Traditions and innovation in the work of modern poets. Literature for children of the 20th century, the chapter of tradition and innovation in literature for children of the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the concept of culture Traditions in the works of Platonov

TRADITIONS AND INNOVATION in the literary process - two dialectically interconnected aspects of the literary process. Traditions(from Latin traditio - transmission) - ideological and artistic experience transmitted to subsequent eras and generations, crystallized in the best works of folklore and literature, enshrined in the artistic tastes of the people, conscious and generalized by aesthetic thought, the science of literature. Innovation(from Latin novator - renewer) - updating and enriching both the content and form of literature with new artistic achievements and discoveries: new heroes, progressive ideas, a new creative method, new artistic techniques and means. Innovation based on traditions, develops them and at the same time forms new ones; it becomes traditions, which in turn serve as the starting point innovation. In such interaction, creativity and innovation are the dialectics of the progressive development of literature and art.

Reform of Russian verse carried out by V.V. Mayakovsky, was a necessary consequence of the novelty of reality, which became the subject of Soviet poetry.

The secret of the Russian soul is hidden in national poetry. “In the lyrics of our poets,” wrote N.V. Gogol, “there is something that the poets of other nations do not have, namely something close to the biblical.” The supreme source of lyricism is God, however, “some come to it consciously, others unconsciously, because the Russian soul, due to its Russian nature, already hears it somehow by itself, no one knows why.”

In Russian classical poetry, the theme of rural Russia has always been one of the main ones (it is enough to mention Pushkin’s textbook “Village”). And these are not just “landscape” lyrics. In the element of the Russian soul, “the ordering power of myth was always visible - the myth of the earth, soil, space.” S. Frank, in his article “Wise Testaments,” expressed the following thought: “Using a later term, we can say that Pushkin was a convinced soil scientist and had a certain “philosophy of soilness,” he best expressed it in a famous poem of 1830:

Two feelings are wonderfully close to us -

The heart finds food in them -

Love for the native ashes,

Love for fathers' coffins.

Such rootedness in the native soil, leading to the flourishing of spiritual life, thereby expands the human spirit and makes it receptive to everything universal."

N. Nekrasov occupies a special place in Russian poetry. It was he who “provided the first example of a poet living in the city but suffering for the countryside.” “Nekrasov is dear to me because,” wrote Ya. Polonsky, “because he is, so to speak, our home poet, our soil scientist; he brought us great benefit because, by cultivating our people’s soil and clearing it, he makes it possible to grow on it over time not only Russian, but also universal human poetry."

The end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries was the time of the genuine rise of the “peasant line” in Russian poetry. During these years, Leonid Trefolev, Ivan Surikov (author of the famous "Rowan" and the no less famous "Childhood" ("Here is my village") and poets of his circle ("Surikovites") were working: Savva Derunov, Dmitry Zharov, Alexey Razorenov, Matvey Kozyrev , Ivan Rodionov. They were joined by Ivan Osokin, Niktopolion Svyatsky, Maxim Leonov, Spiridon Drozhzhin. In the 20s, the “new peasant” poets became widely known: Nikolai Klyuev, Sergei Yesenin, Sergei Klychkov, Pyotr Oreshin, Alexander Shiryaevets, Mikhail Artamonov, Pavel Radimov, Vasily Nasedkin and others. Close to them in theme and spirit of creativity were Ivan Molchanov, Dmitry Gorbunov, the early Alexander Zharov, poet and artist Efim Chestnyakov, Pavel Druzhinin, Ivan Doronin, Vasily Eroshenko. The latter is better known in Japan, where it was published a three-volume collection of his works.The fact is that he wrote not only in Russian, but also in Japanese, traveled a lot, studied the folk culture of many countries, was familiar with Lu Xun and Rabindranath Tagore.

Among the Russian poets who promised to do so much, but failed to find their own poetic path, one of the most soulful lyricists was Sergei Chukhin. He began in the second half of the 60s, during the heyday of “quiet poetry”. Silence is the most important word in his lyrics: “Nowhere to rest... Such silence!”, “And the soul is protected from the cold by this snow, by this silence.” It turns out that not only now the silence of the “stagnant” time is perceived as the “golden age” of modern Russian history:

You won't find a person in the village

That today is cloudy and angry.

