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About Platonov, I can only recommend reading The Foundation Pit. Even though a little knowledge of the Bolshevik revolution and Stalinism is needed to fully appreciate his genius, it is still worth a read.
His fiction is often portrayed as some sort of proto-dissident criticism of Stalinism, but it's far from such a simplistic reduction, nor is it absurdism, as some like to claim. He's quite the realist as I see it, although precisely, because his fiction is set in a world between the crumbling old and the new, yet to come, truly communist word, the reality of such a intermediary position cannot but appear as quite absurd. He writes about a world where old notions no longer hold people, yet new ideas fail to give a meaningful existence, and where these strange "no longer" and "not yet" worlds mix. Furthermore, it sheds light on the early trans-human and bio-political utopias of the late 19th/early 20th century Russia, like Cosmism for example.
Besides, what is truly shocking about his writing is that he himself was a true supporter of the soviets: travelling around the country, helping people to establish councils. So all of the horror he's writing about acquires an extra tragic dimension.
Bolshevik existentialism if you will, but actually it is so much more.
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