The timing of Tora Lane's short monograph suggests that it might constitute a study of the relationship between revolutionary politics on the one hand, and the literary creativity of Andrei Platonov on the other. Yet despite its title (and over a century of hindsight about the legacy of the October Revolution), there is little explicit ideology here. Instead of a study of Platonov's politics, or even his poetics, Lane offers an account of his utopian aesthetics that is broadly philosophical in tone, with as many references to Georges Bataille, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Nancy as there are to Karl Marx or even Georg Lukács. In this respect, her work harks back to some of the foundational scholarship of the 1980s and early 1990s, before the archival revelations of the last twenty years or so began to transform our understanding both of the textological complexities of Platonov's oeuvre, and of its often fraught interplay with unguessed at details of his biography. It is striking, for instance, that Lane makes no use of recent documentary publications by Natal΄ia Kornienko, such as the first volume of the ongoing Arkhiv A. P. Platonova (2009) or Ia prozhil zhizn΄, the painfully intimate edition of Platonov's letters that appeared in 2014, or even the slightly older Zapisnye knizhki (2000, second edition 2006).

These works have illustrated quite how imbricated Platonov was in the ever-changing linguistic discourses of the time, reflecting and more particularly refracting the verbal simulacra of Stalinism. Perhaps for this reason, works from the 1930s such as Dzhan and the unfinished Schastlivaia Moskva have come to enjoy a special resonance in contemporary scholarship, replacing an earlier emphasis on the more canonical Chevengur and Kotlovan. Lane is not oblivious to such developments, and even if her work overlooks some of the major primary sources in modern Platonov scholarship, she draws pertinently from key works of secondary criticism. Unfolding over seven brief chapters, arranged chronologically and bookended by an introduction and an afterward, Andrey Platonov: The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution offers many valuable insights into a number of works (there is, for instance, a thoughtful and generous reading of “Reka Potudan”). Most importantly, Lane's commitment to reading Platonov less as a particular product of the October Revolution than as an author of a more broadly existential impulse, allows her to avoid speculating as to whether his later works are pro- or anti-Soviet, pro- or anti-Stalinist, or a straightforward continuation of or departure from his earlier, more utopian works.

Thus, at the outset, Lane declares that her primary interest will be in “the revolution as a revolution in existence—that is, in our understanding and experience of being in common” (1–2). Although not glossed as such, this appears to be an allusion to the writings of Nancy, and his interest in ontologies of belonging and the relationship of the individual to his or her community. The relevance of this theoretical school to a study of Platonov would appear to be self-evident, even if Lane's methodological framework is more implicit than fully elaborated, especially for non-adepts. Similarly, claims such as “What aligns Platonov with the existential thought of Martin Heidegger is that he does not describe the world apart from man's relationship to it and does not separate man from his being in the world” (64) tend to take Heideggerian thought at face value, rather than interrogating what happens to existential philosophy when subjected to the particular lived experience of Soviet socialism. Still, Lane's broader commitment to seeing Platonov through a distinct philosophical prism is productive and perceptive, and may well serve to stimulate further debate. As she asks towards the end of her book, “what can be saved of the idea of Communism after the dark record of its implementation in Russia and Eastern Europe. Is it possible to reach and understanding of Communism in literature that is not communist literature?” (130).