Although Platonov regarded himself as a communist, his principal works remained unpublished in his lifetime because of their skeptical attitude toward collectivization of agriculture (1929–1940) and other Stalinist policies, as well as for their experimental, avant-garde form infused with existentialism which was not in line with the dominant socialist realism doctrine.

From 1918 through 1921, his most intensive period as a writer, he published dozens of poems (an anthology appeared in 1922), several stories, and hundreds of articles and essays, adopting in 1920 the pen-name Platonov by which he is best-known.

With remarkable energy and intellectual precocity, he wrote confidently across a range of topics including literature, art, cultural life, science, philosophy, religion, education, politics, the civil war, foreign relations, economics, technology, famine and land reclamation, and others.

In spring, 1924 Platonov applied for re-admission to the Party, offering reassurance that he had remained a communist and a Marxist, but he was denied then as on the next two occasions.

For the next years, he worked as an engineer and administrator, organizing the digging of ponds and wells, draining of swampland, and building a hydroelectric plant.

A turning point in his life and career as a writer came with the publication in March 1931 of For Future Use (″Vprok″ in Russian), a novella that chronicled the forced collectivisation of agriculture during the First Five Year Plan.

According to archival evidence (OGPU informer's report, 11 July 1931), Stalin read For Future Use carefully after its publication, adding marginal comments about the author ("fool, idiot, scoundrel") and his literary style ("this isn't Russian but some incomprehensible nonsense") to his copy of the magazine.

The report described For Future Use as "a satire on the organizing of collective farms," and commented that Platonov's subsequent work revealed the "deepening anti-Soviet attitudes" of the writer.

[7] In 1934, Maksim Gorky arranged for Platonov to be included in a "writers' brigade" sent to Central Asia with the intention of publishing a collective work in celebration of ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan.

Platonov’s contribution to the Turkmen volume was a short story titled “Takyr” (or “Salt-flats”) about the liberation of a Persian slave girl.

He wrote two stories: "Immortality", which was highly praised, and "Among Animals and Plants", which was severely criticized and eventually published only in a heavily edited and far weaker version.

In August 1936, The Literary Critic published "Immortality" with a note explaining the difficulties the author had faced when proposing the story to other periodicals.

[11]: 626–629  In 1939, the story was republished in the intended collective volume, Fictional representations of Railway Transport (1939) dedicated to the heroes of the Soviet railroad system.

For his part, Platonov made hostile remarks about Trotsky, Rykov, and Bukharin but not about Stalin, to whom he wrote letters on several occasions.

[14] In January 1937, Platonov contributed to an issue of Literaturnaya gazeta in which the accused at the second Moscow Show Trial (Radek, Pyatakov and others) were denounced and condemned by 30 well-known writers, including Boris Pasternak.

Thanks to efforts by Platonov and his acquaintances (including Mikhail Sholokhov), Platon was released and returned home in October 1940, but he was terminally ill and died in January 1943.

Platonov viewed the world as embodying at the same time the opposing principles of spirit and matter, reason and emotion, nature and machine.

His aim was to turn industry over to machines, in order to "transfer man from the realm of material production to a higher sphere of life."

His Foundation Pit uses a combination of peasant language with ideological and political terms to create a sense of meaninglessness, aided by the abrupt and sometimes fantastic events of the plot.

[22] (Batuman is author of The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and was Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel The Idiot.)

In 2007, New York Review Books published a collection of newer translations of some of these stories, including the novella Soul (1934), "The Return" (1946) and "The River Potudan".