Plants, songs and wanderers. Andrej Platonov’s stylistic and thematic evolution from poetry to prose

This dissertation examines the relationship between poetry and prose in the work of Andrej Platonov (Andrej Platonovič Klimentov, 1899–1951), a writer who has come to occupy a canonical place in Russian-language literature in no less part thanks to a linguistic style of exceptional density that pushes the expressive possibilities of language to the point of absurdity. The central argument of the dissertation is that one of the roots of Platonov's distinctive style can be traced back to his own poetic experience: to his ideas on verse, its formal qualities, and his conception of the role of poetry in the new socialist society. Platonov's transition from poetry to prose is therefore understood as a gradual evolution in which formal habits, thematic concerns, and ways of seeing developed in verse are carried over, tested, and transformed in prose. The dissertation begins by analysing Platonov's two poetry collections, Golubaja glubina (1922) and Pojuščie dumy (1926), as dialectical spaces in which opposing thematic tendencies coexist and evolve: the agitational-proletarian on one side, the lyrical-peasant on the other. This textual analysis is accompanied by a reconstruction of Platonov's theoretical ideas on poetry, drawn from his essays, articles, and archival material related to his work as a poetry editor. The analysis then turns to the formal mechanisms through which poetry enters prose, concentrating on the period 1920–1927, when the two modes of expression actively coexisted. Here the dissertation introduces the concept of the “poetic break”, a stylistic device consisting in the explicit quotation of verse within a prose text, where the verse functions as a condensation of the narrative, to then argue that this practice constitutes a fundamental structuring element of Platonov's mature prose style. Finally, the continuity between Platonov's poetry and prose is examined through the lens of the invariant motif — a concept borrowed from Aleksandr Žolkovskij — by tracing the trajectory of the representation of plants from its origins in Platonov's poems through its development across the prose works of the 1920s and 1930s, up to and including Čevengur. This motif is selected not for its prominence, but precisely because it is one of the subtler poetic traces that persists across different periods and contexts, testifying to the depth and durability of the poetry-prose relationship in Platonov's writing.