in apocalyptic language. Completed in 1930, the novel was not published during the author's lifetime. During the Second World War, he served at the front, as a correspondent for the newspaper “A Estrela Vermelha”. Even so, in the post-war period, he found himself once again in the condition of a literary pariah: in the last years of his life, seriously ill, the author survived by transcribing Russian and Bashkir folk tales, finding material support only among close friends, such as the writers Mikhail Cholokhov and Aleksandr Fadiéev. Without seeing his work recognized, Andrei Platonov died in 1951, leaving his main works unpublished.