Гастрономическая сатира Андрея Платонова: поэтика и социальная критика
ANDREI PLATONOV’S GASTRONOMIC SATIRE: POETICS AND SOCIAL CRITICISM

Summary/Abstract: The article explores a distinctive satirical strand in Andrei Platonov’s works of the 1920s–1930s associated with the depiction of food and food supply, an aspect that has not previously been subjected to systematic analysis. The relevance of the study is due to the need to fill this gap. The article is aimed at identifying the innovative nature of Platonov’s gastronomic satire as an integral system of a non-classical type, drawing on his journalism, poetry, early prose, and the play The Hurdy-Gurdy. The article explores how the theme of food functions as a key tool for socio-political criticism and expressing the writer’s philosophical vision of the essence of communist society. Employing historical-biographical, historical-literary, contextual, and intertextual methods, the study situates gastronomic satire within Platonov’s biography, the classical satirical tradition, and the cultural and ideological context of the era. Motif and plot analysis is applied to the gastronomic motifs of The Hurdy-Gurdy, which structure the plot and serve as the foundation for political allegory. The article demonstrates that Platonov’s gastronomic satire combines traditional comedy techniques with the dialogical principle of merging the author’s and characters’ voices, and that it couples unsparing social criticism with philosophical ambivalence and compassion for the “little man”. The findings confirm that the writer’s gastronomic satire constitutes an integral artistic system of a non-classical type and a distinctive form of social thought. The significance of these results lies in introducing a new dimension of Platonov’s satirical heritage into scholarly discourse and in establishing a framework for analyzing satire of this type in twentieth-century Russian literature.

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