Thoughts on the novel, "Chevengur," by Andrey Platonov

Chevengur

 reviewed by Ruth Latta 

 Ever since Elizabeth and Robert Chandler published their new translation of Chevengur last year, the 1927 novel by Russian writer, Andrey Platonov, has become popular. It was reviewed by Benjamin Kunkel in the New Yorker (March 11, 2024) and an internet search provides plentiful information about both author and book. 

Andrey Platonov (1898-1951), a railway mechanic’s son, became an irrigation engineer, land reclamation specialist and developer of new hydraulic and steam turbines. (See Vladimir Sharov’s article on “Platonov’s People,” in the Chandler translation.) Some of Platonov’s writing was published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime, including several excerpts from Chevengur, but the Soviet literature authorities rejected the novel as a whole, which was not published until 1972, in France. An English translation was published in 1976, and finally, during the Gorbachev administration, the book was published in the Soviet Union in 1988.

 The numerous articles and scholarly papers on Chevengur range in topic from studies of Platonov’s style and language use to his influences and his politics. Some writers consider Chevengur a picaresque novel, comparable to Don Quixote, and as either a utopia, or a dystopia. To some it is a condemnation of communism; to others, the novel is a satirical yet understanding critique of the emerging Soviet society in which Platonov was a part.

 My only qualifications for writing this review are my background in history, including Russian history courses from Professor Carter Ellwood of Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada; my efforts in researching and writing historical novels, and my interest in the subject matter. 

 WARNING: This review contains spoilers. They are necessary to discuss the novel properly. 

 The Chandlers note in their introduction that Soviet author Maxim Gorky thought Chevengur too satirical to be acceptable in the struggling early years of the Soviet Union. The black humour/gallows humour is actually part of the novel’s attraction; Platonov makes light of subject matter considered too serious, too embarrassing and too painful to joke about. 

 The novel begins during Tsar Nicholas II’s regime with Zahkar Pavlovich, a man with no family who lives outdoors in summer and rings bells in the church in winter in exchange for shelter. He earns a sparse living as a repairman and woodcrafter. For most Russians, live was not a bed of roses. In Zakhar’s village, Every fifth year the harvest fails and inhabitants of his village leave, to look for work in Luskhans’k, to beg in Kyiv, or to forage in the woods.

 “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. There was one old woman who cured infants of hunger. She gave them an infusion of mushrooms mixed with sweet herbs and the children fell peacefully silent with dry foam on their lips. The mother would kiss her child on its now aged, wizened forehead and whisper, ‘He’s done with suffering, the dear. Praise the Lord.’”

 People look forward to the second coming of Christ and see death as an escape from life’s miseries into a heavenly future. When Zakhar Pavlovich leaves town to seek his fortune, he remembers a local fisherman, recently widowed, who drowned himself so as to enter a happy afterlife and left behind a devastated son to face a bleak future.

 Zakhar reaches the outskirts of a city where he eventually finds work that lends itself to his fascination with mechanical devices and trains; he becomes a locomotive cleaner. The fisherman’s orphan, Sasha, is taken in by the Dvanov family who have seven surviving children out of a total of sixteen. The mother is expecting again; the father tells her she has chosen a bad time to fall pregnant. Yet the children bring him joy and stability; “with their little soft hands, they made him plow, look after the household and generally take care of things.” 

When the harvest fails, the eldest son in the family, Proshka (also known as Prokhor or Prokofy), advises his father not to “lie on Mama” anymore and to “send Sasha packing.” Proshka personally kicks Sasha, “a parasite,” to wander around begging for his keep. Temporarily, Sasha seeks refuge in a dug-out cave near his father’s grave. The author sets the tone of his novel in these first few pages, showing the contradictions in life, and using beautiful language to describe terrible things. His blend of slogans, peasant sayings, sensitive insights into characters’ feelings, adaptations of quotations, and crude remarks make his style unique. Platonov can be lyrical in describing nature and the land, and although he pokes fun at peasants, he sees them as the salt of the earth. His innovative writing went against the principles of socialist realism, which prized straightforward, earnest optimistic stories that praised socialism. 

In the city, Zakhar meets Proshka, and later, Sasha. Both boys are beggars, though not working together. Earlier, Proshka had earlier returned to his family with bread but had found no one there; they had either left to search for food or died of hunger. Zakhar pays Proshka to bring Sasha to him, and he becomes the boy’s father-figure. 

