Retrieving the Inner
Like The Foundation Pit, the novella Dzhan (translated into English as Soul) has a conceptual structure. Thanks to Gorky, Platonov was among the writers invited to go to Central Asia to testify to the building of socialism in the Soviet republics. On the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of Turkmenistan in early 1934, he was sent in a writers’ brigade to study and chronicle the success of this Soviet project. More than discovering the triumph of Soviet civilization, however, Platonov gained an insight into the life of the poor natives of the region. In a letter dated April 15, 1934, he describes an excursion to the desert as follows:
We stayed until the first stars appeared. The desert made an enormous impression on me. I understood something that I had not understood before.
[Мы были до первых звезд. Пустыня произвела на меня огромное впечатление. Я кое-что понял, чего раньше не понимал.] (Platonov 2013, 357)
As Robert Chandler (2003, 48) notes, Platonov felt at home in the ascetic way of life in Central Asia and returned early the next year. In January 1935, in Turkmenistan, he began to write Dzhan, a narrative about the discovery of a home and a greatness that differs from what is appreciated in modern society. The plot revolves around the economist Nazar Chagataev, who is sent from Moscow to rescue the starving Dzhan people on the Kirghyz-Uzbek border by leading them to the valley of Ust-Urt, where Soviet civilization can help take care of them. Characteristically, however, Platonov inverts the relationship between the savior and the saved, so that when the people arrive in Ust-Urt they find themselves “lost” in civilization, and Chagataev, in contrast, has “gained” an insight into a new sensitivity in his life among the poor natives. What is more, it seems that somewhere around the time of the writing of Dzhan, Platonov turns his focus from the problems of the realization of a revolutionary community according to the official party line in society to the question of desire and the experience of inner life as a locus of the revolutionary experience of the world. Chagataev and the Dzhan’s biblical trek through the desert is on a superficial level presented as a journey from the provinces to the city, from destitute poverty to socialism, from hunger to well-being; or, as a party secretary in the novel puts it, a journey from hell to paradise. The physical survival of the Dzhan (a Persian word that Platonov deciphers as meaning “soul” or “dear little life”) is pitted against the endurance of the Inner, for when the Dzhan reach civilization they lose the richness of their experience of the world.
Dzhan symbolizes one of the most fundamental political myths of the twentieth century, namely the story of how the other, a foreign people, is received and adopted into the redemptive communion of civilization. It is the myth of the transfer and incorporation of the outside, of negativity, and of losers, into the success story of modern society, where life abounds in happiness. Platonov follows the schema of this myth and its implementation in the project of building the Soviet republics, but in the end he undermines it. Although Chagataev does indeed shepherd the people from starvation to food, from the desert in the mountains to a verdant valley and from poverty to plenty, he does not lead them to salvation. On the contrary, in the civilized world they lose their communality and become fragmented and estranged from each other. With the loss of the commonality of poverty they also lose dzhan: “the dear little life.”[1]
Although the title Dzhan denotes a people and thus suggests kinship, nowhere in the novel itself is there any such sense of belonging or home in relation to either a people or a space. To begin with, Nazar Chagataev “stems” from the people in the sense that his mother is a Dzhan and he was born and initially raised among them before she sent him away to escape starvation through adoption into the so-called Great Soviet Family in Moscow, where he also received his education. While his life in Moscow is characterized by estrangement and a constant preoccupation with ephemeral pleasures,[2] it might seem that by going to the Dzhan and Central Asia Chagataev “returns” to the people that he has lost—to the own, or to his self. The Dzhan, however, are not a people in any original or positive sense. They are “a people who have forgotten who they are” (23) and do not provide any ground or sense of belonging. In a conversation with Chagataev upon his arrival in Tashkent, the party secretary calls them a “lost nation,”[3] because they are not rooted in their surroundings but have been forced to move there. And when the party secretary asks: “Did your mother ever tell you who the Dzhan are?” Chagataev answers:
She did. She said that they were runaways and orphans from everywhere, and old, exhausted slaves who had been cast out. There were women who had betrayed their husbands and then vanished, fleeing to Sary-Kamysh in fear. There were young girls who came and never left because they loved men who had suddenly died and they didn’t want to marry anyone else. And people who didn’t know God, people who mocked the world. There were criminals. But I was only a little boy—I can’t remember them all. (24)
