In the current rewriting of Soviet literary history, Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) has come to occupy a central position. Like Mikhail Bulgakov, who together with Platonov first came to the attention of a broad reading public in the 1960s, he is now regarded as one of the buried treasures of the Soviet cultural past whose excavation has been made possible by Stalinism's final dismantling. Eclipsing even some of the hallowed martyrs of Soviet literature, Platonov has been elevated into an emblem of the Stalin era's repressions, a writer of tragic and prophetic vision who “foresaw all that later took place” and in a series of eerily dystopian works wrote about it with unswerving honesty. So abruptly has the “official” Soviet evaluation of Platonov reversed itself that it is not unusual to encounter the claim that Soviet literature (or even world literature) cannot now even be imagined without Platonov as one of its central figures. The traits for which he was once vilified – his works' penchant for the grotesque, their often anarchistic sentiments, and their weird deformations of the Russian language — are now regarded as his most impressive achievements. The stifling of Platonov's unique voice in the second half of his career and the at best grudging admission into print granted his works in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras have, since the late 1980s, given way to a flood of once-banned publications, and plans are underway for a scholarly edition of his collected works.