Andrei Platonov

Andrei Platonov was born in 1899 in a Russian village and died in obscurity in 1951. Though his literary career began with the blessing of Gorky, it was soon blighted when his writing fell under Stalin’s critical eye. He worked for a while as a land-reclamation and electrical engineer and then as a war correspondent in World War II. Platonov is known and admired for his sharp sense of human suffering and his strong conviction about the futility of Soviet style communism, and his extraordinarily innovative use of language.