A. Ilichevsky'sMatisse in the context of A. Platonov's Happy Moscow: an anthropological aspect

The article explores links between the artistic conceptions of Andrei Platonov and Alexander Ilichevsky who both address a common anthropological turn from humanistic mythology in the twentieth century, as well as a mismatch between the ontological picture of the world and ideas about nature, and man's mission in being. Happy Mo,scow (1932-1936) is part of Platonov's unfinished project about the new Soviet reality after the collapse of the old society. The novel was supposed to reflect the first results of civilization changes in the new Russia. The written part of the novel, in spite of the reduced depiction of the situations of social construction, testifies to the author's ambivalent evaluation of the project aimed to perfect nature, society, and man. The reason is the correction of the Utopian ideas of the early Platonov, close to the Russian cosmists: man as a transformer of natural matter is replaced by the ethical man who preserves the phenomena of real life. It is possible to say that Platonov, at the time of writing Happy Moscow, is close to the anthropological conception of man: man is a product of all natural cosmos; his nature, bodiliness inhibit his pretensions to reorganize social reality and perfect the laws of nature (death of the living, entropy of organic forms, etc.). At the same time, Platonov distinguishes man's ability to animate inert matter through labor and creation of things. As a result, Platonov, in his anthropology, combines archaic mythological ideas about the equality of life phenomena and cosmos, and ideas about man as a creator constructing a more perfect second nature. Alexander Ilichevsky's novel was also created as an attempt to ponder on the result of the collapse of the previous social system - the collapse that canceled out not only the communist, but also civilization project whose beginning was explored by Platonov. Similarly to Platonov, Ilichevsky writes not a social, but a philosophical novel about the loss of a humanistic myth of man as a peak of natural evolution. The anthropological aspect of depicting man in the situation when all the previous foundations are being broken testifies not only to the reduction of the creative efforts of man when he is occupied exclusively with survival, but also to the reduction of the existential intention to be an interpreter of being. The comparison of the novels is meaningful not so much due to the direct influence of the classic on the young writer as because of the commonness of important structural elements in their literary systems with similar conceptions of nature, society and man. The article analyses similar situations in the plot: open consciousness after the change of social conditions; refusal from the social status and vagrancy (Moskva Chestnova, Sartorius, Komyagin and Korolyov, the homeless Vadya and Nadya); the situation of approaching ontological consciousness after the loss of social dogmas and epistemes (natural-cosmic aspect of the learning of life); disappointment in the previous philosophical and scientific ideas. The article analyses the system of characters as variants of different paths to ontological consciousness: the meaning of male and female characters with the reduced vital, erotic intention and ethical attitude to life in Ilichevsky's characters; the movement of Platonov's characters from serving distant goals to serving "the close" (Sartorius, Moskva, Bozhko, Komyagin accept the position of service instead of the position of a reformer), and marginalization of Ilichevsky's characters connected with the loss of the evolutional picture of the world (the influence of the synergetic conception of nonlinear development). The article discusses similar plot, imagery, and verbal motifs (flight and going underground; attitude to body and thing; conceptions of soul and body, the dead and the live, etc.) The anthropologism of Platonov and Ilichevsky is manifested in different conceptions of man as a product of natural cosmos: Platonov's characters tragically go through the powerlessness to harmonize the social and natural world of man and nature; Ilichevsky's protagonist realizes the finiteness of man as a thinking creature of nature that is being ousted by unpredictable biological forms or artifacts, such as electronic civilization.

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