Analysis of the works of A. Platonov

53. Prose of Platonov. Problematics, poetics, types of heroes.

Andrey Platonov (1899-1951) - one of those few Soviet writers who, in their understanding of the new era, managed to move from accepting communist ideas to their denial. But already in his first works, Platonov showed himself to be an artist who knows how to see the world ambiguously, who understands the complexity of the human soul. The longing for humanity in Platonov's stories is inseparable from attention to the individual. The writer - willingly or unwillingly - followed the tradition that was laid down in Russian literature by Gogol and Dostoevsky. Platonov’s humanism was very clearly manifested in the story “The Pit”.

The plot of the construction of a “tower as high as heaven,” based on the legend of the Babylonian Pandemonium, taken from the Old Testament book of Genesis, was first outlined in Platonov’s poems and was developed in “Chevengur” and “The Pit.”

"Chevengur" (1928). The novel didn't come out. The first part of the novel “The Origin of the Master” has been published separately since 1929. The entire novel was published in Paris in 1972 and in Russia in 1988.

The novel is dedicated to the “builders of the country.” “The novel contains an honest attempt to depict the beginning of communist society,” Platonov states in one of his letters.

There are options for deciphering the word “Chevengur”: Boguchar (Vl. Gusev); “cheva” - a scrap, a cast-off bast shoe, “gur” - noise, roar, roar (M. Geller, V. Dorofeev, L. Korobkov). Symbolism expresses the central problem of the novel: the depiction of an attempt to create a communist society in a poor, bast-footed country. The author seeks to show the inconsistency of the ideas of the possibility of building socialism in one country, but at the same time there is immediately hope for the creation of this socialism. However, it turns out that “communism acts separately from people,” and therefore the heroes come to the realization that there is no communism in Chevengur. Belief in the resurrecting power of communism speaks of the attitude of the novel's heroes towards it as a religion.

Platonov perceives “grass” and socialism as phenomena of the same order (“grow socialism straight from the grass”). Socialism must be organically combined with nature.

The novel is autobiographical.

The orphan state of all humanity is depicted, which should not put up with the loss of their fathers and must fight for their resurrection.

The plot is based on a journey into the depths of Russia.

What happens in the novel is sometimes shocking with its combination of cruelty and everyday life.

The novel ends with the hero merging with nature and returning to his father - merging with the primeval chaos and losing hope for rebirth.

In the novel we don't see much "people of the revolution" those whom October helped find a place in life and opened new horizons, whose doubts resolved. These are not only communists (Dvanov, Chepurny), but also non-party people, simply people for whom the revolution has become the highest judge, the standard of morality. All the other heroes - the people, the peasants - live in completely different moral categories, it is as if the truth, the eternal laws of life, have been revealed to them... A revolution for such people is an event that does not in any way affect the deep processes of existence, the course of history, and has almost no effect on their own life.

Platonov describes the fantastic city of Chevengur, where communism has supposedly already been built, and the picture of this “heaven on earth” is rather unattractive. People there do nothing at all, since “labor contributes to the origin of property, and property contributes to oppression,” “the only sun, declared in Chevengur by the world proletarian, worked for everyone and for everyone.” And “work was once and for all declared a relic of greed and an exploitative animal voluptuousness...” However, every Saturday people in Chevengur “worked”, dragged gardens from place to place “on their hands” or moved houses. There are very few residents left in Chevengur, and only the “toiling masses”: “The bourgeoisie in Chevengur was killed firmly, honestly, and even the afterlife could not please them, because after the body their soul was shot.”

In the novel, the writer solves the problem of true and false. The true is everything natural, sincere, coming from the soul; it's all human. False - everything introduced, imposed “from above”, contradicting healthy human morality; this is all immoral. For Platonov, unity, the merging of man with nature, the perception of man as a part of nature that nurtures him, gives him strength, and shapes his soul is natural.

"Pit" (1932). During Platonov's lifetime, the story was not published. “The Pit” was first published in 1969. The story reflected the main historical events of the late 20s and early 30s: industrialization and collectivization carried out in the USSR during the First Five-Year Plan - clearly expressed the essence of the era of the “great turning point.” The symbol of the transformations taking place in the country was the construction of a “common proletarian house”. Part 1 tells about a team of diggers who are digging a pit for the foundation of an “eternal home” to resettle workers of an entire city from private homes. In part 2, the action is transferred to a village subjected to complete collectivization. Here, the analogue of a common house is an “organizational yard”, where peasants who have been deprived of private property and joined the collective farm gather.

The content of “Pit” is superficially similar to Soviet “industrial” novels of the 1920-1930s, dedicated to numerous construction projects of socialism and the creation of collective farms. In “The Pit” two plots are intertwined: the plot of the protagonist’s journey in search of truth and the plot of the test of the next project to improve the life of mankind. The hero of the story, Voshchev, is a reluctant wanderer; he is forcibly pushed out of his usual life, fired from a “mechanical plant” and deprived of his means of livelihood.

Image The “common proletarian house” in the story is distinguished by its multi-layered nature: the basis is the biblical legend of the Tower of Babel. The correlation of the construction of a “common house” with the unsuccessful and punishable attempt of humanity to build “a city and a tower, the height of which reaches to heaven...” testifies to the scale of the author’s understanding of the “construction of socialism.”

In “The Pit” they dream that, having settled in a “common proletarian house,” people will leave hostile nature “outside” and be freed from the influence of its deadly forces. Subject salvation, preservation of life: Voshchev collected and “saved all sorts of objects of misfortune and obscurity,” Prushevsky built a house intended to “protect people.” Voshchev is brought closer to the engineer by the feeling of the meaninglessness of people’s lives (they are in some ways twins). Both strive to save and preserve fragile human life. The excavator Chiklin, like Prushevsky and Voshchev, is tormented by the awareness of people’s insecurity: “... he felt sorry that people are obliged to live and get lost on this mortal earth, on which comfort has not yet been created.”

Theme of death and immortality. Chiklin is endowed with a special attitude towards the dead. From his lips sounds the Christian truth: “The dead are people too.” Plato's inventors were always worried about the mystery of the “flower on earth”, which creates a living body from “dust”, and therefore possesses the secret of transforming dead matter into living matter. The “eternal building,” as conceived by its architect, should transform “mortal” human life into eternal life. Therefore, the builders of the “common house” at first believe that it will “keep people safe from adversity.” They will get rid of death, freed from the power of matter and time: “by organizing a home, life can be organized for the future for future unmoving happiness and for childhood” - in fact, heaven on earth.

In “The Pit,” instead of the expected revival of matter, the opposite happens: people waste their living flesh on dead stone, human life irrevocably flows into a common mass grave. The builders who expected immortality themselves turn into construction material and the unfinished edifice of socialism. In the finale of "Pit"“Plato’s heroes, striving for “elevation” above the world, fall into the abyss. The “fall” of Platonov’s heroes, who dared to “ascend” over the world, recreates the situations of the biblical stories about the fall of Adam and Eve and the Tower of Babel, when people were punished by God for their self-will. The key word of “Pit” is “liquidation”. It has several synonyms: “elimination”, “destruction”, “destruction”.

The motive of destroying people and nature for the sake of building a house is constantly heard in the work: "Chiklin< ... >destroyed the earth with a crowbar, and his flesh was exhausted...” Diggers exist at the limit of their physical capabilities, on the border of life and death. Overwork destroys their souls. The author of the project, engineer Prushevsky, feels the deadness of the house under construction. He is aware of his uselessness and doom. Platonov creates images of people with dead souls.

In “The Pit” the picture of “complete collectivization” is recreated. Foreshadowing and symbol it becomes the coffins that were prepared by peasants awaiting collectivization with mortal fear. Collectivization was perceived by the peasants as “collective farm imprisonment,” “captivity,” “sorrow,” “collective farm orphanhood.” The peasants become victims of tyranny that has no boundaries. Its culminating moments: the deportation of the dispossessed people on a raft “into the ocean” and the final “mechanical” dance of the collective farmers. The organizational yard, where collective farmers sleep side by side in the open air, resembles an unheated barracks where pit diggers fall asleep on the floor. The story creates an image of a country turned into a camp.

The meaning of the story was revealed by Platonov himself: the transformation of the pit for the foundation of a “house” into a grave not only for its builders, but also for future residents: In the text of the story there is an open comparison of construction with a grave: “So they dig graves, not houses.”

The images of the “potbelly stove” Yulia and her daughter Nastya symbolize the Russia of the past and the Russia of the future. The fate of Nastya (the Sirte child) forms the basis of the “Pit” conflict. The death of the girl leads the heroes of the story to doubt: “Where will communism be in the world now...?” “Why does he now need the meaning of life and the truth of universal origin if there is no little faithful person?” - Voshchev asks in despair.

The tragic symbolism of the finale of “The Pit” contains a comparison of the deceased with the “dead grain of the future,” reminiscent of the mythological and Christian formula of immortality that arose on its basis. Nastya's grave at the end of the story - symbol, making you realize that “there is no communism.” The religious attitude towards communism is determined by the belief of Platonov’s heroes that the new social order will provide people with immortality.

Platonov believed that in the future people would learn to bring the dead back to life using “material remains.” The motive for collecting and preserving objects in “misfortune and obscurity” constantly sounds in “The Pit”. Voshchev “accumulated the material remains of lost people into a bag,” hoping that the objects retain traces of the existence of once living people and will help in resurrecting the dead. The idea of ​​resurrecting the dead is often repeated in “The Pit”: “Will they be able or not... to resurrect the dead people?”; “Well, Sofronov, have you completely laid down or are you thinking of getting up after all?” The symbolism of the ending is correlated with the words of the Gospel:“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; and if it dies, it will bear much fruit.”

Hero- a wanderer against his will, forcibly pushed out of his usual life, deprived of his means of subsistence. Feels unwanted, becomes homeless and poor.

Main motive– the desire of a participant in events to understand the meaning of what is happening in order to consciously participate in the construction of a new world. It is indicated at the very beginning of the story.

The image of a “common proletarian home” is multi-valued: it is based on the biblical legend of the Tower of Babel, which indicates the scale of the author’s understanding of the “construction of socialism.” The image-symbol of the “tower house” in “The Pit” is enriched with the content that he acquired in the context of proletarian culture and avant-garde art.

The heroes dream that, having moved into this house, people will leave the hostile nature “outside” and be freed from the influence of its deadly forces. Faith in man's ability to achieve freedom from the material world brings Platonov closer to Russian avant-garde artists (Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh). “Overcoming matter” is associated with Platonov’s desire to see a large-scale picture of the world and imagine its “general plan.”

"Central Metaphor" The story is rooted in “universal organizational science,” where the main principle of proletarian art is defined as “the organization of matter through the efforts of the collective.” The “eternal building,” according to the architect’s plan, should transform “mortal” human life into eternal life. This is the realization of Heaven on earth.

Also, the symbolism of the house is intertwined with the symbolism of the tree: both images can act as a model of the universe with an emphasized connection between up and down, life and death.

However, instead of the expected rebirth of matter, people waste themselves on dead stone. The builders who expected immortality themselves turn into the building material of the never-built building of socialism, they exist at the limit of their capabilities, on the border of life and death.

The key word of the story - liquidation - creates a leitmotif. It has several synonyms: elimination, destruction, destruction. The motive of destroying people and nature for the sake of home is constantly heard. All the characters experience emptiness, physically feeling their soul dying.

The symbol of “complete collectivization” is the coffins prepared for the peasants. Slogans of “false” content. The process of collectivization is riddled with violence. The peasants become victims of tyranny that has no boundaries.

The story creates an image of a country turned into a camp.

The foundation pit is being transformed into a grave not only for the builders, but also for the future of Russia (embodied in the image of the girl Nastya, her mother Yulia is a symbol of the past Russia).

Julia: reduction of a person to the level of an animal, painful death by starvation, complete alienation and hostility of others.

Nastya: weakness, death from hunger and cold. Non-viability. Nastya's death makes the heroes think. That there is no communism. The description of Nastya’s burial in a “special” grave speaks of faith in her future immortality.

Sounds constantly the motive of collecting and preserving objects of “misfortune and obscurity.” Platonov believes in the “memory of matter,” the ability of objects to be the key to the resurrection of a person.

