The idea of Paradise is the logical end of human thought in the respect that it, thought, goes no further; for beyond Paradise there is nothing else, nothing else happens. And therefore one can say that Paradise is a dead-end; it is the last vision of space, the end of things, the summit of the mountain, the peak from which there is nowhere to step except into Chronos, in connection with which the concept of eternal life arises.
The same may be said of Hell.
Being in the dead-end is not limited by anything, and if one can conceive that even there being defines consciousness and engenders its own psychology, then it is above all in language that this psychology is expressed. In general it should be noted that the first victim of talk about Utopia—desired or already attained—is grammar; for language, unable to keep up with thought, begins to gasp in the subjunctive mood and starts to gravitate toward timeless categories and constructions; as a consequence of which the ground starts to slip out from under even simple nouns, and an aura of arbitrariness arises around them.
In my view this describes the prose language of Andrei Platonov, of whom it can be said with equal veracity that he drives language into a semantic deadend and, more precisely, that he reveals in language itself the philosophy of the dead-end. If this statement is even half-justified, that is sufficient to proclaim Platonov one of the eminent writers of our age—for the presence of the absurd in grammar says something not just about a particular tragedy, but about the human race as a whole.
In our age it is not customary to examine a writer outside the social context, and Platonov would be a quite suitable subject for such analysis if that which he performs with language did not go far beyond the framework of the specific Utopia (the building of socialism in Russia), witness and chronicler of which he is in The Foundation Pit. The Foundation Pit is an exceedingly gloomy work, and the reader closes the book in the most depressed state of mind. If at this moment direct transformation of psychic energy into physical energy were possible, the first thing one should do on closing the book would be to rescind the existing world-order and declare a new age.
By no means, however, does this mean that Platonov was an enemy of this Utopia, the regime, collectivization, etc. The only thing one can say seriously about Platonov within the social context is that he wrote in the language of this Utopia, in the language of his epoch; and no other form of being determines consciousness as language does. But unlike the majority of his contemporaries—Babel, Pilnyak, Olesha, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, who concerned themselves more or less with stylistic gourmandizing, i.e., played with language, each at his own game (which in the final analysis is a form of escapism)— Platonov subjected the language of the epoch to himself, having seen in it such abysses that once he had peered into them he could no longer slide along the literary surface, concerning himself with clever manipulations of plot, typographical contrivances and stylistic point-lace.
Of course, if one is to study the genealogy of Platonov's style, one inevitably has to mention hagiographic "plaiting of words," Leskov with his tendency towards individualized first-person narratives, Dostoevsky with his choking bureaucratese. But in Platonov's case the important thing is not lines of succession or traditions of Russian literature, but the writer's dependence on the synthetic (or, more precisely, non-analytical) essence of the Russian language itself, something which, partly as a result of purely phoneticallusions, determines the formation of concepts which are devoid of any real content.
Even if Platonov had used even the most elementary means, his "message" would be relevant, and below I shall explain why. But his main weapon was inversion; he wrote in a totally inverted language; more precisely, Platonov put an equals sign between the concepts of language and inversion—"version" (normal word order) came more and more to play a service role. In this sense I would say that the only real neighbor Platonov had in language was poet Nikolai Zabolotsky during the period of Scrolls.
If for Captain Lebyadkin's poetry about the cockroach (in The Devils) Dostoevsky can be considered one of the first writers of the absurd, for the scene with the striker-bear in The Foundation Pit, Platonov should be acknowledged the first serious surrealist. I say "first" in spite of Kafka, for surrealism is not just a literary category, tied in our minds as a rule with an individualistic world-perception, but a form of philosophical madness, a product of the psychology of the dead-end. Platonov was not an individualist, quite the contrary— his consciousness was determined by the mass scale and absolutely impersonal character of what was happening. Therefore his surrealism is non-personal, folkloric, and to a certain degree akin to ancient, or for that matter any mythology—which one might call the classical form of surrealism.
In Platonov those who express the philosophy of the absurd are not egocentric individualists to whom God and literary tradition provide crisis-awareness, but repre-sentativesof the traditionally uninspired masses; and due to this fact the philosophy becomes far more convincing and utterly unbearable in its magnitude. Unlike Kafka, Joyce, or, let's say, Beckett, who narrate the quite natural tragedies of their "alter egos," Platonov speaks of a nation which in a sense has become a victim of its own language; or, more precisely, he speaks of this language itself—which turns out to be capable of generating a fictive world and then falling into grammatical dependency on it.
It seems to me that therefore Platonov is untranslatable, and in one sense that is a good thing for the language into which he cannot be translated. But nevertheless one has to congratulate any attempt to recreate this language, a language which compromises time, space, life itself and death, not because of "cultural" considerations, but because in the final analysis it is precisely in this language that we speak.
Joseph Brodsky
