THE LANGUAGE OF A. PLATONOV. (RUSSIAN TEXT)

In spite of the great burst in popularity of Andrei Platonov during the recent two decades, his highly original prose style has so far remained largely ignored both by Soviet and Western scholarship. The purpose of the present work is dual: to discover the reasons for this blind spot in the study of Platonov and to lay a foundation for the future study of Platonov's style based on the latest methods of lexical semantics.; An attempt is made to isolate the dominant stylistic device of Platonov's prose. Apparently, this is a substitution of certain words in a phrase by their cognates with a different type of combinability, creating a stylistic effect not unlike that produced by the "traditional" tropes: the metaphor, the metonymy, etc. In fact, it is demonstrated that Platonov's substitution forms a continuum with the metaphor, the latter being in its turn a substitution in the field of semantic combinability, whereas Platonov's substitution consists of two distinct types: a substitution in the field of lexical combinability and a substitution in the field of morpho-syntactic combinability.; Furthermore, it is shown that the fact that an obvious problem of Platonov's style has been so far ignored was caused by two separate factors: (1) In the case of Soviet scholarship, the major factor has been an ideological danger implicit in such investigation, since stylistic peculiarities of Platonov's prose emerged largely as a reaction against certain processes in the post-revolutionary Russian language caused by ideological developments in the society. (2) In the case of Western scholarship, the factor has been either simple lack of awareness of any problem, or a misunderstanding about the nature of the device in question which remained largely undeveloped in major Western literary languages.; Finally, an attempt is made to trace the development of the substitution as a stylistic device, from its origin in the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky to its position in the prose language of some current Russian authors.