Biblical and literature context in Andrey Platonov's play "The Voice of the Father"

The main event of the play "The Voice of the Father" (1937-1938) is the son’s dialogue with his deceased father at the grave of the latter. The author places the dialogue in the hierarchically different contexts (socio-political, biographical, Old Russian, spiritual-literary, biblical). The article deals with two contexts: the spiritual-literary, connected with the spiritual prose of the 1850s which found its fullest expression in literary works of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, and the biblical, previously researched by E. Nyman, A. Kharitonov, H. Gunther, V. V’yugin, but requiring clarification in connection with the recent publication of Platonov’s letters. The comparison of the play with Brianchaninov’s lyrical miniature "Voice of Eternity" showed that both artists use the tradition of "silent speech" dating back to "spiritual silence, ascetic silence..." (A. Dyrdin). In Brianchaninov’s work this tradition freely correlates with the literary word. Platonov, being a Soviet writer, forced to "veil" the image forming importance of the tradition of silence by its transformation into the "poetics of duality," as seen in the extensive remark before the play. On the level of the symbolic content the motif of silence forms the structure of both texts, but the semantic content varies: Brianchaninov’s "silent speech" is a sign of the Orthodox resurrection ritual, Platonov’s "silence" is rather the very substance of the depicted world as the moral result of what is happening in it. The analysis of the second context associated with the semantics of allusions to the biblical texts shows that Platonov skillfully covers the biblical style layer with the "clothes" of the elegiac (K. Kogut). Poetics of the "weak force" allows the playwright to make the play good for censorship, to communicate to the readers / viewers the author’s understanding of the tragedy the country is experiencing as the destruction of the spiritual vertical (Son - Father - Heavenly Father). The genre of the allusive elements is mainly requiem chants. Finally, Platonov’s autodialog with his early works shows ideological shifts and reveals the general direction of the artistic thought. The comparison of the play with an early story "The Star Desert" shows that Platonov’s "ideals" are not so "constant": Fedorov’s resurrection of the dead "freezes" in the play as the original impulse and transforms into the category of memory as an important first principle of spirituality.

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