Like the beginning of a golden age,

A golden day is so worth it.

The names of Fet, Tyutchev, Polonsky are also “signature” for “quiet” lyrics:
The night is numb here, over the field,

And the stars of August are flying,

And Fet reads voraciously,

And the person is happy with peace.

Now it becomes clear that in the “quiet” lyrics it was not elegiac silence that prevailed, but a vague premonition, a feeling of calm before the storm:
And such a strange feeling

Haunts the soul like delirium:

Among the peace and quiet

There is just no peace.

The work of Nikolai Tryapkin also belongs to the tradition, which is inseparably connected “with the verbal art of the people, with its rich song, story, proverb culture, which has a thousand-year history.” According to the poet, he came “from the depths of rural Russia, From the great depths of the people...” In poetry collections of the 60s (“Crossroads” (1962), “Krasnopolye” (1962), “Songs of the Great Rains” (1965) , “Silver Ponds” (1966), “A Loon Flew” (1967), “The Nest of My Fathers” (1967), “Selected Lyrics” (1970)) Tryapkin glorified the happiness of peasant labor, poeticized the life of a modern village, using genre reserves folk art: songs (“Song of Bread”, “Song of the Merry Frost”, “That Night”, “A Loon Flew”, “Song”, “Only Dawn...", “Farewell”), ditties ( "Merry Basket", "Recruit", "I call you mine..."), epics ("Healing of Muromets", "Return of Razin"), carols ("Kalada-kalyada..."), as well as thoughts and legends , were. Tryapkin introduced fairy-tale images into his poems (“Letter”, “Snow and Evening...”, “Awakening”), not forgetting about the song of literary origin - his poems “Hymn”, “Reeds, reeds, reeds” have such a basis. ..", "Song of the Winter Hearth", "I will never get tired of wandering...". You can sometimes hear in his poetry Koltsov and Nekrasov motifs (poems “Rye”, “Country Roads”), Rylenkovsky rhythm (“Forest scruffs...”), and even the syllable of “Vasily Terkin” (“I corrected everything in due taste... ").

Tryapkin's best poems are dedicated to the Russian North ("Pizhma", "Koryazhma", "Steamboat on Vychegda", etc.). In 1941 he was evacuated to the city of Kotlas. “There,” the poet wrote, “my eyes were first opened to Russia and to Russian poetry, for I saw all this with some special, “internal” vision... And I began to write poems that fascinated me.” The language of these poetic creatures is magnificent. Tryapkin achieves in his “northern” cycle an almost complete merger with the natural world:

May it be sweeter than others

Great melody of merging!

The uniqueness of the literary situation of the late 70s was that there were no leaders in it. There were leaders, those who walked ahead, but the places vacated by Pasternak, Akhmatova, Tvardovsky remained unoccupied and it was not clear who could take them.

At the end of the 70s, qualitative changes occurred in poetry, associated not so much with the change of poetic generations, but with the active orientation of young people towards new forms of verse and methods of artistic representation. What in the 60s only timidly took root in the work of “pop performers” - complicated associativity, formal experiment, symbiosis of different stylistic trends - in the late 70s - early 80s declared itself as a leading trend and was regaining its place everywhere living space. Moreover, there were two different directions, similar to those that determined the direction of development of young poetry in the early 60s. This was a traditional direction (N. Dmitriev, G. Kasmynin, V. Lapshin, T. Rebrova, I. Snegova, T. Smertina, etc.), focusing on the continuation of classical traditions, and “metaphorical” or “polystylistic”, focusing for a formal experiment (A. Eremenko, A. Parshchikov, N. Iskrenko, Yu. Arabov, D. Prigov, etc.).

