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Abstract: The study is devoted to the analysis of A. Platonov’s critical articles “Pushkin is Our Comrade” and “Pushkin and Gorky,” written in the context of the Pushkin Jubilee of 1937. Platonov, unable to be heard, turns to the genre of the critical article and temporarily becomes a reader himself. Despite the fact that Platonov’s conclusions about Pushkin were in the spirit of his contemporaries’ statements and developed some of their ideas, the writer remains true to himself and interprets the poet’s works in compliance with his own authorial philosophy. In his articles, Platonov gives his understanding of the development of Russian literature, referring to the works of N. V. Gogol, F. M. Dostoevsky, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, L. N. Tolstoy, M. Gorky and other writers. The main topics of Platonov’s critical articles are “Pushkin and the people”, “Pushkin and socialism”, “Pushkin and fascism”. The paper shows that Platonov’s articles about Pushkin became a natural stage of his creative evolution. Using the “mask” of the reader and the principle of the “second meaning plot” formulated by him, Platonov expresses in his articles about Pushkin many ideas dear to him, including the high mission of the Poet and Russian literature in general. For a while, the writer abandons the pessimistic “There is no prophet in his fatherland” and turns to the belief that this prophet is already in the Soviet reality contemporary to him, which Platonov measures in Pushkin’s way, believing that “socialism and villainy are two incompatible things”.

About the author(s) :

Marina V. Zavarkina

Petrozavodsk State University (Petrozavodsk, Russia)

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7972-2265

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 24.02.2024; date of publication: 30.06.2025

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