The tragic symbolism of the finale contains a comparison of the deceased with the “dead grain of the future”, is revealed when the meaning of the events taking place is correlated with Dostoevsky’s epigraph to “The Brothers Karamazov”: “Truly, truly, I say to you: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, then only one remains; and if it dies, it will bear much fruit.” Even in the abyss there is hope for salvation.

Pit in the story- an embodied metaphor for the construction of socialism, a model of the social structure of the era of collectivization, when all efforts were aimed at building a “common proletarian home”, when workers worked until exhaustion, forgetting themselves, and peasants who survived starvation left their homes in search of odd jobs.

Poetics of Platonov

“With a bare heart” >>> special emotional intensity of Platonov’s prose.

feature of Plato's phrase. She combines the incongruous: irony, grin and deep meaning. She pretends to be straightforward.

Platonov’s language is a language in Lobachevsky’s style (N. Ivanova) with intersecting parallels (icon painting). High pathos is combined with grotesque.

Grotesque >>> Breaking the usual worldview (the cow has a death-weary face).

Prose features: Grotesque. A word that breaks stereotypes. The image of a wanderer (Chevengur, Kotlovan). The characters are constantly moving somewhere >>> image of a road. The road for Platonov’s heroes is “a place to live” - a realized metaphor for the path of life. A landscape full of the uplifting life of a great spirit.

Folk worldview >>> closeness to Russian folklore in terms of the nature of artistic thinking. Multisphere expansion of moment. Shubin: “Platonov is an intellectual who came from the people.”

A combination of the tragic reality of the hungry life of Russia in the 20s. with the grotesque, a fantastic beginning, and fairy-tale characters give birth to Platonov’s unique style.

Platonov's strange language reflects the peculiarities of his artistic world. This is a model of the fantastic reality in which his characters exist.

Noteworthy is the technique used here by the author to enhance the ideological meaning of the episode: while the main characters of the story are given only last names, the hero, who appears in only one scene, has a last name, first name and patronymic. The author's intent is also manifested in the fact that the name Ivan Krestinin is consonant with the phrase Ivan - peasant son.

Platonov’s works masterfully reveal the mechanism of mythologizing the consciousness of all layers of society, not only the proletariat, but also the peasantry. The writer sympathized with the people who were captured by the “idea”; he saw this not as their fault, but as a misfortune. He expressed his position in the words of the blacksmith Sotykh, who considered the communists to be good people, but strange: “as if they were nothing, but were acting against the common people.”

The depiction of Plato's heroes reflected numerous author's intentions, sometimes hidden from the writer himself. The texts of his works are full of periodic returns, parody, repetitive techniques, and leitmotifs. Criticism has repeatedly pointed out the role of the image - the symbol of the road in artistic system writer. Almost all of Platonov’s heroes set off on a journey to search for the “meaning of existence”

Stories by A. Platonov of the 20-30s(“The Sandy Teacher”, “At Dawn” foggy youth", "Fro" and others)

In 1929, Platonov published the story “ Doubting Makar", written with mischief, with a great deal of humor, and subtle irony. Makar is a type of “natural fool”, his head is “empty”, and his hands are “smart”. He did not get along with Comrade. Chumov, who, on the contrary, had “ clever mind, but your hands are empty.” Makar's trip to Moscow and his stay in Moscow at construction sites, service in an institution constitute the further content and ending of the story. The main character of the story is laughter. The author laughs at everything that is stupid and ugly in “socialist life.” In a dream, Makar saw a “most learned man” standing on a mountain. Makar asked him: “What should I do in life so that I will be needed by myself and others?” But the one he asked had dead eyes from the “distant gaze”, and he himself was dead. There is no one to answer Makar’s question. Finding himself in a hospital for the mentally ill, he increases his ideological level in the “reading room.” From the “mad asylum” Makar and Peter went to the RKI. There they met Freaky. The ending of the story is unexpected: the author transfers the action as if into the plane of “distant gaze”, “bad infinity”: Chumovoy sat in the institution alone until the commission “on affairs of liquidation of the state”. Chumovoy worked there for forty-four years and “died amid oblivion and office work...”

All his heroes are young, honest people, active folk characters who emerged from the depths of Russian life. They are full of ardent hopes and carry within them a fresh strength of feelings. They are also ascetics. Sometimes overcoming self-pity, they invest their lives and destinies in a common cause that has become their own.

Poetic story "Fro"(1936) depicts a young woman impatiently awaiting personal happiness and pleasure. She loves her husband devotedly and misses him. She tries to distract herself from her difficult experiences by working with other women. From difficult experiences, she gets the idea to send her husband a telegram that she is dying. The father sends a telegram, and on the seventh day Fyodor returns. Frosya tells him: “I’m afraid that you will stop loving me someday, and then I will really die...” The author comments: “They wanted to be happy immediately, now, before their future hard work produces results for their personal and general happiness." “Frosya wanted her to have children, she would raise them, they would grow up and complete the work of their father, the work of communism and science.” Thus, thinking about the essence of human happiness, Platonov seems to balance the need for personal and universal happiness. In the story "In a Beautiful and Furious World" (1941) reflected the passion of Platonov and his heroes for powerful technology. Machinist Maltsev is an inspired, talented worker. He had no equal in his work, and he “bored from his talent as from loneliness.” This passion turned into a feeling for the soul of the locomotive. The old driver loves his locomotive like a living being, he feels it with all his soul. And this connection with the machine gives him satisfaction and gives him a feeling of happiness. But the subtle artist-humanist Platonov constructs the situation and conflict in the work in such a way that it turns out that the same person who poetically perceives the machine is deaf to a living person, his mood, and does not appreciate the devotion of his student. The machine overshadowed the man in his mind. Only the misfortune that happened - a lightning strike and blindness - returns to him the ability to be attentive and sensitive to people. He appreciated his assistant when he began to fight for the good name of the old master, and morally supported him in difficult times. Only after going through all the trials: lonely pride, human distrust and prison, the loss of his beloved job - is he born, as it were, anew, begins to “see the whole world”, and not himself alone. And this light was returned to him by human love and dedication. Story “Return” (“Ivanov’s Family”) (1946)

During the war, Platonov was a front-line correspondent for the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper. In stories about war there is ambiguity of assessments, an atmosphere of paradoxical existence, an internal conflict between man and the world.

Story “The Ivanov Family” (“Return”) 1946 drew sharp criticism for “slander” against the Soviet family. The devastating article by V. Ermilov “The slanderous story of A. Platonov.”

The main reproach is psychologism of stories A. Platonov, it was not accepted, because this is the “legacy” of the literature of the past, the threat of the loss of “realism” (socialist realism is the only acceptable method of Soviet literature). Creative method A. Platonova is far from social realism. Style- simplified vocabulary, characterized by childish sincerity, unusual usage of familiar Russian words. Images of heroes rather, symbols translate the image into a philosophical and allegorical plane.

trauma of children's consciousness, complex dialectic of feelings of adult participants in events. V. Dorofeev wrote: “ Platonov was one of the first to speak seriously about the troubles of war, about the traumas it brought, about the inevitable callousing of human souls».

New content required a new alloy lyricism, philosophical reflection and epicness. Chronological time and atmosphere are conveyed accurately from both the everyday and psychological aspects. Main character story - Alexey Alekseevich Ivanov - guard captain, “departing from the army due to demobilization.” The exhibition introduces us to the circumstances that will affect his fate. The station, the meeting with Masha - immediately the thought that perhaps he would return to her. A kiss on the cheek is a detail, a harbinger of something. At home there are strangers and relatives. Talentedly conveyed psychology dramatic meeting of loved ones. The writer shows complex hero's feelings (internal struggle): it is difficult for him to leave, he is even afraid to see the house from the window of the carriage. Ivanov closed his eyes, not wanting to see or feel the pain of the children falling as they ran, but he himself felt how hot it became in his chest, as if his heart had been beating for a long time and in vain all his life. Return in the name of love + a sense of loyalty and duty to the family. Metaphor of return! “Eternal return” is a cross-cutting motif (the attempts of Plato’s heroes to merge with the universe or return to the bosom of mother earth; the finale of “The Pit”, where the heroes plunge into the abyss, which symbolizes the return to the mother’s womb). Here is a return to family, their land (detail - even the smell of your home, perception of the world through the smells of “Machilistvo’s hair.”

Another reason for the rejection of Plato’s “Return” is a lack of understanding artistic manner A.Platonova. The story dominates objectified image form, which alternates the hero's internal monologues, improperly direct speech. Platonov the artist is characterized by imperceptible transitions in the perception of reality from the author to the hero. A. Platonov’s original style combines essay topicality and research approach, unique imagery and simplicity of phrase construction. « In a sense, this author can be seen as the embodiment of language» I. Brodsky.

A. Platonov's stories are unique in the spiritual appearance of his heroes. His stories are unique and vitally convincing; they breathe the truth of life and the truth about man. The humanist Platonov, who firmly believed in the good heart of man, showed how difficult a person’s path to himself is. The accuracy of psychological details, turns of thought and feeling also determines the unique language of A. Platonov’s prose.

UDC 801.6/.83.

ANDREY PLATONOV’S STORY “THE PIT” IN THE CRITICISM OF THE 80’S – 90’S. SYMBOLICS OF THE WORK

Davtyan Vahe Samvelovich
Russian-Armenian (Slavic) University
candidate of political sciences

"THE DITCH" BY ANDREY PLATONOV IN THE CRITICISM OF 80-90"S. SYMBOLISM OF THE NOVEL

Davtyan Vahe Samvelovich
Russian-Armenian (Slavonic) university
Philosophy Doctor

Bibliographic link to the article:
Davtyan V.S. Andrei Platonov’s story “The Pit” in criticism of the 80s and 90s. Symbolism of the work // Modern scientific research and innovation. 2014. No. 8. Part 2 [Electronic resource]..03.2019).

Andrei Platonov worked on the story “The Pit” for a relatively short time - from December 1929 to April 1930, during the most prolific period of his work. However, this work, like “Chevengur”, “Juvenile Sea”, “Hurdy Organ”, “Dzhan”, etc., was not recognized and understood by contemporaries. There were practically no conditions for understanding “The Pit”. They could not be created by A. M. Gorky, with whom Platonov retained contact in the 30s. It can be assumed that Gorky expected and did not receive any concessions or adaptation to the times from Platonov. For example, in the form of reworking the same “Chevengur” into a calm play. “I continue to expect from you a work more worthy of your talent,” he wrote to Platonov in March 1934. The sweetness of such persistent “misunderstanding” was that, except for the poor peasant chronicle “For the Future,” published in Krasnaya Novy in March 1931, not a single major work by Platonov of these years appeared in print until 1937.

“The Pit” was first published in the USA in 1973. The story was published with the famous afterword by Joseph Brodsky - one of the best comments to this work written so far. The main theme of Brodsky's article is the unique, virtuoso writing style of Andrei Platonov.

“The idea of ​​Paradise is the logical end of human thought in the sense that it, thought, does not go further; for beyond Paradise there is nothing else, nothing happens. And therefore we can say that Paradise is a dead end; the last vision of space, the end of a thing, the top of a mountain, a peak from which there is nowhere to step, only into Chronos - in connection with which the concept is introduced eternal life. The same applies to Hell.” This is the prelude of the article. Further, Brodsky says that being in a dead end is not limited by anything, and if one can imagine that even there it determines consciousness and gives rise to its own psychology, then this psychology is primarily expressed in language. It is obvious. Brodsky notes that the first victim of conversations about Utopia - desired or already achieved - first of all becomes grammar, for language, not keeping up with thought, suffocates in the subjunctive mood, begins to gravitate towards timeless categories and constructions; As a result, even simple nouns lose ground from under their feet, and an aura of conventionality appears around them. “This, in my opinion, is the language of Andrei Platonov’s prose,” writes Brodsky. According to him, Platonov’s language leads the Russian language into a semantic impasse, or rather, it reveals a dead-end philosophy in the language itself. Brodsky is convinced that the presence of absurdity in grammar does not indicate a particular tragedy, but about the human race as a whole. And this is Platonov’s genius.

