The Artistic Memorandum Of Individual Destiny In Utopian

Andrei Platonov is an important writer in Russian literature in the20th century. His works, which has been prohited for half a century due to political, social and other reasons, return to people’s spotlight as a kind of "Return to Literature" after the disintegration of the former Soviet Union. People come closer to this very writer who once "enraged" Stalin, and disclose his mysterious veil gradually.As a writer who grew up with the October Revolution, Platonov has once been obsessed with Utopia. The Utopian sentiments in his early works are closely tied with the Utopian complex of Russia for thousands of years. However, having felt the worrisome social reality in the Utopian age, he depicts with strong sarcasm the real social phenomenon of that age in his works written between1920s and1930s, showing us a "beautiful yet violent world".Staring people’s existence and destiny anxiously, Platonov depicts several typical characters of that age in his works, such as the "introverted person", the Utopian practitioner, the "anti-Utopian" and the flower-like children, etc., all of which show the tragic destinies of people in the Utopian society. His works not only reconstruct the social condition and atmosphere of the Utopian age, but also suspect and question that age through various characters in his works.The deep and profound humanitarian spirit in Russian literature and culture casts a great impact on Platonov, who, together with the characters in his works, ponders over and searches for the salvation of the individual. All of his characters are faced with living difficulties, emotional blankness and lack of psychological balance. They cannot see the significance of their living, nor the happiness the Utopian society has promised to them. Therefore, they question, frustrate and hesitate, either wandering or trying to get away from the Utopia and to pursue the mental balance in the nature, expressing a silent resistence and protest.Platonov employs a unique artistic techniques, such as deformation of words, redundant expressions and other "non-standard" expressions, to insinuate the individuals’ non-normalized state in the era of Utopia and therefore constructs a challenge against the "standard". By using the parody of Utopian official language, he succeeds in conveying the challenge that his characters put forward against the absolute authority, and demonstrating the conditions of individual existence. Additionally, through the shift of narrative perspective, Platonov endows characters with the independence and autonomy, expresses characters’ and the author’s understanding of individual existence and creates a discourse space for contrastive ideas. All those make his works during1920s and1930s become the artistic memorandum in the Utopian era.