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A.M. Gorky Institute
of World Literature
of the Russian Academy of Sciences

IWL RAS Publishing

A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature
of the Russian Academy of Sciences

 IWL RAS

Povarskaya 25a, 121069 Moscow, Russia

8-495-690-05-61

edition@imli.ru

iwl.ras.publishing@gmail.com

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Information about the author: 

Boris N. Borisov, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Moscow International University, Leningradsky ave., 17, 125040 Moscow, Russia.

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4523-8755

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Abstract: The article attempts to comprehensively consider the representative function of the scenes of a joint night feast in the works of A.P. Platonov in the 1930s. The research material is the first part of the unfinished “Technical Novel,” “Hurdy-Gurdy,” “Happy Moscow,” and “Jan.” The analysis of micro motifs, compositional techniques, and plot situations revealed the presence in these texts of elements of the feast narrative and various cultural and historical variants of the feast topos representation. In particular, the article exposes such sources of Platonov’s feast motif as the ancient symposium and its satirical version in late Roman literature, the New Testament motif of the marriage feast, the image of the late feast of Golden Age poetry, “perverse” feasts in Pushkin’s “little tragedies,” the aesthetics of the still life of the late avant-garde. The appeal to one or another cultural tradition of depicting a feast is accompanied by its total revision in Platonov’s works, leading to the deconstruction of its original semantic and emotional content. The result of the artistic development of the world tradition is the formation of the author’s plot-motif complex of the feast with its inherent mortal connotations and negative semantics. 

  • Keywords: feast, motif, reminiscence, allusion, mortal code, feast narrative.

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