Lyric Reclamation: Platonov’s Poetics and the Matter of Collective Life

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media II: Marxism, Poetry and Poetics

Abstract

In a Proletkultist article from July 1921, Andrey Platonov writes: “First electrify Russia, and then you will have an ironclad worker’s poetry, charged by an insane, rending, electrical energy.” In practice, however, Platonov’s own undertheorized lyric poetry doesn’t follow this causal injunction. In fact, almost all of Platonov’s poetic output is produced in direct conjunction with his training and work as an engineer and land reclamation specialist during GOELRO. He stops writing lyric only when he ceases that work and begins his post as a full-time writer of prose in 1926. This conjunction suggests an aporic relationship between the work of transforming and reorganizing the physical matter of the world and the inward-looking subjective form of the lyric poem. To address this, this paper will first revisit Platonov’s lyric’s situation in relation to the major philosophical influences on it (esp. Fedorov and Bogdanov). Next, it will turn to a recurring image in these poems (“the wanderer”) to track Platonov’s own poetic exploration of this aporia across these several years of versification and material work. Finally, it will propose a comparative affinity between what appears as a kind of lyric materialism in Platonov’s poetry and the insights of a distinct but contemporaneously developing strand of Western Marxism (esp. Benjamin and Adorno), which might offer a prism through which Platonov’s lyric materialism might be refracted, reflected on, and put to work on the present, as potential model for what is to be done with the paradox of a committed lyric today.

Author

• George Kovalenko, New York U