Overcoming Death and Oblivion in the Structure of A. Platonov’s Short Story Aphrodite

This article interprets the spiritual and philosophical significance of A. Platonov’s short story Aphrodite (1944–1946), whose main theme is man’s duel with death and oblivion. The overarching theme of the story guides the objectives of this research. Specifically, it aims to: demonstrate the synthesis of the writer’s biography and the traits of the autobiographical character; trace the process of shaping Aphrodite through fractal poetics; and, finally, discover the “forces” that ensure the movement of the narrative. The theoretical and methodological basis of the article has a complex character. Since it was impossible to speak “about the most intimate things” in Stalin’s time, Platonov resorted to the poetics of cryptography as a “method of the second meaning” (A. Platonov), the development of which was continued by several scholars dealing with Platonov studies (V. V. Perkhin, E. V. Antonova, E. N. Proskurina, etc.). The problem of autobiographical writing is connected with the poetics in the writer’s work. Trying to conform with censorship, the writer veils his mental images by transferring them to autobiographical characters. The gift of a civil engineer determined the structure of his short story. Fractal poetics organically forms the basis of the research model described in this article (B. Mandelbrot, A. V. Voloshinov, N. Y. Zheltova, and others). The analysis indicates that the short story Aphrodite is the first artistic reflection of Platonov’s personal tragedy, the death of his beloved son, which he considered “also important for everyone”. The fractal approach applied to the short story allows for the observation of an artistic synthesis of a biographical writer who becomes a creative author and an autobiographical character, embodied in the technique of the “holographic effect”. It is demonstrated that the formative factor of Aphrodite at the first level is presented by mirror-symmetrical nonlinear self-similarity. The second level, which deepens the form of the short story by recursion, outlines the philosophical and ontological meaning of the driving forces of the narrative. The struggle between good and evil is depicted here in the context of a third – weak – force. It is manifested in the loyalty to the beloved and the memory of them, represented in creative work. Weak force is capable of overcoming death and oblivion.