A Technical Novel by A. Platonov: change of chronotopes

The last major work of Andrei Platonov, A Technical Novel, created in the 1930s, has common motifs and narrative echoes with the novels Chevengur and Happy Moscow. The reconstructed text of A Technical Novel allows identifying the keynotes and the meta-plot of a novel triptych: partition, life cycle violation and frustration, futility of the Promethean challenge and transcendent aspirations of heroes. The interpretation of this work as a story (8-volume collected works of Andrei Platonov) narrows the context of comparisons. The third novel allows speaking about the final overcoming of the utopian thinking, and then about the writer’s turning to the Christian philosophy of history and retrospective utopia, as evidenced by the stories of the second half of the 1930s. A Technical Novel is a reason to say that Platonov ended his philosophical quest is in the prewar years. In the early period of creativity A. Platonov touched N. Fedorov’s progressivist utopia, the Gnostic origin of which is beyond doubt. The tragic irony of the middle period is generally interpreted as dystopia, but A Technical Novel (or even the story “Bread and Reading”) mutes the dystopian motives as well as the moments of parody, there is no grotesque, which gives reason for raising the question of Platonov’s new manner, of the end of the search of the philosophical belief, which was expressed in distancing from the Gnostic motifs.

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