Chevengur by Andrey Platonov

Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler

Once again, I have finished a Platonov novel and I am left with the question of where to even begin. Chevengur is horrifying, and hilarious. It is surreal, and realistic; it is a blistering attack on Bolshevism, and full of characters asserting the correctness of Lenin’s proclamations. It is full of yearning for communism and shows that no two characters agree on what communism is; characters in Chevengur insist that when the conditions are right communism is inevitable and spontaneous, and that communism can only happen through the most strenuous and continuous efforts of the vanguard of the proletariat. It is nonlinear, picaresque, and wouldn’t know what a character arc is if one hit it in the dialectic. Chevengur is brilliant and baffling, exciting and exhausting. As I wrote about The Foundation Pit, “This is a journey to another world, recognizably human, but seen through the veils of history, language, culture and the author’s own imagination to make it more distant than what is found in much of science fiction. … Platonov’s Soviet Russia of the 1920s is far, far more alien than Asimov’s New York millennia hence.”

To begin before the beginning, Andrey Platonov was born in Russia in 1899, the son of a railway worker. His formal schooling was over at age 13, and he went to work. He was an ardent supporter of the revolution in 1917, and in the following year he had the opportunity to study electrical technology. At the beginning of the 1920s, he was a prolific full-time writer but by 1922 he abandoned writing and took up work in electrification and land reclamation in central Russia, in the region near Voronezh where he had grown up. He worked to make Soviet power visible and productive in these fertile but poor lands, leading work brigades that dug wells and ponds, drained swamps and brought electricity to rural areas. By 1926, Platonov had returned to writing, and by 1928 he had finished Chevengur. Soviet censorship forbade its publication; some excerpts were published in 1928 and 1929. No more of Chevengur was published in Platonov’s lifetime; complete publication in Russia was not permitted until Gorbachev’s years of glasnost and perestroika.

Platonov himself somehow survived both Stalin’s purges and the Second World War. Stalin himself called Platonov “fool, idiot, scoundrel” in marginal notes in a magazine copy of one of Platonov’s stories. The Wikipedia entry for Platonov cites a secret police informer’s report that Stalin also referred to Platonov as “brilliant, a prophet.” Platonov’s son, however, was caught in the purges at age 15 and sent to a labor camp. Efforts by Platonov and other influential writers secured his release in 1940, but he had already caught the tuberculosis that would kill him less than two and a half years later. Platonov also caught tuberculosis while nursing his son. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Platonov served as a war correspondent for the military newspaper Red Star. (Vasily Grossman would have been a colleague.) He died in 1951; Stalin died two years later.

Chevengur reflects many of the experiences Platonov had as a worker in the steppes of central Russia. He was an ardent communist, a believing Bolshevik; his principles were sometimes at odds with the Party line, and he was too honest of a writer to bend with every change of the political winds. As a result, the communists in Chevengur come in many different flavors. They don’t even represent coherent ideologies; the novel is not a settling of factional scores. Instead, their communisms reflect their different personalities. Kopionkin, often seen astride his horse named Strength of the Proletariat, is a knight errant of the Revolution, and his solution to nearly every vexing situation is to attack someone or to take something by force. Requisitioning, he calls it, echoing the official terminology of the very lean years of the late Civil War period. Chepurny is also a man of action, appointing himself chairman of the RevCom, imposing doctrine without too much thought. Thinking he leaves to Prokofy, who is good at formulating, but who also has a tendency to let things take their course. He sees them as the inevitable outcome of the dialectic.

It leads to some very odd reading, where characters converse in slogans, apparently communicating but possibly having each other on. Platonov never tips his hand, leaving it to the reader to decide their own reactions. To take a fairly random example from deep in the book — the wandering characters have by this time reached Chevengur, a town where communism has supposedly been attained and nobody works (because the sun keeps working and provides all they should need) except on Saturdays when everyone spontaneously volunteers to uproot trees and move all the town’s buildings somewhere else, so as to extirpate the bourgeois legacy and more fully experience communism.

Kirey came out of the brick house. Chepurny called to him, telling him to summon the entire organization, since the masses had appeared and the time had now come. In response to Kirey’s demand, the organization duly awoke and came out to join Chepurny.
“Who is it you’ve brought us?” Chepurny asked Prokofy. “If it’s the proletariat up there on that mound, then why—I ask you now—don’t they come down and claim their town?”
“I’ve brought the proletariat and others,” Prokofy replied.
This disturbed Chepurny. “What others? Not the class of residual scum again!”
“Who do you take me for?” Prokofy retorted crossly. “A snake—or a party member?! These others are simply others. Worse than proletariat—no one and nobody.”
“But who are they, I ask you now! Did they have a class father? You found them in a social place, I take it, not in a wilderness?”
“They’re fatherlessness,” Prokofy explained. “They were living nowhere. They wander.”
“Where to?” Chepurny asked respectfully. Everything dangerous and unknown, he felt, should be treated with dignity. “Where are they wandering to? Maybe we ought to curb them.”
Prokofy was surprised by Chepurny’s lack of political consciousness.
“‘Where are they wandering to’? To communism, of course. We can curb them right here.”
“Go and call them down then! Tell them the town is theirs. All cleaned up and in order. And that the vanguard standing here by the fence wishes the proletariat all happiness and—yes—all the world, since it belongs to them anyway.”
“What if they refuse the world?” asked Prokofy, who liked to keep ahead of things. “Maybe Chevengur alone will be more than enough for them?”
“But then, who’ll end up with the world?” asked Chepurny, now entangled in theory.
“We will, as our base.”
“You’re a swine. We’re the vanguard—and we belong to them, not them to us. The vanguard isn’t a human being—it’s a dead shield on a living body. It’s the proletariat that’s the true human being. So get going now—you semi-snake!” (pp. 330–331)

Much of the book is like that, proceeding by dream logic, or Party logic, or something else entirely; Beckett’s absurdism avant la lettre. Before Kopionkin arrives in Chevengur, he has had a series of adventures on the steppes that calls Don Quixote to mind. He and Sasha Dvanov have encountered counterrevolutionaries, bandits, visionaries and more. Kopionkin holds fast to his vision of Rosa Luxemburg, true to the Revolution, cut down before her time. Kopionkin wants to do great revolutionary deeds in her name, and then make a pilgrimage to her lonely grave in Germany. That he is a paladin of an atheistic Revolution is something Platonov never comments on directly, but it is his essential nature.

