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Abstract:

The topic “Platonov and Usievich,” which occupies a special place in the biography of the writer of the second half of the 1930s, is now significantly enriched with new material, which was first introduced into academic circulation during the preparation of Platonov’s critical articles of 1936–1941 (“Essays,” volume VI, book 3). This article is devoted to the literary life of 1933 and the preparation of three articles by Usievich, in which the name of the author of “For the Future” is mentioned (published in January and February 1934). The political and literary contexts of criticism’s return to the topic “under the guise of foolishness” are considered. Based on the materials of periodicals and archives, the main directions of the development of this topic in the biography of Usievich as a critic are reconstructed: from an article on the work of N. Zabolotsky to articles on the forms of class struggle in Soviet literature. The texts and chronicle of the preparation of three articles mentioning Platonov are analyzed; they were published in the jubilee (for the opening of the XVII Congress of the CPSU(b)) issues of “Literary Newspaper,” “Literary Critic” and the collective work “Soviet Literature at a New Stage” prepared by the Institute of Literature and Language within the Communist Academy. During the analysis of the materials of collective work deposited in the Communist Academy foundation (Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences), it was established that Usievich acted as its responsible editor; the discovered manuscript of a previously unknown fragment about the story “For the Future” was attributed and prepared for its first publication.