Andrei Platonov's father was a metal fitter employed in the railroad workshops and his mother was the daughter of a watchmaker.
17 Facts About Andrei Platonov
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When Civil War broke out in 1918 Andrei Platonov assisted his father on trains delivering troops and supplies and clearing snow.
3.
Andrei Platonov has been involved with the local Proletcult movement, joined the Union of Communist Journalists in March 1920, and worked as an editor at, and the paper of the local railway workers' union.
4.
In July 1920, Andrei Platonov was admitted to the Communist Party as a candidate member on the recommendation of his friend Litvin.
5.
Andrei Platonov attended Party meetings, but was expelled from the Party on 30 October 1921 as an "unstable element".
6.
In spring, 1924 Andrei Platonov applied for re-admission to the Party, offering reassurance that he had remained a communist and a Marxist, but he was denied then as on the next two occasions.
7.
In 1921 Andrei Platonov married Maria Aleksandrovna Kashintseva ; they had a son, Platon, in 1922, and a daughter, Maria, in 1944.
8.
In 1922, in the wake of the devastating drought and famine of 1921, Andrei Platonov abandoned writing to work on electrification and land reclamation for the Voronezh Provincial Land Administration and later for the central government.
9.
Between 1926 and 1930, the period from NEP to the first five-year plan, Andrei Platonov produced his two major works, the novels Chevengur and The Foundation Pit.
10.
In 1934, Maksim Gorky arranged for Andrei Platonov to be included in a "writers' brigade" sent to Central Asia with the intention of publishing a collective work in celebration of ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan.
11.
Andrei Platonov returned to Turkmenistan in 1935 and this was the basis for his novella Soul.
12.
Andrei Platonov published eight more books, fiction and essays, between 1937 and his death in 1951.
13.
In January 1937, Andrei Platonov contributed to an issue of Literaturnaya gazeta in which the accused at the second Moscow Show Trial were denounced and condemned by 30 well-known writers, including Boris Pasternak.
14.
In May 1938, during the Great Terror, Andrei Platonov's son was arrested as a "terrorist" and "spy".
15.
However, towards the end of the war, Andrei Platonov's health worsened, and in 1944 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
16.
Andrei Platonov's writing, it has been argued, has strong ties to the works of earlier Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky.
17.
One of the most striking distinguishing features of Andrei Platonov's work is the original language, which has no analogues in world literature.