Andrej Platonovs ‚Unsterblichkeit‘

Summary It has often been claimed that the journalist Platonov reproduced the idea of ‘immortality’ which belonged to the soviet topos of ‘new man’ and that the poet Platonov contradicted the journalist by making this idea ridiculous. Such an overly complicated understanding of Platonov’s work can be replaced by a simpler explanation: An analysis of several of his texts shows that the young and the elder Platonov, the poet and the journalist were unanimously in favour of a certain concept of ‘immortality’, that simply did not fit into the then-mainstream topos of ‘new man’. This first part of the study explains how Platonov rejected the fantastic notion of ‘immortality’ that dominated the corresponding discussions in soviet intellectual life in the decade after 1917. The second part analyses Platonov’s relationship to the stalinist version of ‘new man’ and its specific variant of ‘immortality’.