mindedness of Gladkov’s 1925 production novel Cement.
The production of cement, like the destruction of the fascist enemy, is a straightforward material task. Platonov’s position on “matter” is far more potent and strange. Socialist realist works presume that the material world can be shaped for the better. There will always be sabotage, fresh destruction, violence, waste, decay, natural disasters – Cement is full of these – but the energy that new generations can apply against this “entropy” or anarchy is not questioned. The great ally in this struggle is the industrial machine. Platonov does not reject this faith. In his autobiography he remarked that from his youth he had loved steam engines, shrill whistles, sweaty work, and that there was a link (he didn’t know exactly what) between burdocks in the field, electricity, locomotives, and earthquakes. But unlike the construction novel, where this energy passes from animate to inanimate entities (from human muscles, always tensed and hot, to the pulleys that will haul fuel to the factory or bags of cement out of it), in Platonov the flow is more often reversed. Far from being concentrated or accelerated, the energy of human beings escapes and dissipates in open space. Even people eager to work on behalf of a Purpose rapidly cool down. Or as Platonov puts it in his 1938 Turkmenistan novella Dzhan: “Men live because they’re born, not by truth or by intelligence, and while the heart goes on beating it scatters and spreads their despair and finally destroys itself, losing its substance in patience and in work.”18
Platonov’s two great themes are the persistence of inert matter and the weariness of the working body. In The Foundation Pit, both of these “gravitational pulls” prevail over human life. The very language of the narrator is thick, languid, rich in associations, weighed down. We learn in the opening paragraph that the protagonist Voshchev is an outcast, expelled from the machine factory because of his “tendency to stop and think,” which interrupted the general pace of work.19 A traditional Russian wanderer, an ascetic and a seeker, he has also absorbed the new Soviet builder’s cosmic ambitions: he “could no longer strive and walk along the road without knowing the exact construction of the whole world and what a man must seek in it” (p. 7). Voshchev wanders onto the construction site of an “All-Proletarian Home” and enlists to dig its foundation. As utopian hopes for the Home increase among the weary workers, so must they increase the depth and dimensions of the foundation pit in order to support this structure, further exhausting their strength. Among other items, their excavations reveal a hundred coffins that had been stockpiled by a nearby village. The second half of the novel recounts violent bizarre episodes from the collectivization of peasants, ending on the death of Nastya, an orphaned little
214 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
girl, the mascot and muse of the builders. They bury her deep down in the pit, almost in solid rock, so the earth can no longer harm her.
The Foundation Pit has been called a parody of the “Five-Year Plan novel” – novels that celebrate the accomplishments of a planned economy – and the parallels, or inversions, of the Stalinist industrial-production narrative are startlingly evident.20 Both The Foundation Pit and Cement depict building projects in the wilderness. The cast of characters in both includes party activists, labor enthusiasts, an old-regime specialist recruited to socialist labor, and a small martyred girl. Violence against class enemies is routine. Both feature “materialist” heroes in the sense of people who believe in the defining power of matter: Voshchev and the two Chumalovs. But there the similarities end. The cement factory rises and the All-Proletarian House sinks. That opposing movement along a single axis partakes of a larger, more disturbing difference in the economy of the two sites, which concerns the relationship between material things, energy flow, and language. In this novel, Platonov offers his alternative to the dynamic of “consciousness” versus “spontaneity” that underpins the official socialist realist worldview. We consider here only two episodes, common to both novels: an “expropriation scene,” and the death of a young child.
In Chapter 11 of Cement, a Party detachment arrives in town to strip the local bourgeois households of their surplus, round them up with their miserable bundles, and lecture them on the new state of affairs. “You’ve been living in palaces,” says Gleb, “now try huts for a while!” (p. 185). For all the grim-ness of the event, the scene radiates energy: the communist worker Lukhava strides up to the homeless families, his hair “fluttering like black flames”; “with flaming face, Polia ran up to Gleb” (p. 185). At the very moment of inventory, however, the Whites and Greens join forces and attack the factory. The Reds call an emergency meeting. Motion gives way to more motion. In this whirling knot of events, wealth is grabbed, redistributed, robbed, for a short time even produced – and in all these transactions we sense the dialectic so important to Maksim Gorky in his 1934 speech: in the New Russia, there will be no more superfluous people. Even the capitalists in their comfortable homes can be a source of goods, just as Engineer Kleist is a source of technical knowledge. Matter – energized through machines, guided by ideology, seized by revolutionaries and redistributed by committee – can transform life. The dialogues in Cement abound with slogans that promote the continuity between human and mechanical bodies. “Idleness and jabbering!” the engineer Brynza shouts to Gleb at the beginning of the factory reclamation project. “These are machines, and machines are not words; they’re hands and eyes!” (p. 17).
The death of Nyurka, the Chumalovs’ daughter, works another variant on the same task, that of “steeling” the body and controlling emotions. Part of
The Stalin years 215
the “revolutionary romanticism” of Gladkov’s novel lies in its patches of very old-style sentimental pathos. Nyurka’s life is “flickering out.” Every morning and evening Dasha stops by to see her, but “the child had become all bones, and the skin on her face was yellow and rumpled likean old woman’s” (p. 243). Ideologically, the mother has gone forward: she is the New Soviet Woman and activist, her red headscarf flashes as she strides down the village path. The child, the new generation, has stayed behind. When Dasha asks Nyurka if she feels any pain or wants anything, the child answers: “I want to stay with you, so that you’d never go away – and always be near . . . and some grapes . . . near you, and grapes” (p. 245). After this exchange, Dasha leaves the Home, flings herself down on the grass, and sobs – but goes back to work. The child was her “life’s sacrifice”; we are told the loss was unbearable, but she bears it. She will not grab up Nyurka, feed her, or refuse to part from her. We do not see the actual death; it’s not clear that Dasha was present for it. When Gleb gets back from his meeting, Dasha tells him that “Nyurka is no more” with eyes full of tears. But the first subsection of the next chapter (ch. 16) is titled: “Our Hearts Must Be of Stone.”
Let us now consider equivalent scenes in The Foundation Pit. Compared with a genuine construction novel, the expropriation of the kulaks in Platonov is accomplished with a bare minimum of infrastructure and machines: no tractors, few visible tools, hardly even any weapons. The kulaks have slaughtered their livestock rather than allow it to be requisitioned. Under such conditions there should be a feast. But nourishment from those animals seems to be impossible: “Having liquidated the last of their steaming live inventory, the peasants began to eat meat . . . During that brief time, eating meat was like Communion. Nobody wanted to eat, but it was necessary to hide the flesh of the butchered family beasts inside one’s body and save it there from socialization” (pp. 100–01).
Some peasants grew bloated, some vomited, and those who let their livestock be collectivized “lay down in their empty coffins” and made their homes in them, “feeling sheltered and at rest.” The expropriating Bolsheviks employ a tame bear to sniff out hoarded food. But edible food is not to be seen; the entire episode is swarming with flies from these carcasses, which seem more alive than their peasant owners. The kulaks too are exhausted. The bear pokes at them with its paw, the requisitioners prod or smack or push them over, and when they die their bodies are simply stacked up. The passage from life to death is scarcely perceptible. One peasant asks his horse if it wants to join the collective farm. “‘So you’ve died?’” he says, getting no response (p. 100). But then we read that “the horse’s life was still intact – it merely shrank in distant
216 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature
