“Absurd in grammar does not mean a particular tragedy” (I. Brodsky): getting out of a “semantic dead end” in the plays by A. Platonov. A review of the book: Kogut K.S., Khryashcheva N.P. Poetics of the dramatic works of A.P. Platonov in the late 1930s - early 1950s: intertextual dialogue. Moscow, Nestor-Istoria Publishers, 2018, 280 pp

The article reviews the book by literary scholars from Ekaterinburg, Doctor of Philology N.P. Khryashcheva and Candidate of Philology K.S. Kogut, devoted to the interpretation of the dramatic works by A. Platonov. The authors regard them from the viewpoint of poetics, i.e. deciphering the artistic codes of the writer and his interpretation of the Soviet and world civilization of the mid-20th century. Attention is paid not only to the scientific novelty of the monograph (associated with the writer’s legacy which is still insufficiently explored), unpublished in Platonov’s lifetime and often evaluated as marginal and incompatible with the narrative prose of Platonov, but also to the methodology of hermeneutics of the texts of four plays of the late 1930s - early 1950s, namely: “The Voice of the Father”, “A Magical Being”, “A Student of the Lyceum”, and “Noah’s Ark”. The authors of the monograph agree with the conclusion of many researchers that the non-canonical dramatic form of the plays and the use of “formula” rhetoric, plot-related and character signs in the artistic system do not testify to a compromise with the dominant epistemes but to the immersion into the deep meanings of existence with the purpose of cognizing historical reality. In the monograph, the following two aspects seem rather significant: on the one hand, it is a holistic analysis of each text and its genetic and associative multilayer structure, and on the other hand, the paradigm of analysis allowing the author to reveal the semantic and character ties and development of character and thematic motifs and to demonstrate the holisticity of Platonov’s evolving artistic system. The method of discovering extratextual allusions (biographical and socio-political) is also productive, as it keeps the interpretation of the plays within the boundaries of the author’s intention, and not within philological hypotheses of a researcher. The monograph substantiates one of the reasons of the writer’s attempt at creating a piece of drama: not just a method of concealing the author’s meanings (“not cryptography” by itself) from social censorship, but penetration into the worldview of the characters with the aim of overcoming the author’s personal subjectivity in answers to the intractable problems of existence. The monograph presents the principled dialogical character of Platonov’s works: autodialogue, intertextuality, and dialogue with existence.