The paper considers A. Platonov’s ekfrasis as a stable unit of a plot narration in the writer’s
works and as one of the key means of his cryptography. The paper’s author pays attention to two types of verbal pictures in Platonov’s works: a word icon and a word painting. An analysis of the
writer’s texts has shown that, orienting himself to a canonical model, the writer creates his own
variant of a word icon in such stories as, for instance, «The homeland of electricity», «The July
storm» as well as «Excavation». Most distinctly manifested in the word pictures of the novel
«The happy Moscow» and the story «Jan» is avant-garde poetics. Traced in their dynamics, the
ekfrasises of the said works make it possible to see the innermost aspects of Platonov’s changing
attitude to the soviet reality.