On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality by Mieka Erley

Author:Mieka Erley [Erley, Mieka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Literary Criticism, European, Eastern
ISBN: 9781501755705
Google: Jzr5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell
Published: 2021-06-15T13:58:26+00:00

Figure 1. Photomontage of the Kara-Kum desert. USSR in Construction, no. 2, 1934. Ne Boltai! collection.

A brigade of Russian writers had been dispatched to Turkmenistan that very spring to help develop local literature in advance of the Writers’ Congress and to collect literary material for a volume to commemorate the republic’s tenth anniversary.8 Among them was Andrei Platonov, whose posthumously published novella about Turkmenistan, Dzhan (Soul, completed in 1935), drew on material gathered over the course of two trips to Turkmenistan, including a ten-day sojourn into the desert of Kara-Kum.9 Platonov brought a long-standing interest in the transformation of desert environments, as well as special technical expertise, to the problems of development in the Kara-Kum Desert, and he was invited to join not only Gorky’s writers’ brigade but also the Academy of Sciences’ expedition to assess the feasibility of the Amu Darya irrigation project.10 From approximately 1922 to 1927, Platonov had worked for the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Narkomzem) as a regional land reclamation engineer (meliorator), a period during which he wrote scores of newspaper articles and several short works of fiction on drought, desertification, and the irrigation of arid lands.11 Platonov’s major fiction demands re-examination in relation to his early career in land reclamation and the questions about land and human engineering that it generated.

Dzhan, specifically, may be read as an artifact of the brief Soviet cultural obsession in the early 1930s with Kara-Kum and the problems encountered when developing it, as filtered through Platonov’s unique experience working in arid environments. Literary scholarship on Dzhan has not placed it in this historical or biographical context; the novella’s landscape, to the contrary, has been a privileged site of interpretation for its apparent lack of geographical indexicality and its abstraction as an archeocultural site of biblical, Sufi, Zoroastrian, Greek, and Russian mythologies.12 I read the desert landscape of Dzhan not as a purely mythological topos, but as a historically and materially determined space. Platonov’s novella constitutes a response to specific Soviet development projects, shaped fundamentally by the ongoing discourses of soil discussed in previous chapters. Reading Platonov within a continuous tradition of Russian materialism and discourse of soil reveals new dimensions of his art and shows how old myths found new expression in the age of Soviet development.

As an intervention in the ideological and scientific debates on development of the early 1930s, Dzhan may be the fiction work most symptomatic of Platonov’s evolving concerns as a meliorator. On its surface Dzhan tells the story of a mission to claim souls for socialism, not the mission to irrigate and cultivate the desert. Yet the relationship between the “fate of rivers” and the “fate of socialism”—as Ilin proposed at the Congress of Soviet Writers—is central to Platonov’s tale of the Dzhan as a nation on the fringes of both Soviet historical narrative and socialist construction at the end of the first Five-Year Plan. Platonov understands the nomadic Dzhan and the black sands of Kara-Kum to be the products of similar

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