[Беглецы и сироты отовсюду и старые изнемогшие рабы, которых прогнали. Потом были женщины, изменившие мужьям и попавшие туда от страха, приходили навсегда девушки, полюбившие тех, кто вдруг умер, а они не захотели никого другого в мужья. И еще там жили люди, не знающие бога, насмешники над миром, преступники . . .] (131)
This “lost nation” or “lost people” is a collection of worthless slaves, criminals, adulterers, and persons who have not known “God.” They have been “in hell,” and Chagataev’s task is to lead them to paradise:
Your nation has already been in hell. Now let it live in paradise for a while—and we’ll help it with all our strength. You will be our representative. (24)
[В аду твой народ уже был, пусть поживет в раю, а мы ему поможем всей нашей силой . . . Ты будешь нашим уполномоченным.] (131)
The biblical connotations are obvious: the people are to be taken from hell to heaven, a journey that involves a trek through the desert. Also, as the people themselves are called “Dzhan,” meaning “soul” or “dear life,” who have “only their hearts,” “only life itself,” we can tentatively suggest that it is the salvation of the soul and life that is somehow at stake here. Because of its parable-like narrative structure and many allusions to and ruminations on otherworldly aspects of being, Slavic scholars have in fact linked Dzhan to several myths.[4] Early in the novel, Chagataev repeatedly reflects on life in relation to eternity. For instance, he considers a picture depicting the duality of existence by Camille Flammarion on the wall in his Moscow wife Vera’s room. This picture, however, seems first and foremost to resound in the existential dualism between outer movement and inner memory that is central to the story. In my reading, Dzhan tells a paradoxical tale in which the journey to paradise to save these poor lost souls, or the soul of the Dzhan, is at the same time a failure and results in the loss of the experience of life that the people of Dzhan exemplify. The Dzhan cannot be retrieved and transferred to civilization from this “hell.” “Dzhan,” or “dear little life,” stands for a communality experienced inwardly in extreme situations of physical deprivation. Chagataev does not understand this on a conscious level, but when asleep he senses that there is a different kind of greatness to this people:
He was smiling. Everything in this existing world seemed strange to him; it was as if the world had been created for some brief, mocking game. But this game of make-believe had dragged on for a long time, for eternity, and nobody felt like laughing any more. The desert’s deserted emptiness, the camel, even the pitiful wandering grass—all this ought to be serious, grand and triumphant. Inside every poor creature was a sense of some other happy destiny, a destiny that was necessary and inevitable—why, then, did they find their lives such a burden and why were they always waiting for something? Chagataev curled up against the camel’s stomach and fell asleep, full of astonishment at strange reality. (27f.)
[Он улыбался; все было странно для него в этом существующем мире, сделанном как будто для краткой насмешливой игры. Но эта нарочная игра затянулась надолго, на вечность, и смеяться никто уже не хочет, не может. Пустая земля пустыни, верблюд, даже бродячая жалкая трава — ведь это все должно быть серьезным, великим и торжествующим; внутри бедных существ есть чувство их другого, счастливого назначения, необходимого и непременного, — зачем же они так тяготятся и ждут чего-то? Чагатаев свернулся калачом около живота верблюда и уснул, удивляясь необыкновенной действительности.] (134)
In contrast to the promise of future happiness, Chagataev senses “another destination” that belongs to these “poor beings” (“bednykh sushchestv”) and to the poor as such. The Dzhan have nothing but themselves, or, as Chagataev states elsewhere, they have “only life itself . . . But even life wasn’t really their own” (24) (“odna tol’ko zhizn. . . No i zhizn’ byla ne ego”) (131). This other destination is the sense of life as “serious, grand and triumphant,” and it is contrasted with the experience of life as a joke that has become tedious and burdensome. The strength of this people, their other destination, lies in the “destiny that was necessary and inevitable.” In their poor life, everything they come across—people, things, memories—is present as an inevitable necessity, which ultimately means that unlike Chagataev’s civilized world, where a kind of absence lies over everything, what these people surround themselves with is present to them. Through the Dzhan, Chagataev begins to sense the meaning of necessity and inevitability, but this insight comes to him only in the amazement he experiences on the edge of slumber or in extreme situations on the boundary of life and death.
