Philosophy of Existence and “Mechanical” People in A. Platonov’s War Short Stories

Abstract

The article examines the versions of “mechanical” people in the works of A. Platonov and traces their origin and subsequent process of development. The methodological basis of the study is made up by the works interpreting Platonov’s creative activity from the positions of the following scientific approaches: the contextual approach (M. M. Bakhtin, V. E. Khalizev), according to which meanings generated by extra-textual reality are important for this research and the motif-centered approach (B. M. Gasparov, M. Ya. Polyakov), based on the principle of leitmotif narrative composition. The focus is on the analysis of the image of a “mechanical” person in the story “Inanimate Enemy” (1941?). The character series is obtained by “splitting” the main image into two antino- mic characters – an inanimate Russian shooter and the German non-commissioned officer Rudolf Oscar Waltz. The plot of the story is determined by the author’s internal dialogue, objectified by the opinions and actions of these characters. Observations on the nature of the image of the German send the reader to the “mechanical” people of Platonov’s dramaturgy of the 1930s, showing their “genetic” kinship, the essence of which is declared by Platonov in the Notebooks of 1941–1942, where the writer rejects what is happening in the world as creation of emptiness. Likened to a “gramophone record”, the German soldier manifests an extreme “reduction of the human spirit”. In this perspective, the figure of Rudolf Waltz is a technique of purely artistic defamiliarization. This idea is confirmed by Waltz’s death. It is on a par with the reprisals of the Creators of Platonov’s dramaturgy with their unsuccessful creations: the Russian shooter, like them, destroys Waltz as an “inanimate entity”.

Keywords

• a. platonov
• notebooks
• dramaturgy
• “mechanical” people.