Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrei Platonov

A claim like "I have a trend of my own" lands as both defiance and diagnosis, especially coming from Andrei Platonov, a writer who spent his life trying to survive the Soviet state’s hunger for uniformity. On the surface it reads like a modest assertion of individuality. Underneath, it’s a weaponized understatement: in a culture where "trend" means the sanctioned direction of history, to announce a personal trend is to quietly reject the premise that history belongs to the Party.

Platonov’s genius is how he smuggles dissent through ordinary language. "Trend" is a bureaucratic, modernizing word, the sort you’d find in planning documents and ideological lectures. He steals that jargon and turns it inward. The effect is slyly comic: the grand machinery of progress reduced to one person’s stubborn inner vector. It’s also melancholy, because the phrase implies he knows exactly how small, and how risky, that inward vector is.

Context matters: Platonov wrote in the era when art was expected to march in step with Socialist Realism, when deviation wasn’t just aesthetic but political. His work is filled with characters who speak in half-absorbed official slogans, revealing how ideology colonizes thought. This line flips that dynamic. Instead of being ventriloquized by the state, the speaker borrows the state’s own vocabulary to claim private direction.

The subtext isn’t "I’m special". It’s "I won’t be processed". In Platonov’s world, that’s not a lifestyle brand. It’s a survival strategy.