Journal archive

Abstract: The article describes Andrei Platonov’s work in the journal Literary Critic, with a focus on the literary-critical dispute between the authors of the journal and the representatives of the official Soviet literary circles. The author studies Platonov’s articles about Pushkin, written for the poet’s jubilee. Platonov’s articles about Pushkin represent an attempt to understand the legacy of Pushkin’s trope of artistic and political inspiration, or, to use Platonov’s term for both, voodushevlenie, in the Stalinist 1930s. In his articles, Platonov deploys the Romantic myth of the poet as the voice of the silent Russian people. In “Pushkin and Gorky”, prominence is given to Platonov’s interpretation of the poem “The Prophet”, in relation to which Platonov formulates his understanding of the poet’s legacy under socialism. The article notes the contradiction between Platonov’s definition of the Soviet working masses as true inheritors of Pushkin’s creative activity and the recognition of Lenin, Stalin and Gorky as political and artistic followers of the poet. The author draws conclusion that Platonov’s dialectical approach was an attempt to “overcome, to overpower the most difficult and contradictory principles of work with a living, energetic, intellectual force”, a “living principle”, which, Platonov believed, was born of suffering dispersed throughout the poor working people of the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.