Exploration of Poetics of the Creative Activity of Andrey Platonov by Russian and American Philologists

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Exploration of Poetics of the Creative Activity of Andrey Platonov by Russian and American Philologists

Nina Mikhaylovna Malygina1

Leading Researcher of the Gorky Institute of World Literature

of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow)

Pavel Khazanov

Rutgers University (New Brunswick)

The first studies of the poetics of the creative activity of Andrey Platonov were published in the writer's native land in the late 1960s, because their printing became possible in the context of rehabilitation of the Soviet literature of the 1920s, which, with the exception of several specially approved works, was hushed over the period from the 1930s to 1970s.

The foundation of the home exploration of the poetics of the creative activity of Platonov was made by such authors of the monographs dealing with the Soviet prose of the 1920s as V.P. Skobelev, G.A. Belaya, and V.V. Buznik. The articles and dissertations of the home scholars outlined the main areas of research of the poetics of the creative activity of Platonov, which are urgent even now: mythopoetics (N.G. Poltavtseva, 1981; E. Nayman 1987, etc.), semantic poetics (V.P. Skobelev, V.A. Svitel'skiy), etc. Platonov's creative activity of the 1920s - early 1930s received public acclaim in the late 1970s, when the study of this part of the writer's heritage actually began. The articles and monographs of V. P. Skobelev, N. M. Malygina, and V.Yu. V'yugin defined the main principles of semantic poetics and found that the key fragments, characters and plots of the early works of the writer move on, transformed, into his later writings (1977). The scholars revealed the system of Platonov's symbolic characters uniting his artistic world into one holistic text (1992; 2005).

The development of contextual analysis of Platonov's poetics was continued in the articles of E.D. Tolstaya-Segal, later compiled in a book (1978; 1980).

In the late 1980s, after the publication of the main works by Platonov, it became possible to pass on to the next level of Platonov studies.

In 1989, in connection with the 90th anniversary of Platonov's birth, international scientific conferences, devoted to the writer's creative activity, were held in Moscow, Voronezh and Leningrad for the first time. In 1990, a Platonov scientific seminar started its work in the Pushkin House and was held for over 14 years. poetics ceative platonov philologists

The year 1999 saw the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Platonov. Major international conferences took place in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Voronezh. In 2000, A. Livingstone organized a conference in Oxford dedicated to Platonov's jubilee, the materials of which were published as the “Essays in the Field of Poetics” (2002).

Modern research is impossible without taking into account the articles about the poetics of Platonov's works, published in the collection “The Land of Philosophers of A. Platonov: Issues of Creative Activity” (IMLI 1994-2017), as well as in the publications of IRLI “The Creative Activity of Andrey Platonov. Studies and Materials” (1995-2008).

A new impetus to the analysis of the poetics of Platonov's creative activity was rendered by the publication of two volumes of his archive (2009; 2019) and three volumes of the scientific collec-tion of textologically verified works of the writer (2004; 2016; 2020), edited by a group of researchers from IMLI RAS headed by N. V. Kornienko.

Deciphering of Platonov's “mysterious” characters and text fragments can be found in the works by V. Yu. V'yugin, O. Yu. Aleynikov, K. Kogut, N. Khriashcheva (2005; 2013; 2018). The articles and monographs by V. A. Svitel'skiy, O. G. Lasunskiy, M. Geller, T. Langerak (Bel-gium), R. Hodel (Germany), and E. Antonova, dealing with the reconstruction of Platonov's biography (1995; 1999, 2016), make up a special area in Platonov studies. A series of articles and a monograph about the genre poetics of Platonov's utopia (2012) were published by H. Gьnther (Ger-many). Faustian motives of the prose by Platonov were mentioned by L. Debuser (Germany); a de-tailed interpretation of this theme can be found in the works by E. N. Proskurina (2013).

Of special interest are the works about poetics by the translators of Platonov's writings R. Chandler and A. Livingstone. The monograph of O. Meerson “Apocalypse in Everyday Life. Poetics of Non-Estrangement in Andrey Platonov” (1997; 2016), explaining the connections between the artistic form of Platonov's works and their philosophical content received wide recognition.

The journal Philological Class section about the creative activity of Platonov carries articles touching upon understudied issues of the writer's prose poetics and outlines the perspectives for their further investigation. It looks on the functions of the technique of assembling and the principles of “poetics of revisiting” in the works of the late I920s-I930s.

The article by N.M. Malygina (Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences) reveals the semantic poetics of the short story by Platonov “The Potudan' River” in the context of the novel “Chevengur”. The author's observations prove that in the mid 1930s, Platonov preserved his global scale thinking but employed it in his writing in a reserved manner.

