For many years now, almost since the founding of the Platonov Festival, the Group for Preparing the First Scholarly Edition of A. P. Platonov’s Works from the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in short the Platonov Group, has always come to Voronezh from «Happy Moscow." The group shares projects with the festival; its participation in the program includes presentations of new Platonov editions, meetings with admirers of Platonov, researchers, and promoters of his legacy. Almost every year, we bring freshly published editions-the latest volume of the Collected Works, books from the „A. P. Platonov Archive“ series, or another issue of Andrei Platonov’s " Country of Philosophers»: Problems of Creativity. This year, it will be the 10th, anniversary issue of Land of Philosophers, which not only unites researchers of Platonov’s work from around the world but also presents previously unknown archival materials on the writer’s biography and creative life.
By 2006, a small scholarly group had formed at the institute to prepare the scholarly Collected Works of Platonov; this scientific project appeared in the institute’s plans in 1993 thanks to the participation of the writer’s daughter, Maria Andreevna Platonova. The first scholarly results of this collaboration were reflected in the publication of the initial issues of the collective work «Andrei Platonov’s 'Country of Philosophers': Problems of Creativity.
For Platonov’s centenary, the writer’s notebooks were prepared, a scholarly description of the manuscript of the novel Happy Moscow (first published in 1991) was compiled, the history of engineer Platonov’s work in 1932–1935 at the «Rosmetroves» Trust was documented for the first time, and unique, previously unknown materials by and about the writer from the FSB archive were published. In 2004, Volume I of the scholarly Collected Works (Works) was released, covering Platonov’s Voronezh period: poetry, stories, and articles.
The transfer of the family archive to the Manuscript Department of the IMLI marked a fundamentally new stage in the work on the Collected Works: the group now worked not with document xeroxes but with living manuscripts-Platonov’s autographs and lifetime typescripts.
It took almost five years to sort and provide scholarly descriptions of the Platonov family archive (Fond No. 629) that arrived in the Manuscript Department. Six inventories were created («Manuscripts," «Notebooks and Notes," «Letters," «Materials for the Biography," «A. P. Platonov’s Library," «Materials of the Writer’s Wife and Daughter»). The «Manuscripts» inventory includes 364 autographs and authorized typescripts by Platonov; today, this is the largest repository of the writer’s manuscripts, each of which we have dated. Every page has been described-not only the recto but also the verso. Platonov often used blank versos of typescripts of other works as paper for new texts. Fragments of an autograph of one work might be found on the versos of typescripts of another text or among other materials; during the archive sorting, it was crucial to reunite these fragments, etc.
Some single manuscript sheets revealed their closest connections to sheets from other archival repositories. For instance, the autograph of Platonov’s brilliant article «The Great Deaf Woman» (1930), held in RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), had a gap-a missing page fragment; the article had previously been printed with a note about the loss. A fragment that had fallen out during the first transfer of family archive materials to state storage (1951) was discovered during the family archive sorting and now the article’s text is printed from two sources-the incomplete RGALI autograph and the fragment from the IMLI Platonov fond. Thanks to the archive, the first edition of the novel Chevengur-Builders of the Country-was finally restored, and the text history of the main novel gained its true, rather than fabricated, history, as it had been before.
In the scholarly agenda for studying the writer’s work, questions of the specificity of his legacy hold a special place. Documents of Platonov-the-writer, including his letters, are stored not only in specialized literary archives (RGALI, RO IRLI, OR IMLI, OR GLM) but also in places completely unrelated to literature, which is explained by the biography of writer Platonov-the foremost land reclamation specialist, engineer, and inventor (patents obtained by Platonov are held both in our fond and in the Russian Patent Library). Production notes, business correspondence, drawings, and patents represent not only a crucial part of Platonov’s life but also lead us to the phenomenon of his literary persona, explain the writer’s aesthetic and ideological stance in the literary life of the era, and provide rich material from life transformed by the artist’s pen into a new reality, a universe.
The first book of the «A. P. Platonov Archive» was published in 2009; on its cover is an autograph that became the codex of our edition:
«Please leave as is. AP.»
This note was made by Platonov in 1938 on the margins of the typescript of the story July Thunderstorm and refers to editorial corrections to his text. For us, this Platonic formula, which has a universal character, became the motto of the Platonov Group: to go with the author and after the author. Both in relation to the texts of his works, which endured monstrous not only lifetime but also posthumous editing, and to the writer’s biography, around which many myths, and sometimes outright falsehoods, have accumulated.
Working with the writer’s manuscripts allows one to enter the fantastic world of the birth of Platonic masterpieces-to travel with the writer from brilliant variants of a single phrase, paragraph, chapter draft to the text that became world-famous. «To follow the thought of a great man is the most fascinating science»-these widely known lines by A. Pushkin most accurately convey the meaning and pathos of the Platonov Group’s work with the writer’s manuscripts, which reveal to us the secrets of the writer’s laboratory and, if not providing a full answer to the eternal question «how is it done," at least pave a true path to it-more precisely, a trail.
But this is always a meeting with the «cherished person and grandiose writer, chronicler of the 20th century, Andrei Platonov." Our task is to help bring his work back to its authentic form.
The Platonov Group thanks Voronezh, the festival, and the Voronezh Region Government for their support of our shared Platonov endeavor.