Instead of a myth portraying how the other, the strange, and the distant becomes the own, the intimate and the common, Platonov’s story tells us that the own is strange and foreign, and that the foreign and strange is the own. Not only is Dzhan not really a nation lost and forgotten, even to themselves, but there is also no apparent pattern to their movements. The narrative, which at first sight seems to depict the transfer or departure of a people from a place with a life and a world and their arrival in civilization, also tells us that we are never able either to leave or to arrive. Platonov shows us a people living in constant forgetfulness of things and life around them, perpetually oblivious of their own being and the being of the other.
As often in Platonov’s works, the opening presents the significant existential legend that he is about to tell. Here we are immediately introduced to a scene that bespeaks our sense of alienation and forgetfulness of presence in the world. Dzhan begins as Nazar Chagataev, who “is not a Russian”—in other words, a stranger—“leaves” or “goes out” into the courtyard of the institute where he is studying:
Into the courtyard of the Moscow Institute of Economics walked a young man who was not a Russian, Nazar Chagataev. He looked around in surprise and came back to himself from the long time that had passed. He had crossed this yard again and again over the years; it was in these buildings that his youth had gone by, but he felt no regret. He had climbed up high no, onto the mountain of his mind, and from there he had a clearer view of the whole of this summer world, now warmed by an evening sun that had had its day. (3)
[Во двор Московского экономического института вышел молодой нерусский человек Назар Чагатаев. Он с удивлением осмотрелся кругом и опомнился от минувшего долгого времени. Здесь, по этому двору, он ходил несколько лет, и здесь прошла его юность, но он не жалеет о ней, — он взошел теперь высоко, на гору своего ума, откуда виднее весь этот летний мир, нагретый вечерним отшумевшим солнцем.] (113)
What this first paragraph tells us is that time will be an important theme in the novel. The whole scene breathes an atmosphere of the past—Chagataev has finished his studies and is greeted by an evening sun that “had had its day.” As he gazes around after completing his studies, however, he goes out into the world in the present, in order to “come to himself” (“opomnilsia”). His usual world was strange: he looked at it “with surprise” (“s udivleniem”) in a moment of rediscovery or a kind of awakening, not after, but from “the long time that had passed.” He does not see this forgotten world until the moment he takes leave of it; indeed, leaving it seems to be the basis for his discovery of what was. At this moment of departure, Chagataev wishes to linger in this world of “dead things” that hopefully will someday come to life. He touches all things in what appears to be a vain farewell gesture, knowing that soon they will also forget him. The strangeness of the world applies not only to the world, but also to people. He meets Vera, who in the beginning appeals to him as if from a distance:
This temporary stranger, this woman he would probably never meet again, gave off a sense of sleep and happiness; thus it is that bliss often lives unnoticed by us. (7)
[Cон и счастье исходили от этой чужой женщины, с которой он, вероятно, не встретится более; так часто живет рядом с нами незаметное блаженство.] (116)
Thus, Platonov describes a world in which things and beings live unaware of each other. Chagataev laments this atmosphere of collective oblivion. He desires recognition from the objects with which he surrounds himself, but most often he is an “unknown and pitiful creature” in their presence. He encounters this same obliviousness upon his arrival in Tashkent:
Feeling hurt, he walked as if through a foreign world, staring at everything around him and recognizing things he had forgotten, though still going unrecognized himself. It seemed as though every little creature, object or plant was prouder, more independent of former attachment, than a human being. (26)
[Он шел обиженный, как по чужому миру, вглядываясь во все окружающее и узнавая забытое, но сам оставался неузнанным. Каждое мелкое существо, предмет и растение, оказывается, было более гордым и независимым от прежней привязанности, чем человек.] (133)
Parallel to his lack of a sense of presence in Moscow and Tashkent, and later in the desert of Sary-Kamysh, Chagataev very keenly senses the estrangement that his own past absence in that world creates. Upon returning to the places of his childhood, he focuses “the interest of memory” (22) on the world, but recognizes that there is no place for nostalgia because there is no place for him in its memory. The world he walks around in is strange because it does not recognize him. All that he encounters are the absence and the distance that have come between him and his childhood surroundings. The only things that are aware of him are some old bushes:
His mother had once led him here by the hand and sent him off to live on his own, and now he had come back. He walked on with the camel, into the heart of his native land. Wild bushes stood there like wizened old men. They had not grown since Chagataev’s childhood and they alone of all the living creatures around appeared not to have forgotten Chagataev; they were so very unattractive as to seem meek and it was impossible to believe they could be indifferent or forgetful. Hideously poor as they were, they could keep going only with the help of memory or the lives of others; there was no other way they could live. (28)
[Сюда его мать когда-то вывела за руку и отправила жить одного, а теперь он вернулся. Он пошел дальше с верблюдом, в середину родины. Как маленькие старики, стояли дикие кустарники; они не выросли с тех пор, когда Чагатаев был ребенком, и они, кажется, одни из всех местных существ не забыли Чагатаева, потому что были настолько непривлекательны, что это походило на кротость, и в равнодушие или в беспамятство их поверить было нельзя. Такие безобразные бедняки должны жить лишь воспоминанием или чужой жизнью, больше им нечем.] (134f.)