As a rule, it is not customary to consider a writer outside of a social context. Platonov, according to Brodsky, would be the most suitable object for such an analysis if what he does with language did not go far beyond the scope of that utopia (the construction of socialism in Russia), of which he appears as a witness and chronicler in “The Pit.” The poet writes that “The Pit” is an extremely gloomy work, and the reader closes the book in a very depressed state. “If at this moment a direct transformation of psychic energy into physical energy was possible, then the first thing that should be done would be to close this book, is to abolish the existing world order and announce a new time.”

And yet, Brodsky is convinced that Platonov was by no means an enemy of this utopia, regime, collectivization. The only thing Brodsky says about Platonov within the social context is that he wrote in the language of this utopia, in the language of his era; and no other form of being determines consciousness the way language does. He compares Platonov with his contemporaries - Babel, Pilnyak, Olesha, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko. And he comes to the conclusion that, unlike these writers who were engaged in “stylistic gourmandism,” Platonov himself subordinated himself to the language of the era, seeing in it such abysses, having looked into which once, he could no longer glide across the literary surface, dealing with the intricacies of the plot, typographic delights and stylistic lace. Brodsky writes that Platonov’s style is to some extent an interweaving of Leskov “with his tendency toward skaz” and Dostoevsky “with his choking bureaucracy.” But Platonov’s main weapon was inversion: Platonov put an equal sign between the concepts of “language” and “inversion” - version began to play an increasingly auxiliary role. And in this sense, the author of the article considers Nikolai Zabolotsky of the “Stolbtsov” period to be “Platonov’s real neighbor in language.”

Then Brodsky has a very interesting idea. Namely: if Dostoevsky for Captain Lebyadkin’s poems about cockroaches from “Demons” can be considered the first writer of the absurd, then Platonov for the scene with the hammer bear in “The Pit” should be recognized as the first serious surrealist. Moreover, the surrealist Kafka is relegated to the background here, because surrealism, according to Brodsky, is by no means an aesthetic category, but a form of philosophical frenzy, a product of the psychology of a dead end. Brodsky notes that Platonov’s surrelease is folkloric and to a certain extent close to ancient mythology, which can be called a classical form of surrelease. Platonov, however, is not an individualist. Unlike Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, who talk about the tragedies of their “alter egos,” Platonov speaks of a nation that has become a victim of its language, or rather, of the language itself, which turned out to be capable of generating a fictitious world and falling into grammatical dependence on it.

That is why, according to Brodsky, Platonov is untranslatable: “It is good for the language into which it cannot be translated.” And then he adds: “And yet any attempt to recreate this language that compromises time, space, life and death itself should be welcomed - not at all for reasons of “culture,” but because, after all, it is what we speak.” .

However, the American edition of “The Pit” in 1973 did not have great success, since it was not of a mass nature. In addition, in his homeland Platonov continued to remain only the author of children's books and plays. It is known that one of the first attempts to change this attitude towards Platonov was the organization of the first Platonov conference in 1969 in Voronezh. The conference was supposed to be dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the writer. However, it was never possible to implement it. The conference was banned.

And only in the era of Glasnost did the reader recognize the “real” Platonov. The reason for this was the publication of the famous Platonic trilogy (“Chevengur”, “Juvenile Sea”, “Pit”). In 1986 The story “The Juvenile Sea” is published. And already in the 6th issue of the magazine “New World” for 1987, “Pit Pit” appeared for the first time before the judgment of the mass reader. The story was published with a short introduction by the famous Soviet writer Sergei Zalygin. It was here that he expressed the famous idea that Platonov is a kind of reproach to us - people with ordinary language and ordinary concepts. “Platonov,” writes Zalygin, “is one of those more than rare writers whose words - no matter how much they write and talk about them, no matter how much they reflect and unravel - will not be fully unraveled.” He is convinced that the author of “The Pit” is able to see “the pit, that is, the absurdity, disharmony, and drama of human existence, because his soul most of all needs understanding and harmony.” Platonov’s work, according to Zalygin, is not mysticism or fantasy, not irony or satire, not realism and not abstraction: it is Art. In true art there must be a mystery that needs to be solved. However, we give in to Platonov every now and then. Zalygin ends his preface with a thought that would have seemed extremely bold ten years ago before Platonov’s “revival”: the author of “The Pit” is the only writer after the Russian classics of the 19th century who surprised the world and made it shudder.

After the publication of “The Pit,” the boom around Platonov’s name began to grow more and more. Since 1987 right up to the collapse of the USSR in Russians (and not only in Russians) periodicals- newspapers, thick magazines, almanacs - articles about Plato's trilogy appeared one after another. As a rule - positive. Platonov became a kind of unique symbol of perestroika, a banner under which the leading representatives of Glasnost spoke. (In this respect, probably only Solzhenitsyn can be compared with Platonov). One of them was the famous literary critic V. Kamyanov. Famous, in particular, are his two articles dedicated to “The Pit”: “Where it is thin, it does not break” and “The dispute about the past after the assault on the future.” Let's look at them in order. The first is divided into a number of subtopics. We are particularly interested in the fifth one under the heading “Are all the doors wide open?” Here Kamyanov refers to the words spoken by the critic M. Sinelnikov in the article “There must still be shrines” (“Literaturnaya Gazeta”, No. 13, 1988). They sound like this: “The pit” was born from mental pain, a reaction to the perversions and lawlessness that accompanied collectivization.” “Firstly, the story is not entirely about that,” writes Kamyanov, “and the village, deafened by the collapse of directives, lies somewhat away from the center of the action. Secondly, no matter how commendable the promptness of response to the topic of the day and the sharpness of “perversions” are, to approve of Platonov for such qualities means to confuse him with someone else.” Kamyanov believes that the workers began to unravel the umbilical cord of the planet in order to lay the foundation of a “future tower in the middle of the world earth.” And this is precisely the plot of the work. “The author’s “reaction to perversions and lawlessness” doesn’t even seem to be a separate thing here,” the critic writes. He believes that the main theme of “The Pit” is the state of human thoughts, or rather, “one united soul that has waited for the present hour - overcoming the age-old melancholy, the boredom of life.”

In his work, Kamyanov also refers to the article by A. Elyashevich “Invitation to Conversation” (“Zvezda”, 1989, No. 1). In it, the author poses the following question: “In “The Pit” and “Chevengur” by Andrei Platonov, isn’t the theme of confrontation between the authorities and the people the basis of the narrative?” “No, it doesn’t,” replies Kamyanov. Then he explains that if Platonov observes outbreaks of “social fantasy”, running from a spit-stained barracks to a tower, then where is the demonstrative demarcation between “the authorities and the people”? Kamyanov writes that to declare “artistic logic” as something special means to offend the Master, “as if narrowing the boundaries of his domain or slamming a door in his face that should be kept open.” According to the critic, it was precisely this kind of insult that Platonov inflicted on the authorities. And not only Platonov. “Bulgakov, Babel, Pasternak... all those who did not want, or did not know, to keep the door wide open.”

In his other article, “The Dispute about the Past after the Assault on the Future,” Kamyanov primarily raises not the problem of Platonov’s deep social context, but the life and worldview of ordinary vagabond workers—the main characters of “The Pit.” He writes that long before Platonov, Leo Tolstoy captured a moment in the inner life of a character, “as fleeting as a green ray over the ocean.” And as evidence he cites the example of Petya Rostov from War and Peace. In particular, the scene when he, lying on a Cossack wagon, hears a choir of instruments obedient to his will; the scene when “the usually intractable world agreed to enter into a conspiracy with the soul.” This, according to Kamyanov, is main idea Platonov's creativity. The article shows the supporting point of “The Pit” - the desire and love of the heroes of the story for life. “I’m alive,” Plato’s hero seems to announce to the planet, walking, or even sliding down its slope. Or: “I’m running out of strength, and I haven’t even lived yet!” It is important for him to convey his burden - existence - to the last line with the maximum sense and joy for the soul. And here is just a revolution. Either it will kill you ahead of schedule, or it will intoxicate you - it will spin you until all your packs are forgotten.” I think Kamyanov unraveled the key question of both “Kotlovan” and “Chevengur” in the best possible way. Namely: “They (vagrants. - D.V.) agree to settle down under the eternal sky, even for a short period of time, but not like an orphan, but like a master.” And again - a comparison with Babel. The critic considers the complete lack of time tracking to be special in both writers. And also the fact that both Babel and Platonov see very ancient a man suddenly drawn into a historical whirlpool.

So, we see that the main thing for Kamyanov in Platonov’s work is not the protest against the regime, collectivization in particular, but the Man with his attitude and zeal for life.

I think that an equally important problem—the problem of the intelligentsia in Platonov’s works—is raised in his article “Witness” by critic Alexander Shindel (“Znamya”, 1989, No. 9). However, the article begins with a discussion of the significance of Platonov’s work, as well as the problem of the language of his works - a topic that is almost impossible not to touch upon when talking about Platonov. “The fact is,” writes Schindel, “that the unusualness of Platonov’s thinking is the first thing that mercilessly attacks the reader’s perception (I would even say it deafens, after which the reader already perceives everything written, being, as it were, in a state of some kind of shell shock) - here This very dissimilarity of Platonov subconsciously forces us to single him out “from the series,” to consider him as some kind of large, but quite autonomous phenomenon in literature.”

Schindel believes that Platonov is the first writer who spoke in a language that corresponded with the utmost accuracy to the concepts of the primordial world. According to Schindel, the main thing in Platonov’s works is not the idea, but the Man with his reality. “Only in Platonov the idea and the person do not merge,” he writes. According to him, the idea does not obscure the person. That is why in Platonov’s works the discrepancy between idea and reality is clearly visible. “Platonov is one of the very few Soviet writers in whose works reality controls the idea every minute.”

Moving directly to the pivot point of his article - to the question of the intelligentsia in Platonov - Schindel immediately declares that in “The Pit”, in principle, there is no intelligentsia, if we consider this issue from the current position. Platonov does not have intellectuals, not because he does not recognize them or does not like them, but because in the world he depicts they do not exist at all. He writes: “Speaking about intellectuals, I mean the intellectuals of the new, Soviet formation, and not that tiny part of the old Russian intelligentsia who could not abandon Russia and accepted it new destiny, not suspecting at the beginning of the twenties that he was thereby cutting short his own destiny: for this small part of the state at the end of the thirties was almost completely exterminated by Stalin.”

To explain his point of view, Alexander Shindel refers to Vladimir Shubkin’s essay “Difficult Farewell” (“New World”, No. 4, 1989). It gives the number of victims in Russia from 1914 to 1920 - 21 million people. Moreover, about two million died during the First World War, the rest - as a result of the civil war and emigration. For the most part it was almost all Russian intelligentsia. Schindel writes that for the most part these were people such as the Kiev doctor Turbin or the Moscow doctor Zhivago, the aircraft designer Sikorsky, the composer Rachmaninov, the philosopher Berdyaev, the economist Leontyev, and even the unfamous Chekhov's three sisters. “How to live in a country in which whoever has a Mauser is in power, and instead of talking, everyone shoots?” asks the critic.

Nevertheless, Schindel conventionally singles out those Platonic heroes who were responsible for the functions of the intelligentsia. First of all, in this regard, he singles out one of the central characters of “The Pit”, Voshchev. What follows is a description of the image and thought process of the hero. “Voshchev does not recognize work only for material reward. Labor as a condition for human survival. This is too little for him. For him there is no habitual but blind faith in work, not supported by a mental formula that would explain to him the connection of his personal labor effort with all that exists. And without this formula, work, not ennobled by consciousness, is reduced in his eyes to the level of instinct, and the person himself turns into an ant, not knowing the initial and final goals of his existence. Once he thought about this, he could no longer do his job as usual.”

Schindel notes that Voshchev lives a double life. One – external – is visible from the outside. This could be the life of a worker, a tramp, anyone. The other – internal – is Voshchev’s true life. “The life of thought,” writes the author of the article, “which matures secretly, in the depths of a not very developed mind, gradually turns this mind into intelligence.” Schindel believes that Voshchev, in the second or third generation, is a future intellectual. Today, it is not even a prototype of an intellectual, but a kind of embryonic cell that has realized its functions. The critic primarily considers contemplation and comprehension of accumulated information to be functions. As an illustration of what has been said, Schindel cites the famous dialogue from “The Pit.”

