Andrei Platonov: Dzhan

After graduating some college in Moscow, young Chagataev is sent by the authorities back in his native region, to set the Soviet values on the population there. We are in the 1930's and the language is soaked with words like industrialization, kolkhoz, pyatiletka, and with sentences like Communism is the golden future of humanity, Class struggle intensifies as Socialism goes from triumph to triumph, etc. etc. Young enthusiasts like Chagataev are tens and tens of thousands.

The native region of Chagataev is a desert somewhere between the Soviet republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and the population is a nomadic tribe moving his flocks up and down a river there. The river has dried and animals, then the people started dying of starvation.

Chagataev has to fight with the harsh natural conditions himself, of course, also with the incredulity of people, also with the scandalous abuses of local apparatchiki. And he has to fight also with his own memories. His marriage in Moscow was a failure. He married a divorced woman. Vera came with a teenager daughter from her first marriage and a pregnancy: the father of the expecting baby is unknown and Chagataev found out the thing after the wedding.

As action unfolds, Chagataev starts to realize that the population where he was sent is not as desperate and as poor as he thought. The name of the tribe is Dzhan, which in their Turkic dialect means Soul. This is their richness; their soul. It is about their collective memory, their traditions, their values. It is about their identity. The struggle of Chagataev to find a Soviet solution to their problems comes with an impardonable cost: the loss of their soul. He goes on anyway: people are starving.

Here is a fragment from Dzhan:

Many pale eyes were straining to look at Chagataev, trying not to close from weakness and indifference. Chagataev felt the pain of his sorrow: his nation did not need communism. His nation needed oblivion – until the wind chilled its body and slowly squandered it in space. Chagataev turned away from everyone: all his actions, all his hopes had proved senseless…Did there remain in his nation even a small soul, something he could work with in order to bring about general happiness? Or had everything there been so worn away by suffering that even imagination, the intelligence of the poor, had entirely died? Chagataev knew from childhood memory, and from his education in Moscow, that any exploitation of a human being begins with the distortion of their soul, with getting a soul so used to death that it can be subjugated; without this subjugation, a slave is not a slave. And this forced mutilation of the soul continues, growing more and more violent, until reason in the slave turns to mad and empty mindlessness. The class struggle begins with the victory of the oppressors over the holy spirit confined within the slave: blasphemy against the master’s beliefs – against the master’s soul, the master’s god – goes unpardoned, while the slave’s own soul is ground down in falsehood and destructive labor.

After all, we have three players in this story: Chagataev, the tribe with its soul, and the desert. And maybe the main hero is here the desert. Because it is the desert that will determine the outcome. Then, the question becomes: is a desert a transformable universe (through Soviet management of land)? Apparently the plot of Dzhan is directed that way. However Andrei Platonov's works offer a multi-key reading. I found a very subtle observation made by Katharine Holt: the similes and metaphors subvert the apparent meaning of the book. And Katharine Holt concludes, these deserts stand not for a world that can be re-made, but for themselves.

(Andrei Platonov)