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Abstract:

The article analyses A. Platonov’s notebook during the period of his journalist’s career in the paper “Krasnaya Zvezda.” The author dates the period when these notes appeared as well as clarifies the time of Platonov’s conversation with the soldiers the First Polish Army. The events and realia mentioned in his notes are synchronized with the historical context and writer’s “personal” time. The author analyzes the specifics of the communicative behavior of A. Platonov’s interlocutors, the well-being of soldiers and officers who fought under the Polish banner as part of the operational and strategic formations of the Red Army. The events and realities mentioned in the notebook are brought into line with the historical context and the writer’s “personal” time in the course of historical and literary commentary, and textological reconstruction. We find out individual writing strategies exploited by A. Platonov who created unique war description. The article traces the relatedness Platonov’s notes to the newspapers published in 1939–1944; the latter spread different versions about Polish military units deployed in the USSR and their part in combat action during the war. The author comments upon the notes on moral and psychological state of “yesterday enemies” who survived the Soviet military imprisonment and became “battle comrades.” The paper also restores Platonov’s reductions made by him in his own works, clarifies the names and surnames mentioned in the notebook, and interprets the allegorical drawings that formed the signs of handwritten “search literature” (V. Khalizev’s term) that existed in the censored era.