In the second half of the 80s, spiritual poetry began to rapidly revive. Now, it seems, all poets are “crying out to the Lord in unison, since such a long ban has been lifted.” To be fair, it must be said that Russian poets turned to the Bible long before 1988 (A. Tarkovsky, I. Brodsky, D. Samoilov, O. Chukhontsev, A. Tsvetkov, Yu. Kublanovsky, I. Lisnyanskaya, V. Sokolov, N. Tryapkin, Yu. Kuznetsov, to some extent - N. Rubtsov). S. Averintsev occupies a special place in this series.

Spiritual poetry is an unusually complex and delicate area of ​​Russian literature. Those entering it must overcome three main obstacles:

1) philological (the problem of combining church and literary language, especially in semantic terms);

2) religious (the problem of renovationism);

3) personal (the problem of spiritual growth, the degree of comprehension of God).

“That’s why,” writes A. Arkhangelsky, “professionals retreat before the greatness and impossibility of the task... And amateurs are not afraid of anything - because they do not feel, do not hear the terrible silence of their words.”

Fortunately, we have poets who know how to talk about lofty things without naive delight and without pomposity that is annoying for the reader. Such is V. Blessed, according to S. Chuprinin, a “truly tragic” lyricist, as well as N. Rachkov, O. Okhapkin, O. Grechko, M. Dyukova, N. Kartasheva, N. Kozhevnikova, E. Kryukova, L. Nikonova , S. Kekova, O. Nikolaeva, N. Popelysheva and many others.
A group of Orthodox poets who sincerely and deeply believe and understand that “spiritual verse in its religious content stands outside the current trifles of reality” came to our poetry in the late 80s (most of them were not even forty years old by that time). These are A. Belyaev, A. Vasiliev, E. Danilov (Konstantin Bogolyubsky), M. Dyakonova, V. Emelin, G. Zobin, Fr. Roman, N. Shchetinina and others. Their poetry is truly exclusively spiritual. They place faith above art.

35. Artistic originality of A. Platonov’s prose

Andrei Platonov, in his understanding of the new era, managed to move from the acceptance of communist ideas to their denial. Platonov believed in the revolutionary reorganization of the world; in this he was no different from his contemporaries. He believed that it would finally be possible to defeat egoism and create a society of “higher humanism.” 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. He followed the tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky.

Platonov had a hard life: he was expelled from the party, persecuted, and his son was arrested, who later died of prison tuberculosis.

Features of his work: unusual characters, an unexpected ragged ending, the impossibility of presenting the work either on the basis of the logic of events or on the basis of the logic of the heroes; density of narration, universality of generalization at the level of 1 phrase in the text, colossal freedom and element of the Russian language. One of the best representatives of Russian religious philosophy. Unusual philosophical intensity: in the form of ordinary stories and tales, Platonov identifies serious ontological and existential problems.

Platonov's stories of the 20-30s: The Sandy Teacher, At the Dawn of a Foggy Youth, Fro, etc. They contain a bright confidence in the possibility of man improving the world. All his heroes are young, honest people, active folk characters who emerged from the depths of Russian life. They are full of ardent hopes. They are also ascetics, sometimes overcoming self-pity, they invest their lives and destiny in a common cause.

“Fro.” The young woman Frosya is waiting for personal happiness. pleasure. She loves her husband devotedly. He tries to distract himself from his difficult experiences with work. Her husband Fyodor leaves, she tells him that she will die if he stops loving her. “They wanted to be happy immediately, now, before their future hard work would produce results for 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.” This is how Platonov seems to balance the need for personal and universal happiness.

The story “In a Beautiful and Furious World” (41g) is the fascination of Platonov and his heroes with powerful technology. Machinist Maltsev is an inspired and 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 commonality with the machine gives rise to a feeling of happiness. But Platonov constructs the situation and the conflict in such a way that this driver turns out to be deaf to a living person. 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 sensitive to people. Only after going through trials (loneliness, mistrust, prison, loss of his favorite job) is he, as it were, born again.