“The administration says that you stood and thought in the middle of production,” they said in the factory committee. “What were you thinking about, Comrade Voshchev?

About the plan of life.

The plant operates according to the trust's ready-made plan. And you could work out your personal life plan in a club or in a red corner.

I was thinking about a plan common life. I am not afraid of my life, it is not a mystery to me.

So what could you do?

I could invent something like happiness, and the spiritual meaning would improve productivity.

Happiness will come from materialism, Comrade Voshchev, and not from meaning. We cannot defend you, you are an irresponsible person, and we do not want to find ourselves at the tail of the masses.”

It is surprising, however, that Schindel, speaking about the intelligentsia in “The Pit,” is based only on the image of Voshchev. In my opinion, another similar “germ cell” of the intelligentsia is another character in “The Pit” - Prushevsky. He, like Voshchev, is trying to comprehend life and cannot live without knowing the main Truth of the Universe. As an example, I will give an excerpt from the story: “Prushevsky wanted to know this (“the future course of life.” - D.V.) now, so that the walls of his architecture would not be built in vain; the house must be inhabited by people, and people are filled with that excessive warmth of life, which was once called the soul. He was afraid to erect empty buildings - those in which people live only because of bad weather.” Prushevsky thinks every now and then: “Is a superstructure formed from every base? Does every production of vital material give as an additional product a soul in man? And if production is improved to precise economy, will indirect, unexpected products come from it?”

Schindel also introduces serious political context into his article. He says that the extermination of the old intelligentsia was catastrophic in its consequences precisely because, having eliminated the physical carrier of ethical thinking, this most important functional part of society was filled with carriers of criminal thinking. He is sure that Stalin’s like-minded people - Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Zhdanov, Beria, Mehlis and others - were pure selection for the type of criminal thinking. And they won because no one opposed them.

One way or another, Schindel ends his article with the thought that, despite Platonov’s great popularity, even the most serious literary scholars often do not approach his work entirely correctly. “They write a lot about Platonov now. One comes across definitions like “novel – vision”, “novel – dystopia”. This whole thing doesn’t look good to me.” The critic asks the question: what kind of foresight can there be if the novel was written in the twenties, actually from life? Why dystopia? If we follow this logic, then the entire Stalinist reality is a utopia? That's the whole problem, that all this is reality. “Both the form of thinking,” the author writes, “reality, and the alphabet of symbols, to which we are ready to classify unique language Platonov’s works are a historical reality.” This reality is an echo of a lost civilization, a certain landmark from which one must move as far as possible.

Articles regarding the publication of “The Pit” also actively appeared in newspapers. Here I would like, in particular, to dwell on Viktor Malukhin’s article “A Contemporary of All Times,” published on August 6, 1988 in the Izvestia newspaper. First of all, the critic writes that a true writer is always relevant, modern at all times. This is exactly what he thinks of Andrei Platonov. He figuratively divides his work into three main periods: 1) the 20s - Platonov’s debut, 2) the mid-60s - his revival and 3) the end of the 80s - the period when they began to talk about Platonov as a national genius. However, according to Malukhin, no matter how we divide Platonov’s work into different periods, the main theme of his works of all periods is “impatience of the heart” (the title of one of Stefan Zweig’s novels). Further, after a detailed analysis of the symbolism of “Chevengur”, there follows a chapter about the “Pit”, which the author symbolically entitled “The sky under your feet”. He writes that “The Pit” is a work that perfectly connects “Chevengur” with the “Juvenile Sea”. This book, according to the author, is destined for the same fate as “The Odyssey” or “Demons,” for it has already become a generally accepted sign of the corresponding life phenomena, a kind of “hieroglyph of culture.” And you don’t have to be a prophet to understand this. The author of the article believes that the reason for this is that “The Pit” is a traditional synthesis of philosophy and artistry for Russian literature.

Comparing “Pit” with “Chevengur”, the critic comes to the conclusion: if the Chevengurs dreamed of building something “worldwide and wonderful, ignoring all worries,” then in “Pit” this “something” became a kind of idea, which can be compared to the Babylonian project. “On a mowed wasteland,” he writes, “it was decided “to begin the construction of a single building where the entire local class of the proletariat will enter to settle.” And people began to “dig deep into the soil,” as if they wanted to “extract the truth from the dust of the earth.” Thus began the foundation pit, which was supposed to become deeper the higher the builders wanted to raise the common house of the proletariat.”

Malukhin, like many critics - Plato scholars, identifies the same connecting point in Platonov’s three works - the death of children. Firstly, there is a boy who dies upon arrival at “Chevengur”; secondly, this is young Aina from the “Juvenile Sea”, who committed suicide; thirdly, Nastya from “Kotlovan”, who was supposed to receive socialism “in her maiden dowry.” “There is no need to prove that the motive of a young life being cut short is far from accidental, especially if we do not forget that it arises at the moment when the long-awaited future seems to have already crossed the threshold or is standing at the door.” Note that Malukhin compares these three deaths with the “metaphorical rebellion” of Ivan Karamazov, who refused to accept the Kingdom of God, built on a single child’s tear. He explains: “In all three cases, Platonov’s death serves as a signal of violation moral law, that the path is lost, the landmarks have been replaced.”

The critic considers one of the central symbols of “The Pit” to be a raft, which dispossessed families are ordered to put together and on which they are all released down the river, “away from the new life and from life in general.” And the unreality and inhumanity of everything that is happening is already embodied by a completely fantastic character - the hammer bear. Malukhin dwells on this symbol in detail. He believes that Platonov “copied” this image from a famous children’s toy – “a wooden invention of our ancestors”: a bear and a man, sitting on a log, alternately lower a hammer onto an anvil. The author is sure that in Plato’s story the bear is humanized in order to raise an iron hammer over his dispossessed head.

The critic writes that, despite the fact that Platonov’s trilogy came to us late, it was nevertheless not late, since writers like him are always modern. He draws the following peculiar parallel: “Pushkin told about how St. Petersburg was built. Nekrasov - how the railway was built. Platonov spoke about the pit in which he left the Russian utopian man to die.”

Speaking about the deep-rooted opinion about Platonov’s hopelessness, Malukhin writes that the perception of “The Pit” depends on how hopeless we ourselves are, how much we understand his words about the human lot.

The article ends on a rather optimistic note: “Today, for the sake of our children, we must repeat: “The foundation pit must be filled in!” - and throw handfuls of earth at him, as has been done in Rus' for a long time. Only in this case will Plato’s great requiem help us travel the distance of hope to the end and achieve it...”

In 1989 with the preface “Platonov – our contemporary” to the collection of the writer’s works (“The Pit”, “The Hidden Man”, the play “14 Red Huts”, letters, excerpts from notebooks) was made by the famous researcher of Platonov’s work Vladimir Vasiliev, author of the famous monograph “Andrei Platonov . Essay on life and creativity” (1982).

Vasiliev believes that the main thing in “The Pit” is that, showing the historical process of the late 20s - early 30s, Platonov showed the depletion of the soil on which the culture of life grows, the loss of the meaning of human existence. According to Vasiliev, the writer mainly shows this in pictures of the de-peasantization of the village - the destruction of the peasant class that had been developing over centuries, its culture in Russia.

“Platonov,” writes the critic, “considered Russia a man, unlike Germany, a master mechanic.” Platonov thus showed the forced denationalization and proletarianization of the people (which also shines through in the play “14 Red Huts”), the bureaucracy and nationalization of life and people, devoid of national and historical roots. This is the social, political side of “The Pit”.

But the main one emotional basis Vasiliev considers the story to be horror, fear, psychosis, generated as if automatically, regardless of the heroes. “Its source,” writes the author, “is constantly self-sustaining at a certain critical level, constantly feeding on the tragic alienation between people and their “subtraction” from reality, the gap between word and deed, goal and means of achieving it, which is equal to the loss of the meaning of life. In the story, Voshchev is “ashamed to live without truth,” and the socialist Safronov is afraid to even think about it...”

After this very logical interpretation, Vasiliev expresses a rather peculiar thought: “The pit” is a kind of Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”. The themes of both works are almost the same. The critic explains this as follows: in both Pushkin and Platonov, the main idea is the invisible decomposing effect of a dead stuffed animal on the environment. “According to Platonov,” writes Vasilyev, “Peter and Eugene are equal figures, equally called to “historical” work: Peter is a direction to the “vast, active world, where, however, it is also impossible to exist without... Eugene, so as not to only one “bronze” was obtained, so that the Admiralty needle would not turn into a candlestick at the coffin of a dead (or destroyed) poetic human soul.”

Vasiliev writes that in “The Pit” the people are represented either silently or behind the scenes. On the surface, as a rule, “petty bosses” act, different from their neighbors and feeling some of their own peculiarity in relation to them. And this so-called “petty bosses” are incurably infected with “scholarship,” and the epidemic of the utilitarianization of life takes on an all-pervasive character. Vasiliev confirms his thought with the words of Platonov himself from the story “The City of Cities”: “The bureaucracy has merits for the revolution: it glued together the spreading parts of the people, permeated them with the will to order and accustomed them to a monotonous understanding of ordinary things.”

However, I personally do not entirely agree with the idea that the people are shown by Platonov “behind the scenes”. Undoubtedly, Platonov’s bosses often rule the people without their knowledge. It's difficult to argue here. But there is also no doubt that the main theme of Platonov’s trilogy (if not all of his work) is ordinary men, hard workers, vagabonds, beggars, dreaming of building a bright future.

Vasiliev notes that in “The Pit” Platonov, deeply skeptical of the revolutionary transformations of the first half of the 30s, contrasts them with the evolutionary development of life. The critic asks the question: “... What to do with the suffering of Voshchev himself, who cannot live without truth, and therefore without purpose? Where is the truth? In revolution or evolution, in power or freedom, in plan and order or elements and anarchy? The answer, however, does not follow.

One way or another, Vasiliev dwells on the fact that Platonov, unlike other writers, does not justify anyone, does not defend anyone, and does not take anyone’s side. He embraces the entire contradictory world he has recreated primarily with his understanding. This is the universal and wise humanity of the artist.

However, not only magazine and newspaper articles were written about Andrei Platonov. In the late 80s and early 90s, a large number of serious scientific studies of his work, many monographs, and academic publications appeared. Of all this multitude, it seems to me that Viktor Chalmaev’s book “Andrei Platonov (To the Hidden Man)”, published by the publishing house “Soviet Writer” in 1989, especially stands out. Note that this book still remains one of the best fundamental studies on Platonov’s work. The author shares his thoughts about “The Pit” in the chapter “When manuscripts don’t burn.”

Unlike Alexander Shindel, Chalmaev views the story primarily as a social dystopia. And in this respect, “The Pit” perfectly resonates with E. Zamyatin’s novel “We.” Even better than “Chevengur”. But nevertheless, Chalmayev considers the following to be the main difference between these works: “Zamiatin, an artist who has not forgotten about his sovereignty, depicting in his novel-pamphlet faceless crowds of people with numbers inhabiting a conditional barracks state, always stands as if outside of this world, not generated by him. He is a soothsayer, a prophet, predicting a catastrophe, warning about the danger of dehumanization, the emergence of a society of human automatons. He is aristocratic.<…>Platonov is entirely within his world, entirely in the crucible, among the extremes of the process.” Chalmayev notes that if Zamyatin’s hero, speaking the author’s language, is only a point of view transferred inside the model, like a writer’s observation deck, then the characters in “The Pit” are each and every one connected with their time, with its dramas and tragedies. That is why the language of the heroes of “The Pit” is partly politicized. As an example, Chalmaev cites Prushevsky’s thoughts on the basis and superstructure.

What is a “pit” not in the real, but in the metaphorical aspect? This is the question the critic poses. It is known that the translators of the story into Polish, abandoning the “overly constructive word” “foundation” (under this title the story was published in English in 1973), settled on the word “dig”. This definition, according to Chalmaev, does not quite suit the content of the story. The heroes of the story are really digging up something huge, super-personal in the ground, they are preparing the foundation, but first of all it is more important for them to “get to the bottom” of something. So, we almost don’t see the real pit. The critic gives the “pit” the following definition: “... This is a conditionally real point of mixing of various spiritual and moral hopes, life skills, romantic dreams and bureaucratic projects. Everyone essentially “digs” their own... But what will happen in the end? And is it possible to synthesize the officialdom already introduced by Pashkin and romantic idealism? Or will one beginning dry up the other?”

