By Professor Evgeny Pavlov, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Andrei Platonov, one of the most fascinating Russian modernists of the Stalinist period, was an ardent believer in Communism. Most scholars of the recent decades agree that he consistently and genuinely identified with the revolutionary objectives of the Soviet state. This said, he has recently been viewed more as a “negative revolutionary” whose vision is a melancholy one that poses utopia as a redemptive, signifying horizon rather than a reachable goal. In this regard, time and space as its metaphor become key preoccupations of his mature Soviet writings many of which did get published in Soviet times. Focusing on a few representative texts from the late 1930s (especially Dzhan) I will examine ways in which Platonov’s “Socialist Realist” oeuvre collides with Stalinism’s understanding of time as it offers its own insights into what time may be all about. How do we relate the persistent “belatedness” in Platonov’s narratives to the backward-looking posture of high Stalinism? How does cyclical time in his later stories differ from and comment on, the primitive, “folkish” temporality propagated by the cultural establishment in the 1930s? And finally, how does Platonov use geographical space to zoom in on his overarching temporal concerns?

Evgeny Pavlov is Associate Professor of Russian and History at the University of Canterbury | Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha in Ōtautahi | Christchurch, Aotearoa | New Zealand. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. He is the author of Shok pamiati: avtobiograficheskaia poetika Val’tera Ben’amina i Osipa Mandel’shtama (The Shock of Memory: Autobiographical Poetics of Walter Benjamin and Osip Mandelstam, Moscow: NLO, 2005) and editor of a number of volumes on Russian and comparative literature. Evgeny Pavlov’s principal area of research is Russian and European cultural and literary history of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is co-editor of the New Zealand Slavonic Journal and vice-president of the Australia and New Zealand Slavists’ Association.

Friday 17th November 2023, 12pm - 2pm

Salle de réception
Bâtiment DE1 - Niveau 3 - Salle R.3.105
Avenue Antoine Depage 1
1000 Bruxelles

Free entrance

Contact: Dennis Ioffe