Publication date:
31 May 2018Length of book:
160 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498547758
This book traces the originality of Andrey Platonov’s vision of the Revolution in readings of his works. It has been common in Platonov scholarship to measure him within the parameters of a political pro et contra the October Revolution and Soviet society, but the proposal of this book is to look for the way in which the writer continuously asked into the disastrous aspects of the implementation of a new proletarian community for what they could tell us about the promise of the Revolution to open up the experience of the world as common. In readings of selected works by Andrei Platonov I follow the development of his chronicle of revolutionary society, and from within it the outline of the forgotten utopian dream of a common world. I bring Platonov into a dialogue with certain questions that arise from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and that were later re-addressed in the works of Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy, related to the experience of the modern world in terms of communality, groundlessness, memory, interiority. I show that Platonov writes the Revolution as an implementation of common being in society that needs to retrieve the forgotten memory of what being in common means.
Lane (Södertörn Univ., Sweden) should be commended for taking on a subject as complex as Andrey Platonov (1899–1951), whose ideas, language, and views of history—whether taken individually or together—have challenged readers for decades. Lane examines Platonov's works to see how he reconciles the disastrous effects of the Russian Revolution with its Utopian promise. . . Accordingly, this welcome exegesis of Platonov's works will appeal to those well-acquainted with Platonov and philosophers such as Heidegger, Blanchot, and Bataille and to less-sophisticated students of Russian literature. Her translations are good as are her notes, which appear at the end of each chapter. The ample list of references will lead anyone interested in Platonov to fertile ground for further study. Lane's study will be invaluable to Russianists, historians of the Russian Revolution, and anyone interested in Utopian ideals and their hidden capacity for tyranny. Summing Up: Recommended. Ambitious upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and faculty.