So, in the “pit”, cauldron or even ark, as Chalmaev calls it, Platonov collected all the extremes and extremes that the social lower classes of Russia dreamed of in their dreams about the future, everything light and dark, painful, even terrible that gave birth to in him centuries of slavery, disunity, oppression, ignorance. But Chalmaev calls the “pit” the ark, referring to the words of the hero of the story, “one of the enthusiasts of building a utopian house” Chiklin: “You heard about Mount Ararat - so I would probably fill it up if I put the earth with my shovel in one place.”

Chalmaev writes that Platonov, in spite of everything, still believes in the creative power of the revolution, since the heroes of “The Pit” have no nostalgia for 1919; You can’t hide them in “reserve reserves”; work for the sake of the future is not joyless for them. “The most autobiographical thing in the story,” the author writes, “is the frantic romantic burning of the writer himself, captured in his journalism of the early 20s, his youthful conviction that everything great can be done now, right away. Before throwing the dreams of his heroes into the brine, he threw himself into this brine dozens, hundreds of times - both in his poems of 1919-1922, and in his journalism of the Voronezh period.” The main thing here, according to Chalmaev, is faith in the birth of a new person, to whom “it is a long way to go.”

The author comes to the conclusion that the earthly dreams of Andrei Platonov are elevated in “The Pit” to the universal heights of humanistic anxieties, concerns about man and humanity. His utopia is an entire planet, where romantic impulses to recreate, competing with God, all of existence, and despair from failures, and power, and powerlessness, and deep delusions, and truth are mixed in bizarre compositions. “Earthly dreams about a golden age, about the future for people sparkle with some kind of alarming fire, warning of the need to verify both the direction of the path and the means of achieving the goal at any speed...”

And one last thing. In 2004, the Moscow publishing house “Luch” published a very interesting book, which is a collection of articles by Russian and Polish writers. The originality of the book lies in the fact that the authors, as a result of lengthy debates, come to announce a list of the ten best, in their opinion, Russian novels of the 20th century. So, along with “Petersburg” by Bely, “We” by Zamyatin, “The Defense of Luzhin” by Nabokov, “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, “Doctor Zhivago” by Pasternak, “Life and Fate” by Grossman, “In the First Circle” by Solzhenitsyn, “Yawning” Heights” by Zinoviev and “Angels on the tip of a needle” by Yuri Druzhinin are also called “The Pit” by Andrei Platonov. Well, it is, of course, not entirely correct to perceive such a selection unequivocally. Naturally, there will be scientists or simply readers who will immediately challenge the representativeness of such a list. But one way or another, the simple truth once expressed by Dmitry Merezhkovsky comes into force. Namely: they argue about tastes. For all literary criticism is nothing more than a dispute about tastes.

Symbolism in “The Pit” by Andrei Platonov

In the explanatory dictionary of the Russian language we read: “A pit is a depression in the ground for laying the foundation of a structure.” The question arises: did Andrei Platonov, calling his story “The Pit,” want to show the basis of not only the proletarian house under construction, but also the basis of the new state? Did he want to show the hopelessness of justifying socialism in Russia? I think yes. Moreover: if we consider “The Pit” not literally, but figuratively, in other words, not socially, but philosophically, then we can say that this is the basis not only of the state under construction, but also of a whole new life, to which the heroes of the story strive. And not only political or economic life, but also ordinary everyday life, human life in the literal sense. In this regard, the “pit” lies not only in the hole that the workers are digging, but also in all the places, phenomena and thoughts described in the story. This, of course, is the barracks located near the pit, and the ruins of the factory where the mother of the girl Nastya lives out her days - as it seems to me, the central symbol of the “Pit”, and the dispossessed village, and the thoughts of Voshchev and Prushevsky about the basis and superstructure.

However, “The Pit” is more hopeless than it seems. After all, a “pit” is not even a foundation for construction. This is the pit for establishing the foundation itself. The latter, accordingly, also cannot be built. For at its core are poverty, hunger, inhumanity, death, loss of the meaning of life. “That’s how they dig graves, not houses,” says the hero of the story, Chiklin. This is the peculiar social utopia attributed to “The Pit”. “... And that common house will rise above the entire estate, courtyard city, and the small individual houses will be empty, they will be impenetrably covered by the plant world, and there the wasted people of a forgotten time will gradually stop breathing.”

We can definitely say that the central theme of “The Pit” is the search for the meaning of life, the desire of the heroes to know the main Truth. Despite their endless thoughts about the meaning of life, Karamazov’s aphorism “Life must be loved more than the meaning of life” is perfectly suitable as the epigraph of the story. It is obvious that the heroes’ philosophical reflections and conversations about life are not an aesthetic whim. They come primarily from an endless, often painful love for life. Voshchev feels “the weakness of the body without truth”: “I am ashamed to live without truth,” he says; “We don’t smell anything now, only dust remains in us,” say the men from the Orgyard; the engineer Prushevsky, “who felt the constraint of his consciousness from the age of twenty-five,” strives to erect not just a building in which people would hide due to bad weather, but a building that was supposed to be inhabited by people with “excessive warmth of life,” in other words - soul. He himself, however, does not really believe in it. He, like Voshchev, thinks that people live thanks to one birth.

However, not every resident of the barracks feels the need to know the truth. Some of them are sure: the truth is not needed, because only in a person’s mind will it be good, but on the outside will it be disgusting. Platonov gives these people the following definition: “Although they owned the meaning of life, that tantamount to eternal happiness(my italics - D.V.), however, their faces were gloomy and thin, and instead of the peace of life they had exhaustion.”

In general, it is generally accepted that the main bearers of the idea of ​​knowing the truth and the meaning of life in the “Pit” are primarily Voshchev and Prushevsky. The first is fired from his job “due to the growth of stability in him and thoughtfulness amid the general pace of work.” The second decides to commit suicide, because he understands his powerlessness and feels disappointed in everything. It is obvious. However, both Voshchev and Prushevsky are, as it were, direct bearers: they literally fall into a crisis without knowing the truth and meaning of life. There is, however, a character in “The Pit” who does not particularly think about such questions. However, it seems to me that it was he who came as close as possible to this very truth, who understood the meaning of human life as well as possible. We are, of course, talking about Chiklin. About the man who brought the little girl Nastya to the barracks, devoting himself entirely to this defenseless creature. After the death of the girl, Chiklin himself loses the meaning of life and understands that there can definitely be no bright future. “The fat cripple” Zhachev also thinks so: “You see that I am a freak of imperialism, and communism is a child’s business, that’s why I loved Nastya.”

The theme of the meaning of life in the story is also closely related to the theme of various small things and objects collected by Voshchev in a bag. So, at the beginning of the story, Voshchev picks up a withered leaf and hides it in the “secret compartment of the bag,” where he saved all sorts of “objects of misfortune and obscurity.” “You had no meaning in life,” Voshchev believed with avarice of sympathy, “lie here, I will find out why you lived and died. Since no one needs you, and you’re lying around among the whole world, then I will protect and remember you.” He goes on to say that he lives and endures everything in the world without realizing anything, as if someone had extracted a convinced feeling from us and taken it for himself. So, all these useless objects for Voshchev are “documents of the planless creation of the world,” “facts of the melancholy of any living breath.” Voshchev perceives these “poor, rejected objects” as unique symbols of eternity. He collects them as the material remains of lost people who, like him, lived without truth and died before their time.

It is known that one of the central themes of Platonov’s work is children. “Kotlovan” is no exception. Platonov’s children, as a rule, die. And in this regard, they should be considered not as ordinary characters, but as symbols of new times.

Little Nastya appears only in the second half of the story. However, long before this, Platonov repeatedly touched upon the theme of children. Let's look at it in order.

Already at the very beginning of the story, Voshchev, walking through the streets of the city, sees a warden loudly quarreling with his wife. The wife sits by the window with the child on her lap and answers her husband with curses. But Voshchev’s attention is primarily drawn to the child, who silently plucks the frill of his shirt, “understanding, but saying nothing.” And it is precisely this patience or even indifference of the child that encourages Voshchev. “... He saw that the mother and father did not feel the meaning of life and were irritated, and the child lived without reproach, growing up to suffer.” “Why don’t you feel the essence?” he asks. - “Your child lives with you, and you swear, he was born to end the whole world.” And then he concludes: “Honor your child, when you die, he will be.” This, apparently, is the main idea of ​​Platonov’s inclusion of children’s characters in the story. Platonov, of course, interprets children ambiguously. As a rule, the children in his works are not just children, as they are usually perceived. For the most part, these are creatures that see a lot, often even more than adults. Note that such “childish” characters are also often found in Dostoevsky: say, Nellie from “The Humiliated and Insulted” or Ilyusha from “The Brothers Karamazov”. Here we see a child who embodies not only purity and naivety, but also human grief and sadness. The same goes for Platonov. It’s not for nothing that he calls the girl “little woman” and the children “little people.” He explains: “Any one of these pioneers was born at a time when the dead horses of the social war lay in the fields, and not all pioneers had skin at the time of their birth, because their mothers lived only on the stores of their own bodies.”

But first of all, children for Platonov are “time maturing in a fresh body.” From this position he describes the main child of “Kotlovan” – Nastya.

We first meet her among the ruins of an old factory, lying next to her dying mother. The idea that a child is a continuation of life, hope for the best, in Once again emphasized in this scene. In particular, in the words of a dying mother: “Turn out the light, otherwise I still see you and live.” Soon finding herself in a barracks, Nastya becomes the only joy of the workers, who before our eyes turn from rude, often cruel people into affectionate and caring people.

What is the symbolism of this image? If you look more closely, you can see that Platonov does not at all describe Nastya as a child; This is precisely the “little woman” who thinks along with adults. And indeed, she often expresses thoughts that are simply not typical for children. This is what allows us to talk about Nastya not as a separate character, but rather as a certain system used by Platonov to formulate his idea. Nastya is the future of the new country, “an element of the future” who must “take socialism as her maiden dowry.” This is her “mission”. “The main one is Lenin,” she says, “and the second one is Budyonny. When they weren’t there, and only the bourgeoisie lived, I wasn’t born because I didn’t want to. And as Lenin became, so did I!” The girl clearly shows cruelty, but the cruelty is not childish, but conscious. “Eliminate the kulaks as a class. Long live Lenin, Kozlov and Safronov. Hello to the poor collective farm, but no to the kulaks,” she writes in a note to Chiklin. Platonov himself does not believe in such a future. So Nastya’s death at the end of the story is very logical. Moreover: the hero of the story, Chiklin, digs a grave for Nastya for fifteen hours in a row, so that it is deep and neither a worm, nor a plant root, nor heat or cold can penetrate into it, “so that the child will never be disturbed by the noise of life from the surface of the earth.” And in this sense, “The Pit” can be perceived as a kind of prophecy. A prophecy that seems destined to come true. This is, in principle, what Voshchev is thinking about. “Voshchev stood in bewilderment over this quiet child; he no longer knew where communism would be in the world now if it was not first in a child’s feeling and in a convinced impression? Why does he now need the meaning of life and the truth of universal origin, if there is no small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement? After Nastya’s death, not only Voshchev loses the meaning of life, but also the disabled Zhachev and, of course, Chiklin. Let us also note that Platonov hints at Nastya’s doom long before her death, saying that Chiklin gives her a coffin for storing toys. This, it seems to me, is one of the most important symbols of “The Pit”.

