플라토노프의 전쟁 산문 연구

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse war prose featuring one important genre in Platonov's creation and study his perception of war and peace, enemy and friend, life and death, and words and ideologies. Platonov worked as war correspondent during World War II and recorded his war experience as most writers of the time did. The war in itself was a tragic event but it served as a new instrument of creation, which ironically brought the most productive period of writing to the author. During and after the war, war was described as victory and tragedy in the Soviet Union. At that time, tragedy was not intrinsic one where no one could be a winner, but rather it was related to a noble sacrifice for the sake of a glorious victory. Therefore, Soviet war literature is eventually regarded as ideological expansion of socialist realism in a monologue. Platonov's war prose, however, is essentially distinguished from this universal idea. He talks about love, intrinsic tragedy of war, human beings, and peace rather than hatred, victory, heros, and war respectively. What can be found in Platonov's war prose is deep pain and despair, and exit-less tragedy. Furthermore, what is the most interesting thing about Platonov's war prose is his profound exploration of the essence of Fascism and Totalitarianism. He thought the essence of Fascism could be revealed by the fact that human lose their own language and adopt the language of the ruler. Generally in Platonov's work language loss boils down to the loss of humanity. This position on relationship between language and ideology can be found in his work written in the late 20s, such as The Foundation Pit and Chevengur. As shown in The Foundation Pit, people who repeated the language of Utopia, namely heat of the state, like a parrot eventually faced a tragic death, in which the writer predicted a bleak future of Utopia. And now Platonov observes a similar phenomenon out of Fascism which caused one of the most tragic wars in the 20th century.