In this Utopia-in-the-making, the hole in the ground which is to underlie a new society, the characters all share two things: an all-encompassing sadness and a strangely altered language. Whether it be Voshchev the truth seeker or Zhachev the malicious vigilante, or even Nastya the small girl (none has a full name), they all seem to operate in a daze, an expectation of death in the midst of life. They are unsurprised by the strangest of events—horses foraging collectively, bears belonging to trade unions—so violence and death are hardly anything new. Yet Andrei Platonov’s characters are not callous: Humans, animals, and objects seem to deserve pity and compassion in equal measure, since all three seem to be identically wasted, impoverished, and discarded. What is so disturbing in Platonov’s characters is that their very compassion seems as impersonal as their anger. It has nothing to do with specific people or traits.

The characters, then, are motivated by physical need, by ideological dictates, and by “what used to be called the soul.” Platonov is dealing with body and with consciousness, not realistic psychological motivation. Hence, the seeming aimlessness and randomness of their actions; there are Party directives which they fulfill, they are believers, but their melancholy puzzlement suggests that they are moving out of inertia rather than will.

The vocabulary of the revolutionary era has for them become a vocabulary of the spirit. Their language—common to all the characters as well as the author-narrator—is a complex mixture of cliches, slogans, revolutionary buzzwords, abstractions visited on concrete, and colloquial turns of phrase. Voshchev sees nothing absurd in his dismissal for “the growth of the strength of his weakness and of pensiveness in the midst of the general tempo of labor” but instead goes off to try to understand what has made him this way.A man about to make love to his wife speaks of her “gigantic feeling for the masses” and plans to “organize himself up close to her.” He is not self-conscious, not joking—nor, perhaps, is Platonov.