Another problem that Platonov poses in the story is a sharp revaluation of values, a partial return to the old days. For some heroes this appeal is negative. Let's say, from the same activist teaching villagers to read and write, or from Pashkin. Some people feel the most real nostalgia for the old days. True, they themselves hide it quite skillfully. And Platonov himself, it seems, deliberately shows this point not entirely clearly. You can guess the characters' longing for the old days only by delving deeply into the context. Or rather, by feeling the atmosphere that the writer shows. Prushevsky belongs primarily to such heroes. “Prushevsky sat down on a bench near the office. In the same way, he once sat at his father’s house - summer evenings have not changed since then - and then he loved to watch those passing by; He liked some, and he regretted that not all people knew each other. One feeling was alive and sad in him to this day: once, on the same evening, a girl passed by his childhood home, and he could not remember either her face or the year of that event, but since then he peered into everything. women’s faces and in none of them did he recognize the one who, having disappeared, was still his only friend and passed so close without stopping.” This girl, as we see from the story, turns out to be Nastya’s mother, whom Prushevsky recognizes “by her sadness alone,” dying in dim light in an abandoned factory. From here we can assume that if Nastya is a certain symbol of the new time, then her mother personifies the old time. However, both of them die. People, in fact, find themselves between two abysses, in an opaque state.

“Quiet” melancholy is faintly manifested in the scene where Chiklin walks through the area around the tile factory. Old trees, dilapidated houses... Chiklin remembers how in his youth there was the smell of a bakery, coal miners were driving around, “milk from village carts was loudly promoted.” “Now the air of decay and farewell memory hung over the extinct bakery and aged apple orchards.” And one more scene. Near the tile factory - not a soul. But suddenly Chiklin notices some unknown old man: “... He was sitting under a shed for raw materials and mending bast shoes, apparently getting ready to go back to the old days.” That feeling of silence and calm that arises when reading this fragment is proof of bottomless, partly painful melancholy. The whole story is saturated with it.

As for the revaluation of values, in “The Pit” this topic is shown openly and clearly. This can be seen throughout the entire story. However, this theme reaches its climax in the joyful cries of the men towards the end of the story. “Oh, you, our esser mother! - one oblivious man shouted in joy, showing his grip and slapping himself on the belly, cheeks and mouth. - Come on, guys, our kingdom is the state: she’s unmarried!

“Is she a girl or a widow?” asked a nearby guest during the dance.

Girl! – explained the moving man. – Don’t you see how clever he is?!

Let her become wiser! – the same visiting guest agreed. - Let him help! And then we will make a meek woman out of her: good things will happen!”

Platonov also touches upon very important topic: destruction of churches, denial of God. True, he touches on it in passing, since this topic, of course, is not the key one in “The Pit.” But nevertheless, using just a few strokes, he gives us a clear picture of what is happening, explains it true essence. It shows the time when, according to the former priest, “you have to earn experience in order to be accepted into the circle of atheism,” when all the income from the sale of church candles goes to the activist to buy a tractor, and those who are baptized are registered by the priest himself in the “funeral list". In a word, the time when man was left without God, and God - without man. “Chiklin walked out of the church into the grass. A woman was walking along the grass towards the church, straightening the crumpled quinoa behind her, but when she saw Chiklin, she was stupefied on the spot and, out of fear, handed him a nickel for the candle.”

And finally, as the most important symbol of farewell to past life stands out a raft built by fists for its own destruction. After all, it is on it that they must be lowered down the river, thereby, as it were, closing the doors to a new life for them, crossing them out of the future.

So, “The Pit” is full of symbols. But still, the most important symbol of the story is Platonov’s language itself. Often, however, it is paradoxical, requiring super-careful reading and then deep analysis. But it is still the language in which people think. They just think, not talk. This is the language of associations, instant impressions, which not everyone dares to speak. However, it is obvious that Platonov does not relish his language: his goal is not a linguistic or stylistic game. This is a living language. In his notebook, 1931. Platonov wrote: “Art must die - in the sense that it must be replaced by something ordinary, human; a person can sing well without a voice if he has a special, real enthusiasm for life.” I think Platonov figured himself out.

There is nothing surprising in Platonov's untranslatability. What Platonov writes is felt by every person, but is embodied only in the Russian language. That is why it is impossible to consider Platonov outside the Russian national context. As an example, let us cite some Platonic expressions: “a heart surrounded by hard, stony bones”, “to fall asleep and part with oneself”, “he felt the cold on his eyelids and closed his warm eyes with them”, “weakness of the body without truth”, etc. How writes Bitov, “this is no longer a writer, this is Platonov.”

Andrei Platonov is a reference point to which many Russian modernists, and today postmodernists, have referred. The reason, I think, is that already in the twenties Platonov wrote in the language of a certain new, peculiar modernism, which first fully entered literature in the 50s and 60s. I mean the existentialists, beatniks, surrealists, absurdists - in a word, all those who proclaimed their own rules in art.

CRITICAL PROSE BY ANDREY PLATONOV

The writer's articles about literature are a special kind of critical prose. When an artist reads a book and thinks about it, he does it a little differently than a literary critic. For him, the work of his contemporaries and predecessors is not only a subject of critical analysis and evaluation, but also a reason for thinking about his own creativity. The analysis here is complicated by comparisons with one’s own work and is verified by it. This is a dual process: on the one hand, the very subject of analysis (a book of another writer or poet) is convexly and sharply outlined (due to the figurative nature of thinking), on the other hand, the author’s aesthetic self-determination occurs, his awareness of his literary connections and artistic confrontation, the development of one’s own artistic principles. Therefore, the writer’s critical articles (the French “essay” - literally “experience” - would be more accurate here) are of particular interest - they are, at the same time, an assessment of a work of art, and self-recognition, self-esteem. However, the stamp of personality, one’s own literary experience and creative destiny - all this can sometimes deform the critical assessments and historical and literary ideas of a writer-critic - the life lived by the writer and understood by us explains the meaning and motives of such deformations.

Criticism of Andrei Platonov is closely related to his work. And the point, of course, is not only that one can easily establish a roll call of ideas, sometimes encounter a literal coincidence of individual formulations - something else is important: the unity of the writer’s approach to life, the complex, spiritually intense world of Platonov’s reflections on the relationship between man and nature, constant concern for practical and spiritual needs of the working person, the desire, through his literary work, to help these people understand themselves, other people and nature, to find out the meaning of “their own and common existence.” The acuteness of social feeling, strictly oriented by the revolution, - characteristic Platonov's worldview. Revolution, as the writer understood it, introduces an element of reason into the spontaneous, tragically tense relations between man and the world. Platonov was sometimes even too categorical and, if you like, too straightforward in his statements that only with socialism does it begin true story of humanity, that the people are now, through their labor, spiritualizing the world, “which previously existed in a wretched form, in fragmentation and without a common clear meaning.”

Platonov's hero is a working man, thinking hard, striving to understand himself in the world. He learned to “think with the revolution,” which awakened his consciousness. The worldview of Plato's hero changed slowly and difficultly during the revolution; here the new was bizarrely and strangely combined with the old. However, the originality of Plato’s prose lies not only in this. The very structure and mode of thought of the hero and the author in Platonov are extremely close. If there are elements of a fairy tale style in Platonov’s early stories, they are caused by “ literary etiquette", the young writer sought to justify his own way of thinking, passing the word to the hero or narrator. He thinks so himself, he thinks like his heroes, the very way of his thinking is folk.

Platonov is an intellectual who did not “come out” of the people. Since the mid-twenties, the writer has boldly introduced the popular system of thought not only into the hero’s speech, but also into the author’s speech. It is significant that the stylistics of Platonov the critic and Platonov the prose writer in the twenties are different. In criticism and journalism, where there is neither a hero nor a narrator, he adheres to the “generally accepted” rules. This is no longer the case in critical articles of the thirties - Platonov the critic speaks in his own voice.

Platonov's critical prose has in common with his artistic and philosophical prose the desire, need and need to find out - and express in simple words (and not in philosophical terms) his understanding of man, society, and nature. Platonov's artistic prose is always on the border between literature and philosophy. It seems that the image is about to “break” into convention and become abstract, but the writer, as a rule, maintains balance. This is probably why his transitions from prose to journalism and criticism are so organic, where not only the problematics are preserved, but also the rhythm, intonation, and structure of the phrase.

Platonov the critic is almost completely unknown to the modern reader. The writer's articles and reviews were published in periodicals, and who, besides literary experts, re-reads old newspapers and magazines? But it's not only that. Platonov very often, especially in the thirties, spoke under pseudonyms that are not disclosed even in the most authoritative reference publications

Platonov's critical activity began in the twenties. IN literary life In post-revolutionary Voronezh (the city where the writer was born and lived until 1927), his critical speeches and journalism occupied a significant place. He was an active participant in the work of the provincial Communist Union of Journalists (Komsozhur, as they said then), and was a member of the first associations of proletarian writers in Voronezh. Critical articles and reviews of Platonov regularly appeared in those years on the pages of the Voronezh Commune, the organ of the provincial party committee; in 1920, under the leadership of G. Z. Litvin-Molotov, he edited the newspaper “Red Village”; his reports on proletarian poetry were hotly discussed in the Voronezh journalists’ club - “Iron Pen”.

Platonov is a son of his time, he was fascinated by the creative, transformative pathos of the revolution, but he did not avoid exaggerations. “The flame of revolution,” he wrote in 1919, “begins to spread from the spheres of political struggle into the sphere of artistic creativity, art... We are experiencing great era revival of the human spirit in all its manifestations... Reviving all life, the working class revives art... Proletarian art reflects all of humanity in its best aspirations... It will be the music of the entire cosmos, an element that knows no barriers, a torch burning through the depths of secrets, a fiery sword the struggle of humanity against darkness and oncoming blind forces... The time of creation of the communist Edda and the great myths of labor and solidarity, myths about the coming monster machines, servants of humanity in the knowledge and conquest of the universe, is approaching.” This extensive quotation demonstrates the revolutionary pathos of Platonov the critic, characteristic of those years.

Already in these years, the foundations of the writer’s artistic views were formed: the organic connection of art with reality, the desire to show the awakening of the people’s consciousness, to express and objectify in words the consciousness of the people in the revolution, the effectiveness, the transformative orientation of art. “The purpose of art,” wrote

Platonov in 1921, - to find an objective state for the world, where the world itself would find itself and come into balance, and where people would find it family... Truth is a real thing. It is the perfect organization of matter in relation to man. Therefore, the socialist revolution can be considered as the creation of truth." Even if the critic’s thought is expressed somewhat abstractly, even if there is an excessive emphasis on the organization of life (as a function of art), it is important that the effective nature of art is realized in connection with the revolution, and the revolution itself is understood as such an organization of the world , in which life is created, worthy of a person, or, as Platonov says, a life in which a person must find this world native.

From the mid-twenties until the mid-thirties, Platonov's critical articles did not appear in print. However, judging by the writer’s archives, even during these years he repeatedly turned to critical prose, trying to formulate clearly and definitely his attitude to the processes taking place in Soviet literature at that time. Probably, preoccupation first with engineering work and then with artistic creativity prevented the completion of this work. Thus, the archive contains a draft of an article (most likely from 1930 or 1929) “The Great Deaf One”. These notes are interesting primarily because they show Platonov’s involvement in the most important problems of those years: the writer’s participation in socialist construction and his attitude to disputes about the creative method of Soviet literature.

However, no matter how interesting the early articles of A. Platonov are, no matter how indicative they are from the point of view of the history of our literature and the creative path of the writer himself, it should be recognized that this is only the prehistory of Platonov the critic. In the mid-thirties, Platonov began to constantly collaborate in the Literary Critic magazine. At the same time, his articles and reviews are published in the critical and bibliographic biweekly “ Literary Review” (“a subsidiary of the Literary Critic”), in the magazines “Children’s Literature”, “Ogonyok” and in newspapers. The advancing maturity, the increasing demands and exactingness of the artist, who has accumulated extensive literary experience, everyday review work - all this helped to shape Platonov’s talent as a critic. His articles of the thirties were significant for those years, but modern critical thought also keeps them in its memory. Platonov’s best articles are, as he himself said on another occasion, “of fundamental and universal significance.”

