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People person: the greatness of Andrey Platonov

Platonov is one of the greatest of Russian writers—not least for the characters he brought into the world. He deserves to be more widely read

The son of a railway worker who also gilded the cupolas of churches, the writer we now know as Andrey Platonov was born at the turn of a century—on 1st September 1899—and between town and country, on the edge of the central Russian city of Voronezh. It is as if, at the start of his career—at a time of famine and social breakdown—he had asked himself how it might be possible to bring the emotionally maimed and crippled to a state of wholeness, how it might be possible to endow the lost and alienated with a sense of belonging, to allow them to form families and enter into communion with others. The story may not seem controversial today; it may appear to adhere to the tenets of Soviet socialist realism, but it lacks the tone of heroic optimism that was obligatory during the years following Stalin’s supreme triumph.

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