Andrej Platonov and the pragmatics of radical modernism

The article discusses one of the possible ways to interpret Platonov’s oeuvre with regard to the Avant-Garde problematics of life-creation, its pragmatics of action and expression. There are noticeable affinities between the historical Avant-Garde, its radical left-wing politics and poetics on the one hand, and Platonov’s “cryptomodernist” aesthetics of the “new communality” on the other. Platonov’s ironic grotesque is treated here as a major trait illuminating his profoundly modernist creativity.