ABSTRACT
Factography is a term coined in the late 1920s to designate a certain aesthetic practice preoccupied with the production of facts as opposed to the fiction or fabrication of facts in the emerging doctrine of socialist realism. The debates about fact and truth, about the traps and falsities of Leninist reflection theory, of the illusionism and theatricality of realism and fiction, were a topic of the day in the avant-garde discussions. According to the factographers, a fact is not something that one can passively excavate by means of observation, but a process of production that has its specific artistic means. Chehonadskikh considers Platonov’s 1920s texts on a method of literature and his 1930s essays on collectivisation. His position will be identified as a mediatory point between a radical critique of the novel form in Tretyakov and Shklovsky’s theory, and the defence of realism and classical novel as developed by Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács in the journal Literary Critic. Platonov’s contribution to the discussion on representation of facts in literature, above all, clarifies political views on collectivisation among the left-wing writers, thus, illuminating Platonov’s sabotage of Stalinism through his philosophical critique of fact and representation.