The story “Return” (46g) is a reflection on post-war life. War as a global attempt to destroy mercy, hopes for the power of goodness and humanity. Boy Petrusha. There is no image of war. Main characters: Alexey Alekseevich Ivanov and his wife Lyubov Vasilievna. The plot is about a father returning from the war. His wife's frankness (stories about a hard life, about experiences, about loneliness, about Semyon Yevseich) affected his pride. He leaves home, away from his children, to a new, as it seems to him, carefree life. Son Petrusha and daughter Nastya created a revolution in the soul of their father

The problem of life and death is one of the central ones. Awareness of the connection between the living and the dead, people and animals, humanity and nature. His stories are the truth of life, the truth about man. He showed how difficult a person’s path to himself is. Accuracy of psychological details, turns of thought and feeling. Platonov went through a passion for technocracy and social utopianism and came to the idea of ​​integral knowledge. Platonov is a supporter of science and progress, but in combination with natural intuition and spirituality.

By the end of the 1920s. – 3 collections of prose. “Epiphanian Gateways”, “The Hidden Man”, “The Origin of the Master”. Satirical stories appear, and freedom is limited. They accused me of ideological sins and labeled me a kulak.

It was important for Platonov to be published, and he tried to rebuild.

In the 1930s acts as a critic, reviewer, journalist. There are many stories about selfless people (“At the Dawn of Foggy Youth”), about personalities. New lyrical prose about love, about the world of childhood (“Potudan River”, “June Thunderstorm”). Little is published. The only collection is 1937, “The Potudan River”. I could only write criticism.

During the war he was a correspondent, writing essays and stories about the heroism of people. After the war - one of the best stories, “Ivanov’s Family.” The story is subject to severe criticism. Ermilov “Platonov’s slanderous story.” After this article, Platonov is practically not published.

In the 1940-50s. acts as a storyteller (“The Magic Ring”).

At this stage (lifetime) very little reached the reader.

The second stage - in 1958 (Platonov died in 1951) a small book of stories appeared, which aroused great interest. Begins to be published quite frequently. Largest number of posthumous publications.

Plato's boom - 1960s The rebirth of a writer. Continues into the 1970s and 80s. A 3-volume collected work is being published. Platonov again came to the reader deformed. “The Pit”, “Chevengur”, “Juvenile Sea” have not yet been published. 1986 – third birth. The largest novels have been published.

Two stages - lifetime and 1970-80s.

Special emotionality of prose.

Think about the uniqueness of Plato's phrase. "Language according to Lobachevsky."

An incorrigible idealist and romantic, Platonov believed in the “vital creativity of goodness,” in the “peace and light” stored in the human soul, in the “dawn of the progress of mankind” on the horizon of history. A realist writer, Platonov saw the reasons that force people to “save their nature,” “turn off consciousness,” move “from within to outside,” without leaving a single “personal feeling” in the soul, “to lose the sense of oneself.”

Platonov’s heroes had no knowledge and no past, so faith replaced everything for them. Since the thirties, Platonov has been calling us with his special, honest and bitter, talented voice, reminding us that the path of a person, no matter what social and political system he lives in, is always difficult, full of gains and losses. For Platonov, it is important that a person is not destroyed.

Creativity of M. Bulgakov.

In the novel “The Master and Margarita” Bulgakov touches on many problems of everyday life and existence, reminding people of them. The so-called “Yershalaim” chapters occupy an important place in the novel. This is a free interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew. These chapters explore many religious and moral issues. Bulgakov paints the image of Yeshua - a righteous man who believes that “all people are good”, that in every person there is a spark of God, a desire for light and truth. But at the same time, he does not forget about human vices: cowardice, pride, indifference.

In other words, Bulgakov shows the eternal struggle between good and evil, purity and vice. The significance of this novel within a novel is that the writer expands the time frame of the action and thereby once again shows that this struggle is eternal, time has no power over it and this problem is always relevant. Bulgakov also says that the forces of good and evil are inextricably linked, none of them can exist without the other.

The novel also reflects the theme of love, and Bulgakov writes about “real,” “faithful, eternal love.” “Follow me, my reader, and only me, and I will show you such love!” - the author tells us. In the person of Margarita, he shows that no force, even the most powerful, can resist true love. Margarita's love paves the way to happiness and eternal peace with her loved one.