O.Yu. Aleynikov (Voronezh University) specifies the semantic poetics of “Che-Che-O” via comparing two editions of the essay with the manuscript of the work, which makes it possible to state the transformation of the content and composition techniques in the essay, “reassem-bled” by Pil'nyak.

The article by N.P. Khriashcheva (Ural State Pedagogical University) makes an attempt to re-veal the religious-metaphysical foundations of Platonov's model of the “new person” and de-scribes the idea of world salvation through transcendental love.

The article of the American scholar Erica Camisa Morale (University of Southern California, USA) deals with Platonov's influence on the evolution of the image of the “new person” in the creative activity of Pil'nyak in the 1920s, as a result of which a new character - a person-technician, builder and demiurge, capable of transforming the world radically, appeared in the works by Pil'nyak.

The vector of creative comprehension of the writer's heritage posed by the scholar G.A. Belaya, who was the first to remind in her “Essays on the History of the Russian Soviet Journalism of 1933-1935” about Platonov's contribution to the journal “Literary Critic”, turned out to be fruitful for both Russian and American scholars of Platonov. The study of the literary-critical legacy of Platonov of the 1930s was continued in the works by N.G. Poltavtseva (1981; 2002; 2011) and N. M. Malygina (1985; 2005, 2018).

This journal section publishes the articles by the American philologists P. Khazanov (Rutgers University, USA) and Jason Cieply (Hamilton Col-lege, USA). The scholars reconstruct the political context of Platonov's work in the journals “Liter-ary Critic” and “Literary Review” with the focus on his attitude to the socialist construction in the USSR in the 1930s and the epoch of High Stalinism.

According to P. Khazanov, in the post-war period, right up until the mid-1990s, historians, philosophers and theorists on the political left and right argued as to when the Revolution went sour, but nearly all held on to the widespread con-sensus that the 1930s were the Soviet dark ages, in which an ironfisted totalitarian ruler imposed his will on a silenced, passive state apparatus and populace. From the 1990s onwards, thanks to the end of the Cold War narrative and the opening up of Soviet archives, it became possible to recon-sider such prevailing assumptions about High Stalinism. At this point (and in some cases even earlier), scholars like Thomas Lahusen, Stephen Kotkin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Igal Halfin, Jochen Hellbeck and Katerina Clark began examining Stalinism as a bottom-up, multivaried, mass cul-tural phenomenon.

With Andrei Platonov, too, the post-war con-sensus led scholars to assume that that this writer's acerbic ironizing of Soviet realia must have been a form of dissidentism avant la lettre, while his seeming conformism to the Stalinist party line after 1931 marked an unmitigated spiritual defeat for the writer. However, this framework always squared poorly with Platonov's avowed commitment to the Soviet project, evident both throughout his fiction and his archive. Then, with growing interest in how Stalin-era culture and ideology worked at the level of the very many different kinds of subjects who pushed it along, scholars started taking interest in Platonov's post-1931 oeuvre, precisely because so many of these texts carefully work through the problem of socialist subjectivation, which so occupied mass consciousness and played an important role in the achievements, failures and waves of un-conscionable repressions that characterized the `long' 1930s.

P. Khazanov sees his work on Platonov as consistent with this widespread Western interest in socialist subjectivation, which is shared by a number of younger scholars, such as Mieka Erley, Nariman Skakov, Michael Flatley, Artemii Magun, and Jason Cieply, to name a few. In part, this interest is propelled by the historiographic paradigm-shift described above. Moreover, Andrei Platonov's profound writerly sophistication and his complex grappling with the idea of social-ism makes him into an ideal bridge for entering into dialogue with Western Marxian critical theory (especially the work of Antonio Gramsci, Alain Badiou, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, and Giorgio Agamben).

According to these scholars the Platonov scholarship is driven by a widespread sense on the American political left that a socialist “dream-world” has to be recovered or, indeed, reimagined today, in the wake of the “catastrophe” (to borrow Susan Buck-Morss's terms) of the twin failure of both `actually existing socialism'and its liberal-capitalist antipode. For this reason, many of us are attracted to Platonov's continual engagement with the socialist horizon throughout his oeuvre, especially in moments when his creative labor is beset by desperation and disappointment.

The article of Jason Cieply continues to study the dialogue between Platonov and the leading Marxist critics and contributors to “Literary Critic” Georg Lukacs and Mikhail Lifshitz.

The preparation of the articles for publication under a special heading, devoted to the memory of A.P. Platonov, showed how urgent and fruitful the collaboration of researchers from different countries could be. It is especially fruitful in the context of the creative activity of the writer who dreamed that the whole humanity would unite in the fight against the hostile forces of nature.

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