Insensitive indifference and forgetfulness are features that do not apply to these wretched bushes, for it is “only with the help of memory or the lives of others” that they can go on living. It is the world of necessity that determines the specific sensitivity of the poor. Chagataev does not have this sensitivity because he consumes encounters with others as ephemeral and temporary, much as he would ingest something edible. When the old man Sufyan tells Chagataev that he knows him, and Chagataev replies that he cannot remember him, Sufyan explains:
You don’t know me, because you live like you eat. What goes into you, comes out again later. But what’s inside me, remains there. (30)
[Ты не знаешь, ты живешь, как ешь: что в тебя входит, то потом выходит. А во мне, все задерживается.] (136)
The comparison of life and food points to why the poor sense another destination in life. Platonov suggests that there is a deeper parallel between devouring victuals and the consumption of people. We take both “into” our Inner—food in a material form and people figuratively as memories—but when we overconsume both food and people, we no longer feel what we are consuming and cease to be aware of the other in ourselves. Food immediately leaves Chagataev, but it stays a while (“zaderzhivaetsia”) in the poor man.[5] Indeed, Platonov’s definition of overconsumption is when man ceases to feel the other in himself, and this is also why Chagataev’s initial task of saving the Dzhan is doomed to fail, for leading them to abundance means leading them to forgetfulness. In Sary-Kamish, from which Chagataev sets off on this journey, therefore, there is no bread in the physical sense, but at the end point in Ust-Urt, and later in Moscow there is an opposite lack of spiritual bread, because people have stopped experiencing “the memory of lives of the other.”
Indeed, the feeling of the immaterial Inner is the strange experience that his travels will bring to him, but it is an experience that he finds difficult to take with him from the journey across the desert. In the desert under conditions of physical starvation, when the “usual world” is replaced by a dreamlike experience, the world makes itself accessible to experience in a more exposed form:
Sufyan understood that Chagataev was being agitated by some kind of vital excitement, but this did not interest him. He knew that a man has to fill up his soul with something other and that, if there’s nothing at all, the heart ends up greedily chewing its own blood. After four days Sufyan and Chagataev were so hungry that they began to see dreams, even though their legs were walking and their eyes saw ordinary day. (36)
[Суфьян понимал, что в Чагатаеве происходит сейчас какое-то волнение жизни, но не интересовался этим: он знал, что чем-нибудь надо человеку наполнять свою душу, и если нет ничего, то сердце алчно жует собственную кровь. Через четыре дня Суфьян и Чагатаев настолько захотели есть, что стали видеть сновидения, в то время как ноги их шли и глаза видели обыкновенный день.] (141)
In this story of the road from starvation to salvation, Platonov turns the concepts of physical and spiritual nourishment and satisfaction on their heads. What Chagataev needs appears to be not so much food as other people, or rather, the recognition of their presence as memories in himself. Yet this is what the desert trek will bring to him, because in such a state of minimum energy the appearance of the individual self is less, and this increases the experience of the others in oneself. And as we shall see, experiencing others in the self is the definition of “dear little life” in Platonov’s ontology.
