SOURCE: “The Promised Land—Desired and Lost: An Analysis of Andrej Platonov's Short Story ‘Džan,’” in Scando-Slavica, Vol. 37, 1991, pp. 5–24.

In the following excerpt, Bodin analyzes “Džan,” tracing the biblical and other mythological allusions that define this work about the impossibility of utopia in a new Soviet community.

In 1933 Andrej Platonov was chosen, together with a number of the most well-known young Soviet writers such as Vsevolod Ivanov and Leonid Leonov, to participate in an extensive tour to Turkmenistan in order to study the socialist development of Central Asia in connection with the ten-year anniversary of the Turkmen Socialist Republic.¹ The development of Central Asia was one of the most important issues at the time and to write about this subject was considered almost a duty of any Soviet writer.²

At that time Platonov had already published several literary works, mostly short stories but also a collection...