Children's perception and folk wisdom: the philosophy of life in the short stories of A. P. Platonov

The subject of this study is A.P. Platonov's true story "The Unknown Flower," as well as the short stories "Dry Bread" and "Flower on the Ground," in their genre-poetical unity and in relation to folklore tradition. This article analyzes the functioning of folk wisdom as a meaning-forming and structural element of Andrei Platonovich Platonov's artistic world. The focus is on the transformation of folklore tradition in the author's poetics, where folk wisdom becomes a form of artistic knowledge and socio-philosophical reflection. The article reveals the organic unity of the embodiment of folk wisdom in various forms of short fiction by the writer. The consistent use of "childish perception" proves to be a stable element fulfilling the function of cognition of the fundamental laws of existence in the artistic system of A.P. Platonov. The methodological basis is formed by a comparative-contrastive analysis and an intertextual approach applied to the fairy tale "The Unknown Flower" and the short stories "Dry Bread" and "Flower on the Ground" in their correlation with the folk tale tradition and the writer's novels. The scientific novelty of this work lies in its first comprehensive and multifaceted systematic analysis of folk wisdom as a stable, pervasive element of A.P. Platonov's artistic system, using the unique material of his short fiction. This novelty is also determined by the fact that it is in these short fiction genres that the author's key philosophical intuitions, long overshadowed by his novels, most clearly crystallize. The multifaceted symbolism of the central images is understood as the personification of life's resilience and a metaphor for the tragic fate of ordinary people under the harsh conditions of the social experiments of the 1920s–1950s. The article concludes that folk wisdom in small genres serves as an effective tool for socio-philosophical reflection and a genuine ideological alternative to the utopian projects presented in The Foundation Pit and Chevengur.