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov is a mystical writer, as he called himself. Somehow, very sensitively, he managed to hear his time and understand the future, therefore, in all his works, Bulgakov warns readers about the coming time of Satan.

Literature and revolution. The fate of Russian literature after 1917

The first turbulent years after 1917, when numerous opposing literary groups emerged in accordance with the new social forces unleashed by the overthrow of the autocracy, were the only revolutionary period in the development of art in the Soviet Union. The struggle mainly unfolded between those who adhered to the great literary tradition of realism of the 19th century, and the heralds of the new proletarian culture. Innovation was especially welcomed in poetry, the original herald of revolution. The futuristic poetry of V.V. Mayakovsky (1893-1930) and his followers, inspired by the “social order”, i.e. everyday class struggle, represented a complete break with tradition. Some writers adapted old means of expression to new themes. For example, the peasant poet S.A. Yesenin (1895-1925) sang in traditional lyrical style the new life that was expected in the village under Soviet rule.

The Communist Party began to formally regulate literature with the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932); it was actively promoted by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). The result was an incredible amount of industrial prose, poetry and drama, which almost never rose above the level of monotonous propaganda or reportage. This invasion was anticipated by the novels of F.V. Gladkov, whose most popular creation, Cement (1925), described the heroic work of restoring a dilapidated factory.

During this period, Sholokhov completed the great novel Quiet Don (1928–1940), which was recognized as a classic work of Soviet literature and was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Composition

In 1926, Andrei Platonovich Platonov wrote the satirical story “City of Gradov”. This story was written in less than three weeks, under the influence of Tambov impressions: in Tambov, Platonov was sent to work in the reclamation department of the provincial land administration. “Wandering through the outback, I saw such sad things that I did not believe that luxurious Moscow, art and prose existed somewhere,” wrote Platonov. “But it seems to me that real art, real thought can only be born in such a remote place.”

Later the story received a new edition. Unfortunately, this work is less known than, for example, “The pit” and “Chevengur”, written much later. This was largely due to the fact that Platonov came to his reader not so long ago; his readership had just formed. Now his work is of great interest, as are the works of other writers who are inaccessible to the general reader due to the strict ideological control over literature in Soviet times. Soviet critics considered Andrei Platonov's satire an inappropriate, harmful literary phenomenon. Even Platonov himself doubted his satirical abilities. But Maxim Gorky, who appreciated his work, said that he would be good at comedy, which undoubtedly speaks of the writer’s special satirical talent.

The writer discovers new possibilities in the genre of satire, talking about the creation of a new society, about the life of people during the revolution. The name itself is reminiscent of the city of Glupov from “The History of a City” by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. “The people in the city existed without haste and did not worry about a supposedly better life. He served with zeal, keeping order in the province, but he did not know fury in his work. They traded small, without risk, but firmly selling their daily bread. The city had no heroes, meekly and unanimously accepting resolutions on world issues. Or maybe there were heroes in Gradov, only they were translated by strict legality and proper measures,” Platonov tells us. This is a satire on the topic of the day, making fun of bureaucracy.

Ivan Shmakov, a Moscow official, comes to Gradov to work. He reveals a bunch of official violations, but gradually becomes rigid and gets used to everything that happens in the city. And even technicians who do not know everything about Karl Marx are not hired. But the drought caused famine, so soldiers and self-taught workers were asked to build wells, but technicians were never hired. As a result, six hundred dams they built were washed away, and four hundred wells stood dry. But with the money allocated to fight the drought, they independently built “eight more gliders for the postal service and transportation of hay and one perpetual motion machine powered by soaked sand.” “The people lived here were stupid,” the author sums up.

Bureaucrats consider themselves true workers and think that without their papers and the institutions where they work, the Soviet government cannot exist. Bureaucracy for them is a symbol of invincible force. They think about the reconstruction of society, drawing up a 25-year long-term plan for the national economy in two days. Shmakov creates a huge and important work - “Notes of a Statesman”. It affirms the need for the existence of bureaucracy as the basis for the construction of the Soviet state and emphasizes its services to the revolution. Paper, according to the hero, is a product of the highest civilization.

