“The Dialectics of Nature in Kara-Kum”: Andrei Platonov’s Dzhan as the Environmental History of a Future Utopia

In the Soviet cultural geography of the early 1930s, the Kara-Kum desert of Turkmenistan–the setting of Andrei Platonov's novella Dzhan–represented an environmental challenge to Soviet technological utopianism, just as its nomadic inhabitants challenged Stalinist narratives of political development. In this article, I offer new contexts for reading Dzhan, locating it within Russian and Soviet discourses of natural and national development and within the context of Platonov's second profession as a meliorator (land reclamation engineer). I argue that Dzhan offers a vision of vernacular socialism, first, in its attention to the specific ecology of the desert and its inhabitants, and second, in its resistance to two totalizing Soviet master narratives forming in the early 1930s: in the political domain, new Stalinist doctrine on modes of production, and in the literary domain, the socialist realist plot.