«The river Potudan» by Andrei Platonov: interpretation in the light of Freud's theory of the unconscious

The artistic world of Andrei Platonov's works is complex and unique and is largely shaped by the personal experience of the writer, who was an engineer, artist and philosopher. These three Platonov’s hypostases determined the way of interpretation of his "The River Potudan". The analysis of the story’s problematic field proposed in the article reveals the symbolic content of the key images from the positions of Sigmund Freud’s theory. The images-symbols of Nikita Firsov, Lyuba Kuznetsova, and the River Potudan are reviewed as the main elements “codes” identified by Freud in the structure of consciousness. Reference to psychoanalysis helps reveal the deep philosophical content of these images, each of them can be correlated with one of the main categories of Freud’s studies on the unconscious ("Id", "ego" and "super-ego").