The journey through the desert is a great trial for Chagataev and the Dzhan. For days they find no food, and one child dies and simply vanishes in the sand and is forgotten. Life in the desert is reduced to a minimum. Verging on nonbeing, it will offer to Chagataev an experience of life in entropic fullness on the border of death. The Dzhan follow him, moving slowly and silently through the desert and feeding on whatever living vegetation they can find. Sometimes they walk, sometimes they crawl. An intrigue develops, however, because of Nur-Muhammed, an envoy from the party who was sent to the people before Chagataev. He is a selfish man who does not understand this people and constantly serves only himself. At one point, he lusts for Aidym, a little girl who is attached to Chagataev. When Nazar defends her, Nur-Muhammed shoots him. Wounded, he falls behind and is separated from the people. He crawls along, feeding on dry branches and grass. In this condition of utter exhaustion and as he sleeps, he finds within himself a relationship with the memory of other people:
Chagataev crawled another few yards and, in shallow, sandy tombs, found some dried-up blades of spring grass; these too he swallowed, just as he found them. After sliding down from a dune, he fell asleep at its base, and in sleep his weak consciousness was attacked by all kinds of memories: aimless, forgotten impressions, images of dull faces he had once happened to see—the whole of his past life suddenly turned back and fell on Chagataev. A poor, elderly man, someone he had once talked to somewhere or other, in Moscow or in his childhood, entered Chagataev’s mind and was now muttering away there about who knows what, never coming to an end and not going away. (73)
[Затем Чагатаев поползал еще по окрестности в несколько шагов и нашел в мелких песчаных могилах весенние засохшие былинки травы, которые он также проглотил, без различия. Скатившись с бархана, он заснул у его подножия, и во сне на его слабое сознание напали разные воспоминания, бесцельные забытые впечатления, воображение скучных лиц, виденных когда-то, однажды, — вся прожитая жизнь вдруг повернулась назад и напала на Чагатаева. Вот бедный пожилой человек, с которым говорил где-то Чагатаев, не то в Москве, не то в детстве, вошел к нему в ум и бормотал неизвестно о чем, не кончая и не уходя.] (173)
As he lies in the sand on the verge of death, a dream gives him access to forgotten memories: “the whole of his life suddenly turned back and fell on Chagataev.” In this semiconscious half-being, his entire life opens itself to him as a memory in himself beyond any important or valuable meeting or events:
Earlier he had thought that most of the unimportant, and even the not so unimportant, episodes of his life had been forgotten forever, eternally overshadowed by subsequent major events, but now he realized that all these things were intact inside him, indestructible, as perfectly preserved as precious treasures, as the possessions of a rapacious beggar who hoards what no one needs and what others have thrown away. The poor, elderly, man did not disappear from Chagataev’s consciousness; there he was, still muttering something, begging or complaining (in reality he had probably died long ago), but now a friend of Vera’s someone he had once barely glimpsed, had bent down over Chagataev and she wouldn’t go away either, she was annoying him, her whole being was tormenting the man half-asleep in the desert, while behind her, on a clay wall, trembled shadows from a silvery branch that had once grown in the sun, perhaps in Chardzhou or somewhere else. (73f.)
[Раньше он думал, что большинство ничтожных и даже важных событий его жизни забыто навсегда, закрыто навечно последующим крупными фактами, — сейчас он понял, что в нем все цело, неуничтожимо и сохранно, как драгоценность, как добро хищного нищего, который бережет ненужное и брошенное другими. Бедный и пожилой человек не исчез из сознания, он все еще бормотал что-то, прося или жалуясь (наверное, он давно умер в действительности), но вот подруга Веры, еле виденная им когда-то, склонилась над Чагатаевым и не уходила, она надоедала, и она мучила собою дремлющего в пустыне человека, и за нею, на глиняном дувале, дрожали тени от серебристой ветви, росшей некогда на солнце — может быть, в Чарджуе, может быть, еще где-нибудь.] (173)
Platonov emphasizes the existence of the unimportant and worthless in us that extends beyond the ramifications of any ordinary consciousness of reality. A man who in Chagataev’s more conscious memory has no status or place makes his presence suddenly felt. Thus, Chagataev comes to understand that all people and things he meets live on in him beyond his conscious will. He discovers that in his Inner “the rejected and abandoned” is as “valuable and well-kept as a jewel.” Indeed, he discovers that his inner self is a “rapacious beggar who hoards what no one needs and what others have thrown away.” Thus, all hierarchies of reality (and realism) in the Inner are inverted in extreme poverty and on the borders of consciousness. This beautiful passage continues:
