Article

Name: Ekfrasises of A. Platonov: On the Problem of Cryptography

Authors: Proskurina Elena N.

The Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Literary Plot and Historical Commentary

Abstract: The paper considers A. Platonov’s ekfrasis as a stable unit of a plot narration in the writer’s works and as one of the key means of his cryptography. The paper’s author pays attention to two types of verbal pictures in Platonov’s works: a word icon and a word painting. An analysis of the writer’s texts has shown that, orienting himself to a canonical model, the writer creates his own variant of a word icon in such stories as, for instance, «The homeland of electricity», «The July storm» as well as «Excavation». Most distinctly manifested in the word pictures of the novel «The happy Moscow» and the story «Jan» is avant-garde poetics. Traced in their dynamics, the ekfrasises of the said works make it possible to see the innermost aspects of Platonov’s changing attitude to the soviet reality.

Keywords: plot narration, ekfrasis, palimpsest, iconographic canon, avant-garde poetics, cryptography.

Bibliography: