Platonov and Theories of Modernism

This article seeks to establish a genealogy of the notion of modernism with respect to Platonov criticism in both the Soviet Union and the West. Noting the complexity of trying to account for the authorʼs idiosyncratic literary style, it suggests that modernism has functioned more as a term of subjective evaluation than of objective description (particularly in the West, where an institutional commitment to avant-garde poetics long served to differentiate scholarship from Soviet socialist realism). Whilst not denying Platonovʼs links to a number of modernist and avant-garde principles and practices, the article also argues that too exclusive an emphasis on modernism has led to a resistance to seeing Platonov in terms of a broadly conceptualised realist tradition.