And there were many other pungent, eternal bits of empty piffle: a rotten tree, a village post-office, a deserted mountain groaning in the midday sun, the sounds of a disappeared wind and of tender embraces with Vera—all these things entered Chagataev energetically and simultaneously and then continued to live inside him, motionless and persistent, even though in reality, in the past, they had been current facts that had slipped quickly by and vanished. They now existed more sharply and fiercely inside him, much more insistently than they had ever existed before. In real life these things had lived meekly, they had not proclaimed their significance and had done no harm to man’s conscience and feelings. But now they had all come crowding into Chagataev’s head and, whereas in the real world it had been possible to escape from them, if only because time goes on passing, now these events had nowhere to slip away to; now they went on being and being, eating at the bones of Chagataev’s skull and wearing them away with all this repetition. (74)
[И еще многие, едкие вечные пустяки в виде сгнившего дерева, почтового отделения в поселке, безлюдной стонущей горы на полуденном солнце, звука пропавшего ветра и нежных объятий с Верой, все это энергично вошло в Чагатаева одновременно и жило в нем неподвижно и настойчиво, хотя в истине, в прошлом, это были текущие, быстро исчезающие факты. В нем же они теперь существовали гораздо более резко и яростно, гораздо навязчивей, чем на правде. В действительности эти предметы жили кротко и не проявляли своего значения, не делали больно совести и чувству человека. Но сейчас они набились толпою в голову Чагатаева, и если от них можно было спасаться в настоящей жизни, хотя бы потому, что время проходит, то здесь события никуда не проходили, а продолжали быть постоянно и своей повторяющейся деятельностью точили и протирали кости черепа Чагатаева.] (173f.)
Chagataev thought he could consume other people just as quickly as he consumed his food. The series of women that he has met ultimately become as estranged from him as the world that he constantly leaves behind. It is in the in-between, in the journey through the desert, on the borders of existence, that he understands how wrong he has been. He begins to feel how he consists of his memory, indeed, how the world of spirit or the soul awakens in him. What exists in him exists in contradiction to “reality,” where everything appears as “ephemeral and rapidly vanishing facts.” In real life everything that he had met could enter into a relationship of meanings and values where they did not “do any harm to human feelings and the human consciousness.” In dreams, as in a dream on the border of life and death, reality lives in another intimate form in us.
Here on the boundary of waking and sleep, consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, Chagataev experiences that which cannot fully appear in life or consciousness: the other in the self. Thus, Platonov tells us that man does not have a home in the world, in the sense that he does not inhabit the world as a home, but that man himself is a home for the world and is inhabited by it. He experiences how we are the other in us, and how on the verge of death we feel the presence of everything living in us that is strange, rejected, worthless, and forgotten. Platonov also inverts the traditional Western notion of the soul, according to which it is the uttermost own, equally the basis of the Delphic motto, “know thyself,” the Aristotelian self-mover, and the Christian road to salvation. For Platonov, however, the soul is the immaterial presence of the other in the self. The soul or “dear little life” is the way in which, contrary to consciousness and reality, the world persists as a common remembered relationship in our Inner.
Although the Dzhan are described from the outset as a “lost nation,” toward the end of the novella they lose themselves in a different sense. Their arrival in the valley of Ust-Urt, is but the beginning of the story of their dispersal, disappearance, and alienation. Aidym senses this. As they reach their goal, she turns to Chagataev and asks,
“Teach me not to think. I am frightened. I see terrible things,” said Aidym.”
“But it’s not hunger that’s hurting your soul, is it?” asked Chagataev.
“No,” said Aidym. My soul’s hurting from what I feel. Nazar, why doesn’t anyone need me?
“Who doesn’t need you?” asked Chagataev.
The nation was living with us, and now it’s just wandered off,” said Aidym. “Soon you’ll leave too. Who’ll be left to remember me then?”
“I won’t leave you,” Chagataev promised. (121)
[“Научи меня, чтоб я лучше не думала, а то я боюсь: мне кажется страшное!” сказала Айдым.
“Но ведь у тебя не от голода душа начинает болеть?” спросил Чагатаев.
“Не от голода, — ответила Айдым.” “У меня от чувства . . . Назар, отчего я чужая?”
“Кому ты чужая, Айдым?” спросил Чагатаев.
