Andrey Platonov was arguably the purest literary practitioner of the principles of “scientific Marxism.” Marxist literary critics — Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson — have appreciated this. Stalin, however, did not. As a result, many of Platonov’s best works were composed “for the drawer” and published only years after his death.

The first major Russian writer to come from the industrial proletariat, Platonov was born in 1899 to a large working-class family in the provincial city of Voronezh. He began working in the rail yards at age 15, served in the Red Army during the civil war, and studied in the electrical engineering department of the Voronezh Polytechnic Institute. He began placing articles and science fiction in new periodicals, starting in 1918; three years later, he published a volume of poems and a book called “Electrification.” In 1922, he abruptly stopped writing: “Being a technician,” he explained, “I could no longer be involved in a contemplative activity like literature.” Over the next four years, as a full-time electrical and land-reclamation engineer in the district of Voronezh, Platonov dug an estimated 1,094 ponds and wells, and drained 2,400 acres of swampland.

As it turned out, however, Platonov was unable to live without literature: “It’s essential for me,” he wrote to one of his editors, “a part of my body.” In 1926 Platonov moved to Moscow and began a life of writing. Like many of his contemporaries, Platonov dreamed of forging a new literature, to inaugurate the new period of history. However, unlike the Russian Futurists or Formalists, he was relatively uninterested in new “techniques” (fragmentation, neologisms, verbal “Cubism,” and so on); he continued to write short stories and novels that looked like short stories and novels. For Platonov, the revolution was to consist of the crafting of a truly Marxist literary practice.

Platonov aligned himself at first with Proletkult, the Proletarian Cultural-Educational Organization. From a literary perspective, the most interesting aspiration of Proletkult, as of the other Russian revolutionary avant-garde movements, was to broaden the site of narrative from the private life of the upper classes to the world at large: the cosmic construction site of planet Earth in the 20th century. The idea was to make bourgeois, “romantic” literature look, not just unsalutary, but uninteresting. On the baronial estate, nobody knows exactly where the kasha comes from or how bedsteads are made; bored witless, the inmates fall in and out of love while playing the guitar. Who would want to read about such goings-on?

Inconveniently, however, the reading public has always craved love stories. As Mayakovsky wrote, “Even if, / rolling in blood like Bacchus, / a drunken battle rages at its height — / even then, words of love are not outmoded.” So it was a problem that, as the action of the novel migrated from the private to the public sphere — a migration effected across the Soviet literary spectrum, from Proletkult’s “machinism” to Stalinist “socialist realism” — no room was left for romantic love. (Hence the popular American description of the genre: “Boy meets girl, boy gets tractor.”) The great 20th-century dystopian novels — Zamyatin’s “We,” Orwell’s “1984” — indict socialist realism precisely by reclaiming love as not only the privileged expression of individuality but the privileged novelistic subject.

Platonov’s brilliant response to this problem was to invent an entirely new, ideologically compliant kind of love story: to represent “human love” as “not only a way for two people to become close, but also a means towards a high and heroic relationship towards ‘outer’ reality.” One such “human love” — between a brilliant engineer, Fyodor, and his young wife, Frosya — is the subject of “Fro,” newly translated in “Soul and Other Stories” (NYRB Classics, 288 pages, $15.95). The heroine, Frosya, gamely studies the technology of railway signaling, but she would really rather be in Fyodor’s arms: “It’s all microfarads and stray currents,” she tells him after class; “I’m so bored.” But Frosya and Fyodor manage to harness the tremendous power of erotic love to the higher cause of electrical engineering: “As he embraced his wife after a day of separation, Fyodor would himself be transformed into a microfarad or a stray current.”

Escaping the confines of the household, conjugal love is enlisted into the great mechanical transformation of the world “for the well-being and pleasure of mankind.” Even Fyodor’s assignment to the Far East, to “put into operation some mysterious electrical apparatus,” tests and ultimately strengthens their love for each other and for mankind. “Fro” is an example of what socialist literature could have been: It makes one feel that the traditional love story is antiquated, narrow, that the new, “epic” love needs electrification, the Trans-Siberian railway, boundless expanses, and trembling wires.

In Platonov, machinery is simultaneously a content and a form, a world and a worldview. This duality is beautifully illustrated by Platonov’s recollection of the first time he was put on a locomotive, in the Red Army. Platonov was nervous, because he hadn’t yet completed his technical training, but he was able to bolster his courage by thinking of Marxist rhetoric. “The remark about the revolution being the locomotive of history was transformed inside me into a feeling that was strange and good,” he recalled. “Remembering this sentence, I worked very diligently on the locomotive.” For Platonov, the locomotive of history is a real locomotive.