The interests of Platonov the critic are unusually wide - here he includes folklore, Russian classics, modern Soviet literature, and foreign literature. However, with all the breadth of interests, Platonov, as always, was most concerned with questions Everyday life. From this point of view, the far from complete list of Soviet authors about whom Platonov wrote is indicative: J. Altauzen, A. Arkhangelsky, A. Akhmatova, P. Bazhov, V. Bokov, V. Vasilevskaya, M. Gorky, A. Green, Dzhambul , V. Kaverin, V. Kataev, Y. Krymov, V. Mayakovsky, V. Nekrasov, N. Ostrovsky, M. Prishvin, K. Paustovsky V. Shklovsky. But his appeals to Russian classics and foreign literature are also always sharply modern. Platonov’s articles are not just the master’s thoughts about his craft, about the work of his teachers and comrades, but also an intense search for goodness and truth, a desire to cast into words his attitude towards man, towards art, towards the world. His articles are always openly biased and journalistic. Here ethics, sociology and aesthetics are one.

In 1938, the writer decided to collect his main articles and publish them as a separate book. A discerning artist, he modestly calls it “Reflections of a Reader.” Probably, initially he had the idea of ​​​​preserving the pseudonyms with which the articles were signed when they were first published in journals. These plans did not come true then. Now the time has come to publish such a book, preserving the plan conceived by Platonov, supplementing only the collection with articles written after 1938. The past thirty years have shown that the thoughts of this talented reader are not outdated and not only help us better understand Platonov himself, his thoughts about man and the world, but are also of interest to those who love our literature and want to know its history.

“People read books carefully and slowly” - this is how Platonov begins one of his articles about Pushkin. He saw in this the deep respect of the working man for the artistic word. A hereditary proletarian himself, Platonov calls this noble attitude to “old proletarian” literature. The life of the people is serious, and therefore the people take the work of the artist just as seriously. He feels and realizes “how much reality must be realized, experienced and experienced in order for a real thought to occur and an accurate, true word to be born.” The tasks and goals of art are so significant and important for the people that the artist’s constant connection with reality, with the historical experience of people’s life is unconditional and natural. “Great poetry and the life development of man, as a means of overcoming historical fate and as the happiness of existence, can only be nourished from the sources of reality, from the practice of a close, difficult sense of the world...” Comparing this definition of the purpose of art (the means of “overcoming historical fate” and the means of achieving “ happiness of existence") with the previous definitions of early Platonov, you clearly see not only their commonality and continuity, but also how his thought is formed and honed.

The people, according to Platonov, “economically and concentratedly” express their artistic gift in the best poets, artists, composers close to their heart and mind, in the direction of their talent... They give birth to and nourish “their gift in individuals", as if handing over to them for a while " Living being" And artists are obliged to remember, to be aware of their responsibility and the “dependence of their poetic gift” on the general historical life of the people. True art is purposeful and purposeful, it helps the working person, forms and stimulates “human inspiration aimed at improving the lot in life.” That's why original works arts are not just artistic masterpieces, but “a special word that turns into a physical movement of the heart, into practical action, into politics...”.

Justifying folk character And folk origins art, its effective nature and aspiration, Platonov, unfortunately, did not avoid extremes. His assessment of the post-Pushkin period of Russian literature is very contradictory - here precise words and original, deep judgments sometimes coexist with words and formulas that are inaccurate (from the point of view of scientific historicism) and unfair. It is worth dwelling on this in more detail, because without a historical commentary it will be difficult for a modern reader to correctly understand Platonov’s views. It would be reckless to explain these incorrect judgments only by unrestrained vulgar sociologism. The situation was much more complicated.

Platonov was inclined to think that post-Pushkin literature (as he called all Russian literature after Pushkin up to Gorky, with whom Soviet literature began) had lost the “universality,” as he said, of Pushkin’s creative consciousness. The critic saw the origins of this “universal, wise and courageous humanity” of Pushkin in the fact that the great poet lived “without taking his mind and heart away from reality,” from the life of the people. This is very important and significant for Platonov. He was convinced that a person alone, by himself, cannot understand and understand the meaning and purpose of his existence. When this person “comes closer to the people who gave birth to him, and through him to nature and the world, to the past time and future hope, then that hidden source opens for his soul, from which a person must be nourished in order to have inexhaustible strength for his deeds.” and the strength of faith in the necessity of one’s life.” Pushkin's involvement in people's life and people's worldview was the source of his bright and luminous poetry. Pushkin guessed and expressed in his poetry the people’s ability to continuously develop in life, to overcome “historical fate”, despite public oppression and “personal, often deadly fate.”

Pushkin’s wise love of life harmoniously and completely echoed the people’s understanding of the true price of life “even on a poor and boring land,” where “it’s hungry, painful, hopeless, and sad, but people live, the doomed do not give up.” “Inspiration” (Platonov’s word has many meanings, but first of all it means the social instinct of workers, leading them to search for a “better fate”) never leaves the hearts of people. The search for a “better fate” is, according to Platonov, the creation of a social structure where nothing will prevent a person from objectifying the “sacred energy of his heart, feelings and mind.” And for Platonov this is not an abstraction, not a utopia - this is a socialist society. Pushkin’s “universal, wise and courageous humanity coincides with the goal of socialism, realized in his own, Pushkin’s, homeland.”

That is why social forces hostile to the people, and above all the “caustic autocracy,” aroused in Pushkin not only anger and despair, but also a bright, satirical laughter (“bright” - in contrast to Gogol’s laughter through tears!). The great poet laughed at his enemy, marveled at his madness, “laughed at his efforts to tire out people’s life or arrange it in vain, to no avail, without historical outcome and effect.” Social oppression, the entire apparatus of violence directed against the people and their intelligentsia - in a word, social evil and atrocity always contain an element of the comic, but sometimes, writes Platonov, it happens that “atrocity, an attacking regressive force cannot be defeated head-on, just as you can’t beat an earthquake if you just don’t wait it out.” And there is no sterile stoicism in this, just as there is no pessimism or a sense of doom. This feeling is close and akin to the “human effective inspiration” of the working masses, who in their movement towards social progress “apply... poetry, politics, patience, and direct revolution.”

This understanding of Pushkin’s humanism forces Platonov to be critical of the satirical orientation of post-Pushkin literature, and primarily of the works of Gogol, Shchedrin and Dostoevsky. It seems to Platonov that the desire of these writers to show “the decline of man under the influence of the “darkening” reality” violated real historical proportions and led to the disappearance from literature of the “Pushkin man” - the representative of that “mysterious, silent” (for now - silent) majority of working humanity, which “patiently and seriously fulfills his existence,” which seeks and finds “a way out of the disastrous situation.” The totality and mercilessness of the denial of reality in the satire of Gogol and Shchedrin led, according to Platonov, to the loss of Pushkin’s prophetic gift. “The point is not,” Platonov wrote, “that governors, landowners, merchants, generals and officials are wildlings, fantastic fools and scoundrels. We don't regret it. But the trouble is that the simple, “heartbroken” people who belong to these gentlemen are almost no better. In any case, the image of the “commoner” and the “master” is built on the same principle.” This gave rise to pessimistic conclusions and caused “longing and hunger” in the reader, who sometimes lost faith in his dignity and did not “know how to continue in this world, “where there is only a place for weeds.”

Platonov’s objections to the mercilessness and uncompromising nature of Russian satire come into contrast here not only with historically accurate assessments of the works of Gogol and Shchedrin, which Russian social thought has suffered through, but also contradict the assessments of Russian revolutionary democrats (Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky), on whose judgments the critic tries to rely . The complex dialectic of the relationship of Russian literature to the “little brother” and to the suffering of the “little man”, to the depiction of the “man of the people” - all this dialectic is determined by historical movement Russian society. The progressive thought of Russia at different stages of the development of society differently understood the tasks of literature in depicting the people, put different emphasis - here is the gradual awareness of the role of the people in history, and sympathy for their troubles and suffering, and exposing the passivity of the people, and a sober, realistically truthful word about the downtroddenness of the people, about the “routineness of thoughts and actions, feelings and customs of the common people”... Shchedrin rightly said that it is necessary to distinguish the people “historical, that is, acting in the field of history, from the people as the embodiment of the idea of ​​democracy. The first is evaluated and gains sympathy according to his deeds.” Russian revolutionary democracy suffered through these, perhaps harsh, words and had the civil right to pronounce them. All this complexity and historical concreteness of the judgments of advanced Russian writers contradicts Platonov’s somewhat abstract “love of the people.”

In general, it should be said that Platonov too unconditionally asserts the “autonomy” of the people in society (“... the people live a special independent life, connected with the “higher” circles, with the “light” only by the chain of their bondage... the people have their own politics, their own poetry, their own grief ..."). If this were really so, then neither society nor history would exist, and, as Platonov himself says elsewhere, “each class and era would be silent “islands of solitude.”

Platonov’s inaccurate and unfair words addressed to Gogol, Shchedrin and Dostoevsky were spoken in a passion. And these are not just the contradictions of the concept, its paradoxes, which the writer could not or was not able to overcome. This passion is explained by the fact that the historical and literary assessments of Platonov the critic are connected with his creative destiny. In the late twenties and early thirties, Platonov created a series satirical works, which attracted severe criticism. Criticism, as time has shown, is not fair in everything. This condemnation was unexpected for Platonov. As a satirist, he, of course, understood that he was entering into a sharp dialogue with society, sharing his doubts and fears, but he was convinced that these doubts would be correctly (that is, in the context of his revolutionary beliefs) perceived and appreciated. But the dialogue did not take place. Platonov did not defend his works. He believed: “in order to have a “hearing” (that is, in the words of A. Blok, to hear the music of the revolution. - L. Sh.), you must be able to constantly hear others, even when you yourself are speaking, you must have a relentless adjustment to your feelings in masses of people." He perceived criticism as the voice of the masses.

The articles of the mid-thirties (primarily articles about Pushkin) were such a “correction” for Platonov. “For me,” he wrote in an article in 1937 (“Objections without self-defense”), “it is easier for me to overcome my mistakes and shortcomings, relying on my articles, making my way forward first with at least one “journalistic thought.” It seems to him now that the doubts and anxieties of a satirical writer (even when they are fair and justified) should not distract him from his main goal - to help working people who need “a way out of rigidity, from need and sadness immediately, or at least, they... need confidence in the value of their own and the common life.” His own historical and literary assessments were reflected creative destiny, the extremes of one’s own self-esteem.

With all this, it should be remembered that the contradictions in judgments about satire in post-Pushkin literature are not, after all, some kind of concept that is false at its core; these are rather and most likely contradictions in the views of Platonov. It is enough to carefully read his articles about Lermontov, Aksakov, Korolenko to see how the writer “overcame” (in Platonov’s own words) the extremes of his views on the history of Russian literature. This is clearly visible when you analyze the clarifications made by Platonov in the text of articles about Pushkin in 1938 when preparing them for republication. Platonov believed that post-Pushkin literature mastered only individual elements of Pushkin’s creative legacy. It even seemed to him that these elements, taken outside the context of Pushkin’s “universal creative consciousness,” sometimes brought harm. (“Pushkin is our comrade.”) In an effort to clarify his thought, Platonov now writes that the works of writers of the post-Pushkin period sometimes “did not have full artistic and social significance.” In the article “Pushkin and Gorky” the same idea about the mastery of elements of Pushkin’s poetry by Russian writers of the 19th century (they mastered Pushkin’s “waste”, “waste lands”) is clarified: “some of them widely used only hints, begun and not fully developed themes and thoughts Pushkin..." Four years after his articles about Pushkin, Platonov writes: “Lermontov belongs to such poets who have become part of the flesh and blood of the Russian people. Without him, as without Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Shchedrin, the spiritual essence of our people would be impoverished, the people would lose part of their self-awareness and dignity.” And his very articles about Pushkin are in contradiction with this scheme; their historicity and sharpness of social analysis refute the extremes of the writer’s historical and literary assessments.

Andrei Platonov was formed as a writer who deeply and originally comprehended reality during the period of the revolution, and the revolution taught class struggle and social analysis of cultural phenomena. Therefore, the aesthetic analysis of Platonov the critic is always sociological, and in his best articles sociology enriches aesthetics. Assessing the movement of Russian literature in connection with the historical path of the people to revolution and socialism, Platonov confidently compares Russian classical literature, and above all Pushkin, with Maxim Gorky and, therefore, with Soviet literature. He sees their unity and continuity in deep and organic nationality and effective humanism. In Pushkin’s time, according to Platonov, there had never been such an acute and tense historical situation; “humanity had not yet reached its critical point.” That’s why Pushkin’s worldview was so harmonious and holistic. Gorky lived in a different time - a time of fierce class struggle, the time of the emergence of fascism. His creative mind is focused. He had to save and preserve “his beloved human being from under the collapses of bourgeois society” and raise a person for the future. “He seeks and finds the people of the future in the only place where Pushkin found them - in a people plagued by grief and need, weakened by hard labor and yet keeping within themselves the secret of their patience and existence and the light of inspiration that Pushkin once turned into "a coal blazing with fire."

