Chevengur by Andrei Platonov

First published: 1972 (English translation, 1978)

Type of work: Satire/surrealism

Time of work: Shortly before and during the Russian Revolution and Civil War

Locale: The central provinces of Russia, and Moscow

Principal Characters:

• Alexander (Sasha) Dvanov, an orphan and Red Army soldier
• Prokofy (Proshka) Dvanov, Sasha’s foster brother
• Zakhar Pavlovich, Sasha’s guardian, a railroad mechanic
• Sonya Mandrova, Sasha’s childhood friend
• Stepan Kopenkin, a dedicated revolutionary

The Novel

Chevengur is the story of a quest—the search for a place where time is telescoped and Communism has managed to triumph in a matter of weeks. Episodic and fragmented, the novel follows the path of several characters on their way to the village of Chevengur, the workers’ paradise on earth.

When Alexander Dvanov (Sasha) is orphaned, then turned out to beg by his impoverished foster family, he is taken in by Zakhar Pavlovich, a railroad mechanic who “wanted the world really to be endless, so that wheels would always be necessary, ever preparing the way for general happiness.” As Zakhar Pavlovich declines, losing interest in his beloved machines, World War I comes and goes, the Civil War begins, and Sasha reads and studies, finding comfort, if not understanding, in algebra.

At this point the narrative jumps to Sasha’s travels as a soldier in the Red Army and his wanderings during the Civil War. He leaves his regiment and returns home either to die or to recover from typhus; recovering, he falls in love with a neighbor girl, Sonya Mandrova, but leaves again, telling her that they will see each other after the Revolution.

Sonya leaves the town to work as a village schoolteacher, while Sasha travels through various villages, is wounded and captured by anarchist bandits, and then is rescued by Stepan Kopenkin, a troop commander who is temporarily without troops. Kopenkin believes that “all matters and roads of his life [lead] inexorably to the grave of Rosa Luxemburg”; he carries a picture of her in his cap and uses “Rosa” instead of “giddy-up” to urge his horse, Proletarian Strength, to great endurance in the name of the Revolution. The two set off to investigate the state of affairs in the district and to clear the road to socialism.

During their adventures they encounter more bandits, a knight of the Revolution (clad in homemade armor), and finally Comrade Chepurny, otherwise known as the Jap. The Jap claims to be living in a village where Communism has already been achieved—that is, in Chevengur. Soon after their arrival in Chevengur, Sasha leaves again, but in the meantime Chepurny and Kopenkin help the Party committee purge the area of bourgeoises—they simply execute the male bourgeois population. Klavdyusha, Chepurny’s female companion (since there are no more wives), collects all of their “noncumbersome manual objects.” It turns out that Prokofy (Proshka) Dvanov, Sasha’s opportunistic foster brother, is a member of the village committee and the local authority on literacy and Karl Marx. He is interested in acquiring both Klavdyusha and the village itself.

The problem is that once Communism seems to be established in Chevengur, no one quite knows what to do with it or how they should all spend their time. They make useless objects such as wooden frying pans in order not to exploit one another, and let the crops go so as not to exploit the land. They uproot all the houses and relocate them, but in the process realize that there is no one to live in them. They decide to recruit the poor folk of the district to resettle Chevengur, and so Prokofy is dispatched first to collect the proletarians and the landless peasants, and then later to bring back women for them all. The Chevengurians light a beacon to guide the “miscellaneous” (those who are not peasants or proletarians, but not capitalists) to their new home.

At this point, the action switches abruptly to Moscow, where Simon Serbinov, an inspector of sorts, runs into a mysteriously attractive woman aboard a streetcar. Serbinov keeps a list of the people he knows; he “would have liked to accumulate people like money, as a means of existence.” This woman, who turns out to be Sonya, proves elusive.

Serbinov goes to Chevengur in his official capacity as agricultural inspector, and, like the rest of the people in the town, stays on for no definable reason. Sasha has returned, and they discover that they both know Sonya. Prokofy arrives with his wagonload of women, none of whom seems particularly interested in either socialism or sex. Pitiful, starved creatures, they want only food and warmth.