“Народ жил с нами, а теперь весь раскочевался,” сказала Айдым. — “Ты тоже скоро уйдешь, кто тогда меня помнить будет?”] (213)
When they arrive in civilization, Aidym is no longer hungry, but she suffers from a different pain: the feeling of strangeness or estrangement. She is strange now because the people have dispersed and settled down in different places (“raskochevalsia”). She no longer lives with her people and fears that no one will remember her, that she will be a stranger to everyone. In the Russian original, she asks Chagataev “otchego ia chuzhaia?” which is translated as “why doesn’t anyone need me?” but literally means “why am I strange/foreign?” Chagataev assures her that he will remember her and take her with him to Moscow, but when he does so, they become strangers to each other nevertheless. Thus, the physical pain of starvation is contrasted to the pain of the lonely soul. And through Chagataev’s consciousness, Platonov expresses the view that we need the other in order to feel our own life and souls:
No nation, not even the Dzhan, can live life split up and scattered. People receive nourishment from one another not only through the bread they eat but also through the soul; through sensing and imagining one another; otherwise, what can they think about, where can they spend the tender, trusting strength of life, where can they scatter their sorrow and find comfort, where can they die an unnoted death? With only the imagination of his own self to nourish him, a man soon consumes his soul, exhausting himself in the worst of poverties and dying in mindless gloom. (130)
[Никакой народ, даже джан, не может жить врозь: люди питаются друг от друга не только хлебом, но и душой, чувствуя и воображая один другого; иначе, что им думать, где истратить нежную, доверчивую силу жизни, где узнать рассеяние своей грусти и утешиться, где незаметно умереть . . . Питаясь лишь воображением самого себя, всякий человек скоро поедает свою душу, истощается в худшей бедности и погибает в безумном унынии.] (221)
The Dzhan nation perishes because, dispersed or “apart,” it cannot survive—not because it can no longer be the bearer of a culture, but because it loses the minimal element from which culture can grow: the sense and experience of the other as the self. Here we find the utmost expression of Platonov’s original communism, a communism that lies at the origin of the experience of life: where what is in common is the self of the “shared meaning of life.” This is the germ of his other revolution, which is a different consciousness of what it means to be in the world, namely the insight that without the other, man cannot feel anything but despair and estrangement. We need the other because we nourish ourselves from the other as a soul, or rather, from the way in which the other is the soul, or dear little life. Life is sustained by the care and imagination of the other because it is in being in another that it can survive.
Thus the material poverty of the Dzhan is contrasted to the spiritual poverty of modern man, and the lack of “spiritual food” as the lack of the other appears as another hell that is perhaps even worse than the famine afflicting the Dzhan. At the end of the novel Chagataev meets another people who also call themselves Dzhan:
We’re Dzhan, replied the old man, and it emerged from his words that every little tribe, every family and chance group of gradually dying people living in the empty places of the desert, the Amu-Darya and the Ust-Yurt, called themselves by the same name: Dzhan. It was their shared name, given to them long ago by the rich beys, because Dzhan means soul and these poor, dying men had nothing they could call their own but their souls, that is, the ability to feel and suffer. The word, dzhan, therefore, was a gibe, a joke made by the rich at the expense of the poor. The beys thought that the soul meant only despair, but in the end it was their dzhan that was the end of them; they had too little dzhan of their own, too little capacity to feel, suffer, think and struggle. They had too little of the wealth of the poor. (141)
[Мы — джан, — ответил старик, и по его словам оказалось, что все мелкие племена, семейства и просто группы постепенно умирающих людей, живущие в нелюдимых местах пустыни, Амударьи и Усть-Урта, называют себя одинаково — джан. Это их общее прозвище, данное им когда-то богатыми баями, потому что джан есть душа, а у погибающих бедняков ничего нет, кроме души, то есть способности чувствовать и мучиться. Следовательно, слово “джан” означает насмешку богатых над бедными. Баи думали, что душа лишь отчаяние, но сами они от джана и погибли, — своего джана, своей способности чувствовать, мучиться, мыслить и бороться у них было мало, это — богатство бедных.] (230)
Platonov reverses the relationship between poverty and wealth by insisting that in richness there is a different kind of privation due to a lack of being with the other, a lack of the other in the self. Thus, he also inverts the modern myth of salvation through civilization by transforming it into a story about the loss of the “soul.” Civilization promises fullness and abundance and insists on a hierarchy of forms of material life, but it loses sensitivity to the life that the other lives in us and the life we live in others. Chagataev has entered the otherworld of the interiority of his self and experienced the life of the other in him, but he is unable to take this experience with him. He cannot carry this world in him as a conscious experience. What he has is only the insight with which the novel ends, for now he knows that he is dependent on others: “Chagataev knew for sure that help could come to him only from another human being” (146).