The failed harvests of 1920 and 1921, and the subsequent famine, drew Platonov out of writing and into the field, literally digging for water that the people might grow crops and eat, show up in Chevengur, though of course with neither name nor date attached. (Time is fluid within the novel.)

Every fifth year, half the village would go to the mines and cities, and the other half into the nearby forest: the harvest had failed. From time immemorial it has been known that, even in dry years, grasses, roots, and grains do well in forest clearings. The villagers who had stayed behind would rush out to these clearings—to save their vegetables from instant plundering by hordes of greedy wanderers. But this time there was a drought the following year too. The village bolted up its huts and set out onto the highway in two columns. One column set off to Kyiv to beg, the other to Luhans’k in search of work; a few people turned off into the forest and overgrown gullies, where they took to eating raw grass, clay, and bark, and lived wild. The people who left were nearly all adults—the children had either taken care to die in advance or had run off to live as beggars. As for the unweaned babies, their mothers had let them gradually wither away, not allowing them to suck their fill. (p. 4)

The three paragraphs that follow are, if anything, more horrifying. I may have set the book aside for several weeks at that point, especially when I considered that Platonov is probably understating the suffering during the time of famine. (In this time, Soviet Russia accepted international help. American efforts, led by Herbert Hoover, saved millions more from starvation. Later in the book, when Platonov writes of “naked communism,” of people in Chevengur who had at most one item of clothing, he is not exaggerating.)

If Chevengur had been a relentless parade of horrors, I would not have gone any further. Far from it, though. Here is a bit of a scene in which Zakhar Pavolovic, a character with an affinity for machinery, is trying to help a locomotive.

“It’s poor-quality coal and the fire bars get blocked,” the locomotive was saying sadly. “The uphill gradients are hard going, and there are a lot of women going to the front too, to their men, and they’ve each got a hundred pounds of buns with them. And then there’s the mail vans—we used to have only one to pull, but now it’s two. People are living apart, so they write letters.”
“Hmm,” murmured Zakhar Pavlovich, pensively carrying on the conversation and not knowing how he could help the locomotive when people were so overloading it with the weight of their separation. “Don’t overdo it,” he said. “Take it easy.”
“That’s not possible,” the locomotive replied with the meekness of wise strength. “From up on an embankment I see a lot of villages. I see people crying_they’re waiting for letters and wounded loved ones. But have a look at my piston gland—they’ve packed it too tight. Once we get going, I’ll overheat the piston.”
Zakhar Pavolovich went and loosened the bolts on the piston gland. “Phew, damned bloody tight. What were they playing at, the bastards?”
“What do you think you’re doing?” asked the duty mechanic. “Did anyone especially ask you to tinker about with that gland? Yes—or no?”
“No,” said Zakhar Pavolovich meekly. “It just seemed the bolts looked a little tight.”
The mechanic was not angry. “If it just seemed, better to leave well alone! Anyway, it’s a hopeless business. Steam ends up escaping whatever we do.”
After this, the locomotive went on quietly grumbling to Zakhar Pavlovich, “Of course, tightening the bolts doesn’t help. The rod’s worn out in the middle. That’s why steam keeps escaping. Do they think I do it on purpose?”
“Yes, I noticed the worn-our rod,” sighed Zakhar Pavlovich. “But I’m only a cleaner, you know. Why would anyone listen to me?” (p. 63)

Not that anyone else hears the locomotive talking, of course. Some time later in the course of their wanderings, Kopionkin and Dvanov encounter another kind of ironclad: a man dressed in armor, living out in the forest and in possession of a store of hand grenades left over from the war.

“But anyway, just who are you?” Kopionkin inquired with irritated interest.
“I’m my own person,” Pashintsev informed Kopionkin. “I passed myself a resolution to the effect that 1919 marked the last betrayal of everything. Yet again—armies, authorities, and laws of all kinds. And as for ordinary people—’You lot, fall into rank and obey! From tomorrow! Well I say, to hell with all that!”
Pashintsev concisely formulated the entire current moment with a single gesture.
Dvanov stopped thinking and listened slowly to the man reasoning aloud.
“Remember 1918 and 1919?” Pashintsev asked with tears of joy. Those days lost forever called up ferocious memories in him; by midnight he was hammering his fist against the table and endangering all around him. “Now we’ll never see any of it again … Everything’s been betrayed. Law has got going again. Difference has come between people. It’s as if some devil’s been testing man, weighing him on scales. Take me, for example—can anyone know just what breathes in here?” Pashintsev rapped himself on his low skull, where his brain must have been compressed to make room for all his thinking. “Yes, brother, there is room here for expanses of every kind. And it’s the same for everyone. But people want to reign over me. Well, what do you think? Is that a lying swindle or not?” (p. 170)

Honest swindlers, zealots of a materialistic faith, proletarians who let the sun work for them — Chevengur finds places for all of them. It’s a strange experience from another time, another world, and I have encountered nothing else like it. I barely know where to begin.