Andrei Platonov

Philip Ross Bullock (University of Oxford)

Ed. by Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 2.2.2.00: Post-1917 Writing and Culture in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, 1917-present.
Vol. editors: Neil Cornwell (University of Bristol), Nicole Kennedy (University of Newcastle), Roman Koropeckyj (University of California, Los Angeles), Andrei Rogatchevski (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)

Dates

Born 1 Sep 1899
Died 5 Jan 1951
Activity 1918-1950

Places

Born in Russia
Active in Russia

Activities

Primary

Children's/Young Adult writer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright / Dramatist
Poet
Story-writer

Resources

It would be hard to imagine a writer who better embodied the ambitions and ambiguities, energies and tensions, of the first three decades of Soviet literature than Andrei Platonov. His achievements are many, but a commonplace shared by almost all critics and readers is that he is a difficult writer (Joseph Brodsky famously compared him to Joyce, Kafka and Musil). This difficulty is encountered first of all at the level of Platonov's language, a disorientating concatenation of registers, causalities and points of view. Fusing the intonations of Russian modernism with keenly overheard fragments of everyday speech and the clamour of Soviet sloganeering, he created a language fatally fit for his fateful age.

However, this is no mere idiosyncrasy of style. Reading Platonov, we are invited to participate in the construction of grammatically coherent meaning...

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2180 words

Citation: Bullock, Philip Ross. "Andrei Platonov". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 January 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5575, accessed 05 December 2025.]