But suddenly the Gradov province is abolished. The head of the administrative and financial department, Bormotov, wants to create “an autonomous national republic, because five hundred Tatars and about a hundred Jews lived in the province” just for the sake of “preserving continuity in office work.” But the bureaucrats are transferred to other places, Shmakov now works as a commissioner for unpaved roads and habitually writes: next up is a “social and philosophical work” with a tricky title “Principles of depersonalization of a person with the aim of regenerating him into an absolute citizen with legally ordered actions for every moment of existence.” .

Platonov continues the traditions of Saltykov-Shchedrin as a political satirist. Just like in the fairy tales of M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, the story is about society at a certain stage of change. The author exposes the vices of this society and its imperfections, talking about the life of the state as a whole, and not about individual phenomena. Platonov’s theme of bureaucracy is in the foreground of the narrative, while the study of the nature of the state is in the background. Using irony, satire and grotesque, combining everyday life and fantasy, the author warns about the danger of perverting the idea of ​​socialism, exaggerating its features like Shchedrin, revealing its true essence. His heroes are the same products of the era. The writer pushes the reader to the disappointing conclusion that the Russian state cannot exist without bureaucracy. We, modern readers, are seeing confirmation of this even now. Of course, no censorship could allow this to go into print.

Platonov's pioneering critics - L. Shubin, S. Bocharov, E. Tolstaya-Segal - talk about the paradoxical combination of lyricism and satire in the writer's work and the extreme polyphony of the narrative, where "the narrator generally agrees with any point of view." Platonov uses Sovietisms, poster and slogan speech, newspaper cliches, clericalisms, barbarisms, “awkwardness” of speech and even Church Slavonicisms, creating his own unique style of storytelling. The very title of the story is tautological; it turns out to be a city of cities. This is a symbolic image of a state that divides and destroys, where people's freedom is minimal. Platonov is outraged by bureaucracy, blatant mismanagement, window dressing, and the abstraction of the general state idea from practical life. Platonov is convinced of the dehumanization of society by the state, and this determines the pathos of his next works.

A word about my favorite writer.

Having recently become acquainted with the “beautiful and furious world” of Plato’s prose, I realized that his work corresponds to the level of hopes and anxieties, ups and downs of the twentieth century.

His works pose the most difficult problems of our lives. The main thing for him is to preserve and preserve life on Earth. The writer enters into an open battle with everyone who would like to “reduce man to the level of an “animal,” grind humanity in an imperialist war, demoralize and corrupt it, eliminate all the results of historical culture.”

During his lifetime, criticism declared the harmful influence of his works on the reader. According to today's literary critics, Andrei Platonov is an outstanding writer.

Platonov wrote his works calmly, “quietly,” without trying to outshout anyone around him. And like a true wizard of words, fingering the “rosary of golden wisdom” / Pushkin /, he listened not to the sound of phrases, but to a complex melody, to disturbing variations of thought.

Every day, even hourly, the work of comprehending the world so absorbed Platonov that he was ashamed of the bright, flowery, but unspiritual words without meaning.

His pen does not rest on ingenuous descriptions of his native Voronezh steppes, although he loves his homeland, the land of his youth, no less than Koltsov and Nikitin. But he speaks about this love with extreme restraint and care. Orphanhood and the poverty of his childhood did not kill the main thing in him - the soul of the child.

Platonov reminds each of us that Man is your first and, probably, most important name.

Platonov’s voice, slightly muffled, tiresomely sad, already in the early stories captivates with its endless modesty, restraint, and some kind of sadness. meekness :« He was once a gentle, sad child, loving his mother and his native hedges, and the field, and the sky above them all... At night, the soul grew in the boy, and deep sleepy forces languished in him, which would one day explode and create the world again. The soul blossomed in him, as in any child, the dark, uncontrollable passionate forces of the world entered him and turned into a person. This is a miracle that every mother admires every day in her child. The mother will save the world because she makes him “human” /The story “Yamskaya Sloboda”/.

