«Učenik liceja» Andreja Platonova i vopros o parodii

The article examines Andrei Platonov’s play "The Lyceum Pupil" ("Uchenik Litseia," 1947–1948), written for the 150th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, in light of the functions of parody and parodic devices in the writer’s work of the 1940s. The figure of the young Pushkin is analysed in relation to Platonov’s own biography and literary fate, as well as to the children, folk characters and elderly figures of his prose of the 1920s–1940s (Chevengur, The Recovery of the Lost, Yushka, etc.). Particular attention is paid to the play’s links with folklore and to the portrayal of Derzhavin, in whom parodic traits merge with features typical of Platonov’s elderly characters. A comparison with Daniil Kharms’s Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin and other Pushkin-related texts shows that, although both writers reject the Soviet Pushkin canon, their results differ fundamentally: in Kharms parody serves the absurd, while in Platonov parodic devices, in Tynianov’s sense, acquire a new function. The play thus emerges not as a parody but as a work in which Platonov dismantles the ideological reading of Pushkin and, through his image, denounces the oppression exercised by power over the writer and the individual.