Andrej Platonov as Literary Critic: Embodying the New Man

Having begun his career in the 1920s writing – among others – literary criticism, Platonov returns to the same genre again in the mid 1930s after having been pushed to the margins of belles lettres by the literary establishment. In both his longer critical essays and his shorter book reviews, the writer uses his position as a critic to polemicize with the official conception of the New Man, while at the same time putting forth an alternative (to the socialist realist model) vision of literature based on the best of the Russian 19th and 20th century traditions.