Ascent to Hell: The Poetics of Deconstruction in Peretz Markish and Andrei Platonov

Abstract

In her seminal study of modernisms, Chana Kronfeld identifies the poetics of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures as processes of deterritorialization. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Yiddish—that stateless tongue par excellence—found official status within the new “international state” of the Soviet Union. This article draws breath from Kronfeld’s study of marginal modernisms to interrogate the relationship between space, revolution, and language in Soviet majority (Russian) and marginal (Yiddish) literatures. Peretz Markish’s Yiddish poem Di kupe (The Mound) is read in dialogue with Andrei Platonov’s Russian novella Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit). Both Markish and Platonov disrupt norms of language and space in the construction of their respective literary edifices: Markish’s mound is at once divine and profane, everywhere and nowhere, concave and erect, while the proposed proletarian residential skyscraper of Platonov’s novella dematerializes into a massive grave. Though divided by language and genre, these texts are shockingly similar in their treatment of the paradoxical project of “building communism” and grapple with legacies of violence upon and via the medium of the female body. With the aid of queer theory and Harriet Murav’s conception of hefker (abandonment), this article considers how Markish and Platonov build a distinctly revolutionary poetics of deconstruction.