Many of the stories in this collection are symbolically situated on or near the railroad. “The Cow,” for example, is about a little boy called Vasya, who works in the railway yard and whose parents keep a cow. One day the cow has a calf, which Vasya’s parents sell to a slaughterhouse. The cow, driven crazy by the loss of her calf, walks out onto the tracks and stands there until she is run over by a train. Platonov’s suicidal cow shares a family resemblance with Anna Karenina, who also lost her young son and threw herself in the path of a train. (“The Cow” recalls a famous joke by the critic Tkachev, to the effect that the real subject of Tolstoy’s novel should have been Levin’s romance with his cow, Pava.) Platonov’s story provides a kind of commentary on “Anna Karenina,” showing us just how far the “locomotive of literature” has traveled since Tolstoy. From a utilitarian perspective, Anna Karenina’s death is a total waste. Platonov’s cow, by contrast, dies for the “human” cause. As Vasya puts it in a school report: “Her son was sold for meat, he was killed and eaten. The cow was very unhappy, but she soon died from a train. And she was eaten too, because she was beef.”

In “Anna Karenina,” the train represents the inexorable and impersonal “machinery” of fate, society, and history; it is a swift and external instrument of death. In Platonov, the train is, like all machines, a living thing, a servant to the human cause. It is operated by a human, and with humanity. At the end of the story, the engine driver recognizes Vasya from the railway yard and gives his family 100 rubles for a new cow. Furthermore, Platonov shows the necessity and human utility of the cow’s death, without shortchanging its emotional weight: For Vasya, the cow’s fate is just as tragic as that of Anna Karenina. “I remember the cow,” Vasya’s report concludes. “I will not forget.”

A note is in order on Platonov’s extraordinary style, which recombines and reinvents the language of Soviet bureaucracy, propaganda, and journalism. The overall effect is of a report on the human condition, prepared by a committee of gods and Martians. Like all writers with a distinctive style, Platonov has frequently been proclaimed untranslatable, but the atmosphere of Platonov’s prose can theoretically be re-created in any language that has ever been deformed by bureaucracy and propaganda (or even, as in the case of English, by advertising). This is the general idea of Joseph Brodsky’s exclamation: “Woe to the people into whose language Andrey Platonov can be translated.”

Platonov’s language has often been interpreted as an attack on the Soviet worldview. For Brodsky, Platonov’s grammar demonstrates “the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language” of the Soviet order. For Victor Terras, Platonov’s “deformation of the Russian language … mirrors the process by which a normal social consciousness is destroyed in the first socialist state.” True as these claims may be, it bears mention that Platonov’s language, independent of embodying Soviet absurdities, is a fully functional, literary language. In this way it differs fundamentally from the “Newspeak” coined by Orwell in “1984.” Whereas Orwell merely depicts Newspeak as a feature of the society portrayed in his book, Platonov actually writes in his new, and thereby living, language, a language that resuscitates, rather than deadens, the reader’s sensibilities. Although Platonov was certainly critical of many aspects of the Soviet regime and its bureaucracy, he was really trying to exploit the technological, multifarious richness of the new world order to produce a new kind of art.

Why, then, was Platonov so unpopular with the rulers of this new order? The answer becomes clear when we consider the state requirements of socialist realism, the official mode of literary production under Stalin, which simultaneously demanded the “truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development” and a commitment to the “ideological molding and education of the working people.” “Ideological molding” was another way of saying that all literary works had to have a happy ending. What Platonov saw around him was neither happy, nor an ending. What Platonov saw — what he had a rare gift for seeing — was “reality in its revolutionary development,” that is, reality as it is processed and changed through grueling thought and labor. Platonov was too good a Marxist to tack a “happy ending” onto a work still in progress. Although his works sometimes end on a hopeful note, Platonov never shows us beaming citizens dancing around the threshing machine after filling the five-year quota in six months.

In 1946, Platonov was barred from publishing any original works; he spent his remaining years in a children’s publishing house, rewriting folktales. He died in 1951 of tuberculosis sustained while caring for his son, who had caught the fatal disease in a labor camp.

Ms. Batuman received a doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University in 2007. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and n+1. She keeps a blog at elifbatuman.net.