How unusual for the twenties, among the sharp, abrupt phrases, “barking” intonations and rude gestures, this is Platonov’s word!

Probably after A.P. Chekhov was not in Russian prose, an artist endowed with modesty in the face of falsely pretentious, loud words.

A. Platonov is always a wise interlocutor, addressing an individual. He is not all in the distance, but near the “human heart”.

I want to see the portrait of A. Platono V, the image of his soul should be taken as an epigraph by the words of F.I. Tyutcheva:

Damage, exhaustion and everything

That gentle smile of fading,

What in a rational being we call

Divine modesty of suffering.

This is a man who did not know the ecstasy of theatricality, the bright light of the word. He is convinced that there is no such thing as someone else’s suffering and pain, and therefore he always remembers the fate of many honest Makars.

In nineteen twenty-nine, A. Platonov wrote the story “Doubting Makar,” which was subjected to biased, biased criticism in the early thirties. After Stalin’s angry response to this story, Platonov disappeared from the readers’ sight, sank to the bottom of obscurity, poverty and illness, sharing the fate of those people about whom he wrote in “Chevengur”.

During the first thaw, the publication of some of Andrei Platonov’s stories became possible, but not “The Pit,” “Chevengur,” or “The Venilian Sea.” These works, published in the West, were returned to their homeland illegally and circulated in typescripts throughout the country. And only in recent years, when the idea that universal human values ​​are higher than class interests ceased to be seditious, did Platonov’s real return to the reader begin.

What caused this attitude towards the writer? In the story “Doubting Makar,” the author showed a man from the lowest strata of society. The man Makar goes to the city to look for the truth. The city amazes him with its senseless luxury, but he finds the proletariat only in the shelter.

“And he sees in a dream a terrible dead idol - a “scientific man” who stands at a great height and sees everything... but does not see Makar, and Makar breaks the idol.”

The idea of ​​this story is that statehood is hostile to the people. Makar is a dreamer pretending to be an eccentric, smart and insightful. He passionately dreams of a machine, industrial Rus'. Makar, having arrived in the capital, visiting offices and construction sites, talking in a lodging house with the proletariat, was the first of Plato’s heroes to doubt the humanistic values ​​of the revolution, since demagoguery reigned all around, “writing bitches”, masters of praise and postscripts, sat in the “offices.” And Makar Ganushkin, an intelligent and insightful person, felt that in such conditions, lack of initiative, passivity, and “senseless fear of government paper, resolutions” develop in people.

And our hero doubted the rightness of the revolutionary cause. His thoughts and “doubts” were taken for ambiguity and anarchism. In them, it seems to me, Andrei Platonov expressed his thoughts, ahead of his time, addressing issues of the fight against corruption, formalism, bureaucracy, unanimity and voicelessness.

Naturally, at that tense time, when the liquidation of the kulaks as a class was underway, Stalin regarded A. Platonov’s work from a political point of view as an “ideologically ambiguous and harmful story,” therefore deciding to deal with the writer in his own way.

After reading the story, I was once again convinced that Platonov, like his Makar, has no doubts about the plans for industrialization. This is historically necessary. In ten years, to go through a path that other countries have traveled for centuries is truly remarkable! There is no other way.

The writer only warns about the dangers of formalism, the troubles of bureaucratic stagnation, callousness, and deliberation. No one wanted to understand this writer’s position, which was ahead of everyone else.

I involuntarily remember Yu There is a story by V. Rasputin “Fire” and a novel by V. Astafiev “The Sad Detective”, in which, just like in the works of Platonov, the writers’ anxiety about the moral health of the people, about the disappearing mercy, sympathy, and friendship between people is heard.

I can say with confidence that Plato’s Makar acts as our contemporary in the fight against the elements of corruption, veneration of rank, and ceremonial praises.

The works of Andrei Platonov help to develop in each of us nobility, courage and active humanism in the modern struggle for peace.