Andrei Platonov

Andrey Platonov — his real name was Andrey Platonovich Klimentov. A Russian Soviet writer and playwright, one of the most original Russian literary figures in style and language in the first half of the 20th century. He was born on 16 (28) August 1899 in Voronezh. His father, Klimentov Platon Firsovich, worked as a locomotive engineer and a mechanic in the Voronezh railway workshops. He was twice awarded the title Hero of Labor (in 1920 and 1922), and in 1928 he joined the Party. His mother, Lobochikhina Maria Vasilyevna, was the daughter of a watchmaker, a homemaker, and the mother of eleven (ten) children; Andrey was the eldest. Maria Vasilyevna gave birth to children practically every year, and Andrey, as the eldest, took part in raising and later supporting all his brothers and sisters. Both parents are buried in Chugunovsky Cemetery in Voronezh. In 1906 he entered a church parish school. From 1909 to 1913 he studied at the city four-year school. From 1913 (or from spring 1914) to 1915 he worked as a day laborer and hired hand, as an office boy in the office of the insurance company Rossiya, and as an assistant engineer on a steam engine at the estate of Colonel Bek-Marmarchev in Ust. In 1915 he worked as a foundry worker at a pipe plant. From autumn 1915 to spring 1918 he worked in many workshops in Voronezh—making millstones, casting, and so on. In 1918 he entered the electrical engineering department of the Voronezh Polytechnic Institute; he served in the main revolutionary committee of the South-Eastern Railways and in the editorial office of the journal Zhelezny Put (“The Iron Way”). He took part in the Civil War as a front-line correspondent. From 1919 he published his works, collaborating with several newspapers as a poet, publicist, and critic. In the summer of 1919 he visited Novokhopyorsk as a correspondent for the newspaper Izvestia Soveta Oborony Voronezhskogo Ukreplennogo Rayona (“News of the Defense Council of the Voronezh Fort