| Summary: | This chapter examines the limits of Soviet efforts to refashion nature, to transform deserts into gardens, and to “socialize” wasteland ( pustyr' ). It begins with a discussion of the arc of Andrei Platonov's writings on the desert from 1921 to 1927, the final year that he worked for Narkomzem in the provinces of southern Russia and focuses specifically on Platonov's appropriation of the Solovevian discourse of the battle with the “Asian” desert. The chapter studies the literary works of Platonov in the context of his second career as a land reclamation engineer in the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, whose mandate was to make land more productive through a range of chemical, hydrological, and physical interventions collectively known as land reclamation ( melioratsiia ). It considers new directions in Platonov's writings on the desert following his first trip to Turkmenistan, focusing on two texts from 1934: an environmental manifesto, “On the First Socialist Tragedy” (“O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii”), and an essay specifically addressing the development of Kara-Kum, “The Hot Arctic” (“Goriachaia Arktika”). Reading these texts alongside Dzhan and situating the novella in its original discursive, historical, and ideological contexts, the chapter seeks to obtain a fuller understanding not only of Platonov's account of the history and future of the desert and its nomadic inhabitants but also of the method by which this tale of socialist development at the periphery comments on the ideological concerns of the center.
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