M. Prishvin and A. Platonov: ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’

Abstract

The article examines critical reviews of M. Prishvin’s novella Naked Spring [Neodetaya vesna] published in the journal Oktyabr in 1940. The scholar and literary critic L. Surovova describes an overall positive reaction to the writer’s chronicle of his trip to the Volga River: He travelled there to observe animals’ survival strategies during the seasonal flooding. The occasional negative remarks in the press invoked the harsh dispute of 1930, when the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers attacked Prishvin’s biographical novel Kashchey’s Chain [Kashcheeva tsep] and the novella Cranes’ Homeland [Zhuravlinaya rodina]. Their characters were castigated as proponents of a bourgeois ideology. The 1940 critical coverage contained, however, a rather scathing review by A. Platonov, whose strong dislike of Prishvin’s writing style was also rooted in this 1930s’ ideological dispute. Surovova suggests that this polemic arose from a clash between the two radically opposing mentalities — Prishvin’s ‘contemplative observer’ against Platonov’s ‘action-orientated’ approach — and resulted in an exchange on a critical as well as literary plane, namely, in Platonov’s novella A Great Man [Velikiy chelovek].