Human soul of an engineer: Andrei Platonov's struggle with science and technology

This thesis aims to reconsider the work of the Russian author Andrei Platonov in light of his lifelong fascination with technology. The son of a railroad mechanic and graduate of a polytechnic institute, Platonov came of age in the era of Lenin's Promethean campaign for electrification. As a young poet and essayist, he prophesied the rise of a new, technologically transformed Russia, echoing many utopian aspirations of the Bolsheviks and of other Russian visionaries of the early twentieth century.;After establishing the main features of Platonov's philosophical outlook at the beginning of his literary career, this thesis proceeds to delineate several distinct stages in his development as a thinker and a writer. While identifying the prominent features of each stage in Platonov's ideological and artistic evolution, the thesis attempts to relate his works to the discourses of Soviet cultural and political life from which they emerged.;Whereas most interpretations of Platonov's work have tended to oppose his antiutopian satire of the late 1920s and early 1930s both to the utopian aspirations of his earliest writings and to the psychological orientation of his "realist" prose of the later 1930s and 1940s, the present study seeks to define elements of continuity in Platonov's thought throughout his oeuvre. Following the theme of science and technology as a touchstone, the thesis attempts to redefine Platonov's relationship to the ideological and aesthetic traditions of Russian modernism and of Socialist Realism.