“Happy Moscow”: Incompletable vs Incompleted

The article is devoted to textological issues of Platonov’s literary heritage, which are to be addressed and solved by the first scientific collection of the writer’s works, being prepared at the IWL RAS. The author focuses on the text history of the writer’s second novel Happy Moscow” which for a long time was considered as unfinished. It was first published in 1991 from an autograph of the family archive. The article observes the stages of the writer’s work on the novel, which began in the summer of 1933. Based on the identified realia, reflected on the last pages of the autograph, the research establishes the period when the manuscript was finalized (the second half of December 1934 – the first days of 1935). With all the signs of the novel’s incompleteness (the absence of the note “The End,” which is traditional for all the writer’s autographs; about a hundred questions in the margins with various marks have not been removed; the author’s numbering of chapters ends at the 9th chapter; on the first page of the autograph the title Happy Moscow is crossed out and another one is added, etc.), the author puts forward and proves the thesis about the fundamental incompleteness of this novel, its special status in Platonov’s creative searching in 1932/1933–1935, and at the same time the integration of Happy Moscow in the historical and literary context of the time. The paper lies on the latest theoretical researches, analysis of manuscript materials from Platonov’s personal funds, and data from the publishing funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature, which make it possible to reconstruct the history of the novel’s text and its editional history.