Reflections on Platonov Reflections on Platonov: The Summary of the RAS Institute of Philosophy’s XVI Conference “Problems of Russian Self-Consciousness: ‘People Can Live, but It Is Forbidden,’ Dedicated to the 120^th Birth Anniversary of Andrei Platonov”

On September 24, 2019, the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences held the XVI Conference “Problems of Russian Self-Consciousness: ‘People Can Live, but It Is Forbidden,’ Dedicated to the 120^th Birth Anniversary of Andrei Platonov.” The presentation of reports by the participants was built as a discussion about the book Philosophical Anthropology of Andrei Platonov by S.S. Neretina, S.A. Nickolsky, V.N. Porus (2019). After the reports of the book’s author, other scholars from various Russian universities and research institutes made presentations. The main topics of the reports were: the relationship between philosophy and artistic creation, the writer’s response to the historical and cultural context of his epoch, the formation of a special language for describing the reality perceived by the author, the need for interpretation and study of human nature in the culture of the 20th century. During the discussion, a special interest was paid to the motives of utopia in Platonov’s work, to the themes of the realization of abstract ideas, the correlation of a general idea and a particular thing, the motives of dehumanization and humanism, the literary motive of “duality” and alienated and impartial observation and witnessing, the existential problem of borderline states that transform a person and society.