Utopija prehojene poti. (Gradbena jama in Morje mladosti Andreja Platonova)

Andrej Platonov wrote the short story The Foundation Pit (Котлован) between December 1929 and April 1930. In the Soviet Russia this was the era of accelerated industrialization and forced collectivization of farms, as planed for the fi rst fi ve-year period (1928–1932). Despite the unquestionable historical background, which in Platonov’s work emerges mainly as amalgamation of his own rendition with the contemporary linguistic world of journalistic and agitprop propaganda and the language of the peasant and working classes, the short story is a tale about the relationship that a person who is part of Russian “culture” established with the world of the new era. Unlike the social-political plan, which focused on the future, Platonov thinks that the utopia of the new order can be realized only with the view of the path on which Russian man had traveled for many centuries in search for happiness and justice. Verifying possible success and correctness of the new plan for the future is thus only possible by comparing it to the original Russian philosophical thought (particularly religious), with the rich literary tradition of Russian utopic genre, and particularly with folk culture, which could translated the new social order only to the language of its hundred-year-old oral tradition: folk culture also built its hope for more just and better life on myth, legends, and utopias. In Platonov’s short story the attempt of total amalgamation of two linguistic codes (the new and the old) emerges as a world that is linguistically completely esoteric. The reality does not exist any more, only the absurdity of its manifestation remains. In the short story The Sea of Youth (Ювенильное море) a few years later (1934), during the second fi ve-year period, the previous linguistic obscurity of the world materialized in the reality of the every-day existence. The short story The Foundation Pit (Котлован, 1930) is one of Andrei Platonov’s most characteristic works. The study points out the individuality of his ambivalent poetics, which on the one hand renders the events during the Soviet fi rst fi ve-year period in the language of the time and space that it describes, and on the other hand it refers to the original Russian philosophical thought, to the literary tradition of the utopic genre and to the themes and motifs of folk tradition. The short story The Sea of Youth (Ювенильное море, 1934) in Platanov’s prose fi gures as the last attempt at a synthesis between his own unique poetics and ≫societal directive≪ typical of the literary life in Russia of the time.