Caring for the Others: Between the Ecological Poetics of Andrey Platonov and Varlam Shalamov

• Applicant: Ekaterina Nikitina, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 542829546

The objective of my project is to describe the poetics of care represented in the ecological thinking and literary works of two Soviet writers — Andrey Platonov and Varlam Shalamov. Their literature reveals deep interconnections between humans, animals, and plants. It represents an isolated chapter of the Soviet environmental project and runs counter to Stalin’s plan for the violent transformation of nature, critically conceptualizing anthropocentrism in building ecological relationships with non-human beings. However, there is an important omission among researchers’ common reading of the writers’ ecological prose. It consists of the fact that the main optics of Platonov and Shalamov’s ecological thinking were framed in the context of a totalitarian state whose propaganda rhetoric easily used ideas of ecology and care to dehumanize unwanted political actors and to humanize cultivated animals and plants. At the same time, the USSR created ecological projects in practice (biosecurity of fields, Valentin Mindovsky’s plan to plant greenery and greenhouses in cities, young naturalist stations), which today can be recognized as successful and inclusive, although they refer to the controversial ideas of “plant and animal communism.” So far, this aspect has received little or no attention in the study of the Soviet ecology project and the writers’ works in general. By raising this issue in my monographic research, I plan to answer the question, why do ecology and totalitarian discourse in the USSR appear to be closely linked? In the study, it is important for me to explore this issue through the prism of neo-totalitarian discourse in contemporary Russia, which appropriates progressive environmental ideas and treats the environmental agenda in the same hypocritical way as it did the USSR in the mid-1930s. In such cases, postulating non-anthropocentric relationships between non-humans and humans under a totalitarian regime turns into an ethical nightmare in practice. Ecological ideas cannot be seen in isolation from the political conditioning of particular societies; we must always ask ourselves: where is the distinction between progressive environmental ideas and the functioning of a totalitarian machine? In my work, I will critically rethink the link between the Soviet ecological project as reflected in the writers’ works and its cohesion with the totalitarian ideas of Stalinist dehumanization, with particular attention to how contemporary ecological discourse deals with these legacies.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position