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Abstract: The article analyzes the press responses to published fragments of the novel “Chevengur,” namely articles by D. Talnikov, M. Maisel, and R. Messer. Talnikov’s article on the depiction of the modern village in literature compares two trends in prose of the 1920s: he criticizes L. Leonov, K. Fedin, Vs. Ivanov and A. Platonov’s works, which inherit I. Bunin’s images and represent the “idiocy of village life.” The critic Maisel pays special attention to the overlap between Platonov’s characters and the truth-seekers in M. Gorky’s story “The Town of Okurov,” as well as the prose of working-class writers N. Lyashko and G. Nikiforov. According to critics of the late 1920s, these writers, belonging to the “right-wing” of proletarian literature, depict not an advanced, but a backward worker, burdened with the “ancient traditions” denounced by N. Bukharin. According to the critic Messer, Platonov considers the problems of the “little man in the revolution” following his companions Leonov and Ivanov.