Andrey Platonov

(1899 - 1951)

As a teenager Andrey Platonov, the son of a railway engineer, worked for the Southeastern Railway as an engineer’s assistant. After the Russian Revolution he studied electrical engineering and worked for the Red Army delivering supplies and troops by train. In 1922 he published his first book, a collection of pastoral and proletarian poems. Joseph Stalin allegedly wrote “scum” in the margins of one of his later short stories. Platonov’s son was sent to the Gulag in 1938 and died of tuberculosis contracted during his three years of imprisonment. Platonov died of the same disease roughly a decade later.