from the TLS
Platonov's graveyard earth
The first English translation of a classic piece of ecological writing about technology and nature
"“On the First Socialist Tragedy”, which appears for the first time in English below, is one of the earliest and greatest of classic ecological texts. Like much of Andrei Platonov’s work, it is both bewildering and invigorating. Platonov’s central point – that nature gives us nothing for free – has seldom been put more clearly.
This clarity is, however, at times obscured by Platonov’s idiosyncratic use of the language of his epoch. It is hard for a modern reader to know how – in this article – to interpret such words as “dialectic”, “technology” and even “socialism”. Knowing what we know of the murderousness of Stalin’s regime, and of Platonov’s understanding of this, we may be over-ready to suspect that Platonov is using these words ironically. Or even that he was using them as a sop to the authorities; it was, after all, his hope when he submitted the article, in late 1934, that Maxim Gorky would publish it in a collective volume titled Two Five-Year Plans..."more
catalog Andrei Platonov
This clarity is, however, at times obscured by Platonov’s idiosyncratic use of the language of his epoch. It is hard for a modern reader to know how – in this article – to interpret such words as “dialectic”, “technology” and even “socialism”. Knowing what we know of the murderousness of Stalin’s regime, and of Platonov’s understanding of this, we may be over-ready to suspect that Platonov is using these words ironically. Or even that he was using them as a sop to the authorities; it was, after all, his hope when he submitted the article, in late 1934, that Maxim Gorky would publish it in a collective volume titled Two Five-Year Plans..."more
catalog Andrei Platonov