Parental Yards of Andrey Platonov’s Juvenile Sea: Cosmogony of the Economy of Socialism

The article is an attempt to analyze socio-economic ideas of emergence and development of the economy of socialism, found in the Andrey Platonov’s Juvenile Sea, where the history of creation and development of a large agricultural enterprise in the arid plains of the South-East of the USSR is represented in artistic form. It is shown that by placing in the center of his narrative the orthodox model of progressive evolution of Soviet enterprises from sole-breeder and small collective farms to large state agrarian farms Platonov exposes this social, economic and existential criticism in terms of the reality of multilayered, mix economy. It is noted how the Juvenile Sea paradoxically rethinks questions of objectives and criteria of efficiency of socialist economy from the point of view of formation of a new local community, a kind of Gemeinschaft of socialist enterprise, embodied in its very name “Parental Yards.” Special importance in the study is given to analysis of generational change, its typical senior and junior representatives on examples of relations of main characters “Parental Yards.” Finally, it is emphasized that the formally optimistic ending of Platonova’s story contains in itself anxious mood of hope and despair, connected with contradictory prospects of combining in the Soviet economy of the community “Parental Yards,” youth technocratism Juvenile Sea and the Stalinist leadership of the “Big Brother”.