Andrei Platonov, one of the best Russian writers and playwrights, was not widely known, but many of his works are still extremely relevant and readable. For example, his fairy tale "The Unknown Flower" is included in the school literary curriculum.
Andrey Platonovich Platonov was born at the end of the 19th century in Voronezh. According to him, his life was devoid of a period of adolescence, and from childhood he immediately stepped into the adult world. Nevertheless, he considered his fate as happy as it was tragic.
The writer's childhood passed in a large poor family, and from the age of 13 he had to work with his father so that the family could avoid hunger. By the age of 20, Andrei Platonov had mastered several professions - he worked as a janitor, a messenger, a crawler of railway tracks and an ameliorator. But his real vocation is journalism and publicism.
Platonov's works are distinguished by depth, realism, bordering on fabulousness, but this does not lose its meaning. The mass reader does not know many of his works because he was “lucky” to create in Soviet times, when behind every word the censors tried to find anti-Soviet seditious thoughts, and Platonov's works were precisely those florid and ambiguous that were forbidden to print. In 1946, the writer was struck off the list of writers for telling about the broken fate of a soldier.
Fairy tale "Unknown flower" - about the plot
The plot of this work by Platonov revolves around a small defenseless seed of a plant that is trying to survive and sprout in an abandoned wasteland, on lifeless clay soil. And, despite the fact that he has no chance, he is still fighting, looking for ways to salvation where there shouldn't be any.
And the reward for his labors and striving for life becomes a little girl who is also lonely and uncomfortable in this world. With its help, the plant gains the opportunity not only to survive, but also to turn into a flower, to give life to its seed-children.
And this fairy tale-reality of Platonov is filled with hidden meaning, behind a simple, at first glance, plot is hidden the mystery of survival, which lies in the character of each person, but not everyone manages to reveal and nurture these qualities in themselves.
"Unknown flower" - the history of the creation of the work
In the last years of his life, already being sick with tuberculosis, Andrei Platonovich wrote a lot about children and for children. But even these works of his were balancing on the verge of realism and fantasy. However, in "Unknown Flower" fantasy is reduced to a minimum, and the main emphasis is placed on the subtext, on what each of the readers will see in the work, which he will set for himself as the main idea and meaning.
This fairy tale was written a year before the death of the writer and became a kind of testament for his daughter and for all children of this generation. In the tale, Platonov raised eternal rhetorical questions - how to live, why to live, how to make the world around him better, and each reader must find the answers to them himself.