The Chevengurians try to keep themselves busy but unexploited by making tools and monuments to one another. In the end they are roused out of their uncomfortable idyll by a Cossack attack. In the battle, Kopenkin dies a heroic death and is carried off into the steppe by Proletarian Strength. Sasha goes after them, and in the wake of the fighting Prokofy vows to bring Sasha back.

The Characters

Andrei Platonov’s characters are not psychological studies—they are bodies plus consciousness. Both the body and the consciousness have an air of the grotesque about them, and some would seem monstrous (Pashintsev in his armor, for example, which is his only clothing) if it were not for the pensiveness and reflectiveness that nearly all the characters share.

That reflectiveness is most often a puzzled, all-pervasive melancholy. Zakhar Pavlovich the mechanic is sad and uneasy because he “cannot feel infinity” and because he cannot bear the thought that man is descended from worms, “a terrifying pipe with nothing inside.” Sasha, as a boy, feels anguished sympathy with any life at all, to the point of pitying the passerby who coughs in the yard at night. Throughout the novel, the one emotion the characters feel for one another is not so much love as pity. Even their lust is somehow regretful. This compassion is a generalized and impersonal one, though, extending to railroad locomotives and horses and grass. All are equally vulnerable. The stranger who cuddles up next to Sasha for the sake of warmth in the middle of the open steppe is one example; the monuments the Chevengurians build is another.

The other element of consciousness common to the characters is their singular language—a hodgepodge of misunderstood and misused ideological abstractions, current names, and jargon forcing their way into colloquial speech. “Lenin tooketh away and now Lenin giveth,” says an old peasant woman. As mangled syntax and ideological terminology come to describe not only politics but also the life of the soul and body, the characters’ language simply takes them over. Zakhar Pavlovich tells Sasha that he has to feel imperialism with his body. By the end of the novel, Sasha looks at his fellow citizens and sees “their pitiful naked bodies as the stuff of socialism.” Platonov’s characters witness the word made flesh with a vengeance.

Critical Context

Chevengur is a curious work in many ways, not the least because of its publishing history; this, Platonov’s most ambitious work, finished sometime around 1929, has never been published in full in the Soviet Union. Drastically edited sections have appeared as short stories, but not until 1972 was the novel published in Russian in full—and in France. Even so, there are some missing links, and any effort at synopsis makes the novel seem more coherent than it is. Coherence, though, may not have been Platonov’s point.

His body of work not published fully in the Soviet Union is large, including this novel and another major work, Kotlovan (1973; The Foundation Pit, 1973). Platonov first began to gain fame in the 1920’s. Stories that would eventually go into his first collection, Epifanskie shlyunzy (1927; epiphany), attracted attention with their startling stylistic ingenuity. Platonov’s eccentric language plus his fascination with the relationship between humans and their machines (he himself was an engineer) placed him among the ranks of young writers who were questioning the effects of a new ideology and new technology on an old rural consciousness.

Yet neither Platonov’s idiosyncratic language nor his bleak pictures of rural life proved palatable in the 1930’s. He was often attacked for “monstrous and unclean” attitudes and anti-Soviet slander. While he had his defenders and was able to publish such powerful stories as “Usomnivshiysya Makar” (“Makar the Doubtful”), “Vprok” (for the future good), and “Fro,” hostile criticism—and the arrest of his only son—effectively put an end to his real writing career by the end of the decade. He continued to write, surviving on journalistic reworkings of folktales, until his death in 1951. Chevengur, in whatever form, is a powerful example both of Platonov’s idiosyncratic sense of language and of his technological and spiritual preoccupations. Its absurd vision of the workers’ Paradise Found is Socialist surrealism at its purest.

Bibliography

Bayley, John. Review of Collected Works, “Chevengur,” in The New York Review of Books. XXVI (May 3, 1979), p. 37.

Brodsky, Joseph. “Catastrophes in the Air,” in Less than One, 1985.

Brodsky, Joseph. Preface to The Foundation Pit, 1973.

Jordan, Marion. Andrei Platonov, 1973.

Olcott, Anthony. Foreword to Chevengur, 1978.