In this treatment of the myth of the salvational task of modern civilization, Platonov poses a fundamental question about whether communality can persist in the modern world of abundance. If in earlier works, such as The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, he had shown how the revolutionary historical scheme alienates people from their inner experience of both the past and the present, in Dzhan he has definitely discovered how to inquire about the present of the past in terms of inner life or interiority. In this novel he develops a highly specific way of writing about interiority, the soul, the self, and viewing the innermost own of memory as the place of communality. Interiority is often thought of as the ultimate own, the ultimate self. Following Hegel’s concept of the negativity of the subject or the personal superego, George Bataille (1988) describes interiority or “Inner experience” as a place of sensitive ecstasy, where the I, the subject, is able to meet and fathom the entire world in himself as a place of fusion of subject and object. Hegel defines interiority as “the wealth of an infinite number of representations, of images,” and for him as for Bataille, interiority is understood in Romantic categories as the night of the world, to be attained only through forms of utter negativity, the latter emphasizing an extreme sacrifice of the conscious self (Bataille 1990). It is very interesting to compare and contrast Platonov’s concept of inner life with the ideas of these thinkers. Like them, he regards the Inner, or interiority, in terms of a negativity with regard to the conscious self, and he similarly finds in it an infinite number of representations and images. Platonov, however, thinks of these representations as memories, which is to say, the presence of the other, or rather the presence of past meetings in the self. The Inner is not the autonomous space of fusion and a superconscious self that embraces and communicates with the world in itself through desire. At the most, the self in the works of Platonov is the eunuch, the disinterested spectator of people entering and exiting inner life. The Inner, therefore, is where the world in its outer strangeness keeps on living as the own and as the source of communality. The material of the Inner is the afterlife of others in us as the stuff that memories and “dreams are made of.”
Moreover, for Platonov the negativity of this realm of experience is not a total negativity per se; it does not belong to a radical transcendence but is an experience that can be had in close proximity to being. This attainment of the experience is viewed not as a radical transgression, but rather through what Heidegger would call Versunkenheit—the praxis of falling into the self—because the self is a constantly present other world: the other world of past and present meetings living within us. In a parallel to Rilke’s statement that for the elderly the difference between life and death is not so great, Platonov sees extreme poverty as an experience in which the material of the self can be felt as the beginning of an inner world—a world where the difference between the self and the other is not so great.
Thus, Platonov develops the notion of dzhan, or soul, as a communal ontology that is to be understood not according to Christian duality in the sense of an immaterial entity opposed to the body, but as access to the common world in the self and as the inner self. What the soul according to Platonov is, therefore, cannot really be expressed or experienced consciously. It is the coincidence of the being in which we live and the being which exists in us; it is the communality that we are and from which we constantly move away. Dzhan can therefore also be read as a barely concretized literary image of the revolutionary utopia of being at home in the common world, because it is the image of the experience of the world as the self, or the image of the felt presence of others in the interiority of the self.
Here we see a narrative illustration of entropy, that is, the loss of energy within a system, which Seifrid regards as central to Platonov’s writings.
“But Chagataev was like a sick man to whom nothing brings pleasure or interest” (Platonov and Chandler, et al. 2007, 9). All further references to this edition are by page number only.
The word “narod” in Russian can be translated as both people and nation. In the novel, Dzhan stands for a nation as well as a people.
See Kaminskij (2013, 261), who reads Dzhan according to the myth of Hermes; Turbin (1965) as a mystery play; Bodin (1991) against the background of biblical legends and the myth of Ahriman; Ingdahl (2000) as gnostic; Zhunturova-Fisherman (2000) as Zoroastrian; and Ismailov (2001) as Sufi.
The translation here is slightly incorrect. The food does not “remain,” but lingers; dwells in him.