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Abstract:

The present paper proposes a novel interpretation of the short story “The Locks of Epifan” by Andrey Platonov, informed by the repeated textual references to the challenges of communication and mutual understanding between people and between people and nature. The objective of this study is to demonstrate how incommunicability constitutes a pivotal theme within this work and how this is indicative of the author’s stylistic and conceptual shift in the second part of the 1920s.The ensuing discourse will be structured around three main aspects / difficulties related to: the transmission of written communication, including asynchrony and loss of text; the geographical and social distance, i. e. the distance between central power and the people; the lack of a common language in the broadest sense, i. e. linguistic differences and the inability of humans in general, and engineers in particular, to understand the language inherent in nature and its laws. The analysis indicates that both rational language and interhuman communication are inadequate in protecting humans from the threats posed by nature, and do not guarantee their belonging to a human community. The work was composed during the author’s period of service in Tambov, and it was influenced by the emotional tension of those months. This period is regarded as a conceptual turning point, marking the onset of a phase of profound disillusionment: firstly, it concerns man’s capacity for rational domination over nature, and secondly, the possibility of realising the socialist utopia.