Chevengur is a revolutionary novel about revolutionary ardor and despair. Zakhar Pavlovich comes from a world of traditional crafts to work as a train mechanic, motivated by his belief in the transformative power of industry. His adopted son, Sasha Dvanov, embraces revolution, which will transform everything: the words we speak and the lives we live, souls and bodies, the soil underfoot and the sun overhead. Seeking communism, Dvanov joins up with Stepan Kopionkin, a warrior for the cause whose steed is the fearsome cart horse Strength of the Proletariat. Together they cross the steppe, encountering counterrevolutionaries, desperados, and visionaries of all kinds. At last they reach the isolated town of Chevengur. There communism is believed to have been achieved because everything that is not communism has been eliminated. And yet even in Chevengur the revolution recedes from sight.
Comic, ironic, grotesque, disturbingly poetic in its use of language, and profoundly sorrowful,
Chevengur—here published in a new English translation based on the most authoritative Russian text—is the most ambitious of the extraordinary novels that the great Andrey Platonov wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, when Soviet Russia was moving from revolutionary euphoria to state terror.
"Chevengur is a philosophical novel that is also rich in psychological, social, and sensuous detail. Although it was never publishable in the USSR, it now stands as one of the most celebrated of Soviet novels, and along with The Foundation Pit, it is the most ambitious and moving of Andrey Platonov's efforts to take the measure of a world undergoing revolutionary transformation. Platonov's world is a world of orphans searching for family and home. The Russian people have lost both their Mother Earth and their Father in Heaven. Nothing is left to them but the horizon-a shining but ever-receding future. Thus in part one of the novel Zakhar Pavlovich, a gifted craftsman, moves from traditional village life to the world of industry. He falls in love with steam locomotives; he wishes to harness the power of machines to bring an end to human misery, and yet before long he is disillusioned. In the second part of the book it falls on his adopted son, Sasha Dvanov, to set out across the steppes in pursuit of revolution with, as his companion, Kopionkin, knight errant of the martyred revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Perhaps communism will be born spontaneously of human yearning? The last part of the book finds a group of impatient Bolsheviks who live in the fictional town of Chevengur attempting to make communism happen now. They liquidate the bourgeoisie and the half-bourgeoisie, believing that this will inevitably bring about communism, since nothing else will remain. They relocate all the buildings, so that property will become worn out and cease to oppress the proletariat. Finally, Sasha Dvanov arrives in Chevengur as a herald of communism with a human face-and for the briefest moment it bears one"--
