Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrei Platonov

A four-word confession that doubles as an indictment. Platonov’s "We hate our squalor" lands with the bleak compression of someone who has watched ideals curdle into daily grime. The "we" matters: it’s collective, implicating both the sufferers and the system that trained them to internalize failure as a shared moral mood. Hate isn’t directed upward, at the planners or the bosses, but inward, at the conditions of life as lived - and, by extension, at the selves forced to live them.

Platonov wrote out of the early Soviet project, when utopian rhetoric promised abundance and dignity while famine, shortages, and bureaucratic cruelty made deprivation feel not temporary but structural. In that environment, squalor becomes more than poverty; it’s an atmosphere. The line captures a distinctive Soviet psychology: the state insists history is accelerating toward paradise, yet the apartment is cramped, the boots are falling apart, the language of progress is everywhere, and the body keeps tallying the opposite. Hatred becomes a kind of loyalty test - proof you can see the backwardness that must be overcome - even as it quietly admits the promised transformation isn’t arriving.

The phrase also carries Platonov’s characteristic irony. Squalor is described as "our" possession, a grim domesticity, as if misery has been nationalized and distributed. It’s a sentence that shows how power works best when it persuades people to despise their own circumstances more than they question the machinery producing them.