Platonov believed that Gorky took the baton of “wise and courageous” humanity directly from Pushkin, bypassing experience literature of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The spiritual continuity of Russian culture was disrupted. “When post-Pushkin literature was written by Platonov, ending with Tolstoy and Chekhov, and after them began to degenerate into decadence, the people abruptly “intervened” and gave birth to Maxim Gorky - Pushkin’s line was immediately restored.” The vulnerability of this judgment, its “straightforwardness” are obvious. But something else is equally obvious - the critic’s desire to emphasize in Gorky the restoration of Pushkin’s prophetic gift: “...Gorky is more of a prophet demanding a transformation of life than a writer in the usual sense - and this only makes him immeasurably dearer to us.”

What is especially close to Platonov in Gorky is his belief in the bright mind of man, the exaltation and poeticization of labor. Since childhood, he himself knew the poem “sung by the heart” about Man. Platonov wrote about the driver Maltsev (“In a Beautiful and Furious World”): “... he drove the train with the courageous confidence of a great master, with the concentration of an inspired artist who has absorbed the entire external world into his inner experience and therefore dominates it.” At one of the discussions of this story (February 1941) it was said: “I want to give a compliment. Andrei Platonovich, apparently, belongs to the Maltsev breed.” And this is not just a compliment.

The new - Soviet - literature, which began with Gorky, was, according to Platonov, supposed to bring to working humanity a hitherto unknown worldview - the worldview of a people who had acquired and realized the meaning of their historical existence. Platonov insisted on this, sometimes even with excessive categoricalness. And then the pictures of the past acquired the character of nightmares: “Entire countries and peoples moved in time, as if in the twilight, mechanically, as if in a dream, changing their generations...” The metaphor that only with socialism does the true history of mankind begin, Platonov sometimes interpreted too much literally. But his very belief in the spiritual enlightenment of the people's consciousness in the revolution cannot but evoke sympathy. “The people,” Platonov wrote, “call their worldview the truth and the meaning of life.” This is exactly how the people perceived the new ideas that the revolution brought as an answer to this eternal question about the meaning of life. This meeting and interpenetration of old and new creates and shapes the consciousness of a new person, his spiritual structure. There was a “mutual sense of man and man, so bound by a common goal and a common destiny.” The individual existence of a person has ended, and he “came close to his people”, through the family (this cell of social existence), through the team in which he works, through society, where he meets the people and finds himself at the “crossroads of high roads.” Here, in society, a person “undergoes a great training: he learns to combine the freedom of his individual with the freedom of all, he is brought up to think and take initiative in competition with other people.” Platonov the artist wrote about this, and this interests him as criticism.

The task is not to put marks on the writer’s report card, but to deeply understand the work of art and convey this understanding to the reader. And then the poet’s voice is multiplied by the voice and power of the masses - “and the inspiring, gigantic effect of poetry is obtained.” Platonov the critic always strived for this in his reflections on literature. Moreover, he heard not only loud voices - Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky. He heard the voice of Paustovsky, who recreated the “simple flow of nature”, noticed a romantic fairy tale by A. Green that was alien to him, spoke about the “shy” nature of the satirist writer Arkhangelsky, caught the ability of Anna Akhmatova “from the personal life experience create music of poetry that is important for everyone”...

Back in the distant twenties, Andrei Platonov wrote to G. Z. Litvin-Molotov: “Between the burdock, the beggar, the field song and electricity, the locomotive and the whistle that shakes the earth, there is a connection, a kinship; both have the same birthmark. I still don’t know which one, but I know that the pitiful plowman will sit on a five-axle locomotive tomorrow and will operate the regulator in such a way, stand as such a master, that you won’t recognize him. The growth of grass and the whirlwind of steam require equal mechanisms.” It was very important for Platonov to see in the image of the new man created by Soviet literature, not only a worker and a creator, but also a man of great ethical strength, a man who realized the contradictory relationship between nature and machine, a man imbued with the “spirit of social freedom”, a sense of personal independence and at the same time "an impressionable, passionate respect for the personality of another person." This is exactly the kind of hero he was looking for in Soviet literature.

Platonov knew for certain that the spiritual and ethical strength of a person is a process and path that he goes through during his life. “Good,” said Platonov, “requires immeasurably more energy and time than evil.” Therefore good is difficult. It is nurtured by society, by the people. The appearance and birth of a child depends on the parents, but “it depends only on the people whether this child in his future fate will be a pitiful creature or a wonderful person.” This understanding of the ethical in man determines Platonov’s harsh, sometimes even excessively harsh, assessments of the works of romantic writers (K. Paustovsky and A. Green). In Platonov, a feeling of awkwardness arises, as he said, when reading stories where nobility, tenderness, sublimity, courtesy, caring, humanism, spirituality, consciousness of all the characters “as if they sterilized reality, and everything good and kind in the world became weightless.”

Platonov the critic was aroused by a feeling of protest at the desire (as he believed) of the romantic writer to create a conventional world, a world freed from the “taint of concreteness,” leaving for this world “only the main elements of the real universe: the sun, the ocean, the south, the straightforwardly acting human heart " This cuts the real difficulties in half. Indeed, in the real world, in addition to the confrontation “man - nature”, there is also a social confrontation. Therefore, Platonov is convinced, the works of romantic writers “are not capable of giving that deep joy that is equivalent to help in life,” and this is precisely the task and justification of art. This is probably said too harshly and decisively. Romantic art has the right to its own path to the heart and mind of the reader, to its own conventions. However, Platonov was deeply alien to the artistic principles of romanticism. He was too stern and even ascetic a man and writer to accept vibrant art romanticism. But his philosophical objections are serious and must be heard. Moreover, his “intolerance” did not prevent him from appreciating the pictures of “free, powerful, good and evil nature” in the stories of A. Green, from seeing and emphasizing the discovery of K. Paustovsky’s “own country”, about which he, Paustovsky, spoke with “such an inspiring charm that is only rarely achieved by an artist of words.”

There is another aspect of man's relationship with nature. It is also important for Platonov - this is the opposition of Nature and Civilization. Connected with this opposition is man’s retreat into nature, the search for a “country unafraid birds and animals,” the desire to hide among virgin nature from the contradictions of life. This is a kind of human protest against the imperfections of society. And this protest is understandable and explainable. But the question is: is this a worthy way out for a person? And isn’t such sociology and philosophy an expression of social egoism? Platonov solves this issue unambiguously - a person does not have the right to escape. One cannot demand “immediate compensation for one’s social disadvantage,” especially since an individual can easily mistake one’s “irritated thought” for a real disaster. A person’s place among other people “overcoming the imperfections and disasters of human society.”

Platonov understood the relationship between man and nature dynamically and historically specifically - in society, nature is the link through which social connections person. In the process of human history, nature becomes human, or, as Platonov said, the spiritualization of the world occurs. The hero of the story by Vas Kuonnesin (“The Vanishing Border”), which Platonov wrote about in 1941, runs away from capitalist civilization into nature, runs in search of “a country of unafraid birds and animals.” However, there is no and cannot be luck on this path - this is moving backwards. It took a lot of time and many events before the hero began another movement, “a slow internal advancement into the real country of unafraid birds and animals, into the country that a person creates with his creativity, and not into the one that he only dreams of as a child.” . The narrowly utilitarian, egoistic worldview collapses, and then a person realizes himself in a huge world, realizes his connection with this world, his power over it and his responsibility. A new sense of self opens up in a world where everything - man, animal, inanimate nature, and the entire universe - is covered by a common, unified rhythm of life. This feeling of all-pervading connection is the source of human creativity, creativity as “an element of this connection.”

But is the “universal connection of all living things” so unambiguously interpreted? Shouldn't the social aspect of these connections be emphasized more strongly and definitely? In R. Aldington's novel "Pure Paradise" they also talk a lot about "a huge strand of life that has been spinning for a thousand million years." Both the heroes of the novel and the author himself seem to forget that the “strand of life” has long been spun not only by nature, but also by the hands of millions of working people. Nature here seems to fall out of social relations; it coldly and indifferently confronts man. Opposed as a reproach and as an arbiter of human fate. And Platonov objects to Aldington: “Nature will not judge us, it has a different purpose, and turning to it to solve our purely human affairs is not only pointless, but also sad.” The path from amoeba to man (the same “strand of life”) is an unconscious path, but the movement of a person in history is the work of his hands, his will, his mind. “For a socialist man,” wrote K. Marx, “the entire so-called world history is nothing more than the generation of man by human labor, the formation of nature for man...”

Therefore, the illusions of R. Aldington, his hopes to transform the world on reasonable grounds outside and independently of the people, through the efforts of the “poor, lonely” consciousness, cause Platonov’s sharp condemnation. Especially unacceptable for him are the words of Chris (the hero of the novel), imbued with existential stoicism, that if attempts to transform the world do not bring the desired results, then the joy of the attempt itself will remain. “Chris (and perhaps Aldington) does not realize how alien such an athletic-aesthetic attitude to one’s life and history is to large masses of people. People live in earnest to allow their hopes and efforts to fail; even if there are failures, humanity, enduring great sacrifices, seeks and finds a way to success...” This judgment is true and timely in our days.

The point, however, is not only the passivity of Stoicism. Chris, of course, is full of a sincere desire to improve human society and understands the need for such work, but a complete lack of understanding of how to begin this work, and the desire to invent a recipe for saving the world himself - all this fills Plato with fear. The time when this article was written (1938) was harsh and demanding. Fascism threatened humanity. And literature was supposed to spiritually equip people. That is why Platonov followed the work of his fellow writers - the leading writers of the West - with such attention and responsibility. As a critic and artist, he was certainly impressed by the attempts of these writers to discover and show “the true dignity of modern man.” However, Platonov believed that in such an alarming time, when a person especially needs support, the writer should directly and openly depict the triumph of the good and courageous in people. More precisely, the writer must always keep in mind that, no matter how difficult the situation of the people, he seeks and finds a way to the future, because for him, the people, “swimming through time and into history is an irrevocable voyage.” And he reproaches E. Hemingway for refusing to directly reveal a kind and heroic person. “Hemingway takes an indirect path,” wrote Platonov, “he “cools”, “ennobles” his themes and his style with laconicism, cynicism, and sometimes rudeness; he wants to prove the ethical in a person, but for artistic reasons he is ashamed to call him by his name.” Platonov himself, the writer, was never ashamed to speak directly about the “ethical” and called on advanced literature to do so.

Genuine art is addressed to people, designed to help them. It is tightly connected with the society that gave birth to it, connected by origin and direction. But if this is truly a progressive force, then art also carries within itself the overcoming of its time, “shows a way out of its society and time.” It is overcoming the historical fate of the people. Art, says Platonov in his articles about literature, is no less important and serious than life itself. And therefore books should be written - “each one as if it were the only one.” Platonov operates with this high criterion in his critical articles.

Andrei Platonov wanted to call his book about literature “Reflections of a Reader.” And this is not only an expression of his modesty. He really tried to talk about the books of other writers not as a professional critic, but simply as a reader. It seemed to him that “literary criticism is always a slightly blasphemous matter: it wants to interpret everything poetic prosaically, to understand what is inspired, to use someone else’s gift for ordinary common life.” This fear of Platonov is understandable - he is afraid that analysis might ruin the poetic charm of art. However, this very opposition “critic - reader” is conditional. The reader also translates the poetic into the language of everyday life. On the other hand, a critic is a reader, only a special reader - capable of better and deeper understanding and appreciation of a work of art and conveying his understanding to other readers.

6. Sacrifice by A. Platonov Victims on the “altar of history” If the idea of ​​sacrifice itself was originally associated with religion, then political and ideological ideas about the sacrifice of the 19th–20th centuries developed in a different context, which can be defined as the sacralization of progress.