The two engage in deep discussions. “Trains began to run more frequently; was had begun.” Referring to this “tsar’s war,” Zakhar wonders: “Is man such a danger to man that power has to stand between them?...War’s been thought up on purpose by governments. No ordinary person could have dreamed it up.” When Sasha asks, “How ought things to be?” Zakhar answers, “Some other how.” Throughout the novel Sasha seeks a better way. To Zakhar, the locomotives seem to be saying that they see people crying, waiting for letters and wounded loved ones. 

 The tsar’s war is the last straw to a people already suffering oppression and want: “We will never understand the victory of the Bolsheviks unless we take into account the belief, from one end of the country to the other, that the old life had to be done away with, once and for all,” writes Vladimir Sharov in “Platonov’s People.” In 1917 there were two Russian revolutions, the February Revolution overthrew the imperial government and the October Revolution brought the Bolshevik party (later ‘Communist Party’) into power. Zakhar is “not surprised” by these developments. Hearing shooting in the city, he tells Sasha, “Who knows, maybe life will smarten up.” 

They go into town to join a political party, and choose the one that promises socialism in a year’s time. Zakhar tells the party functionary that he wants “property to be humbled” but also thinks that people should be left “without supervision” to work out the future. When the party man calls this idea “anarchy,” Zakhar insists that every human being wants a “self-made life.” Later, he tells Sasha, “These Bolsheviks may be fine people and great martyrs of Marxism but you must keep your wits about you.” 

 Sasha Dvanov, who believes that the revolution will bring a better future, studies at the new railway school, then the polytechnic. The Bolshevik government sends him to a town in the steppes which is at the front line of the civil war (1917-1923) A loose confederation of anti-communist forces (including monarchists, Cossacks and moderate socialists) know as the “Whites,” aided by Britain, France and other western allies, were attempting to overthrow the revolutionary government.

When Cossacks attack the troop train that Sasha is travelling on, he takes over as driver, and speeds the train out of danger. When his train crashes into an oncoming one, Sasha jumps out, leaves the wreckage and “disappears into unpeopled parts where people live without help.” This event ushers in the novel’s second part, an episodic adventure story centering on Sasha. 

 Back home, he forms a friendship with a young woman neighbour named Sonia. She is in a teacher training course and will eventually be sent with Red Army units to villages to teach literacy. The city is full of homeless migrants, and typhoid fever is raging. The provincial executive committee chairman decides to send some “ethical and smart young fellow to come to the villages and see what the masses want,” and Sasha’s name comes up. 

 Travelling in the countryside, Sasha is wounded by a pair of anarchists and rescued by the commander of the field Bolshevik regiments, Stepan Kopionkin, who takes the three to a nearby village, which, coincidentally, is where Sonia is teaching. 

 Kopionkin is inspired a revolutionary heroine,  Rosa Luxemburg (1871- 1919) a leader in the 1919 Spartacist uprising in Germany who was shot by the paramilitary “friekorps” sent in by the new German Social Democratic government to suppress the revolt. Rosa is to Kopionkin what the Virgin Mary was to Crusaders or what Dulcinea was to Don Quixote. Kopionkin’s horse is not old and sickly like Don Quixote’s “Rocinante”, however, but a heavy, strong, work animal named “Strength of the Proletariat.” If he were to eat his fill, writes Platonov, Strength of the Proletariat would consume “an eighth of a young forest and wash it down with a small pond from the steppe.” 

 Lack of food is a widespread concern for humans, too. As Sasha Dvanov travels, he hears repeated complaints about government grain requisitioning. During the “war communism” period of the Civil War (1917-23) the central government seized food from the peasants for the Red Army and urban dwellers. Historians disagree as to whether Lenin used the war emergency as a way to establish centralization and force, or whether he truly intended requisitioning to be a temporary but necessary evil due to extreme circumstances.  In 1921, after a rash of strikes and protests, the Bolshevik government adopted a “New Economic Policy,” which ended forced grain requisitioning, and allowed small scale private business. 

 As Dvanov, sometimes accompanied by Kopionkin, travels in rural areas, he meets peasants who have appropriated land that had belonged to the nobility under the tsar. They use grain stores from the estate, rather than cultivating new crops which will only be confiscated. When Dvanov tells one villager that the requisitioned grain nourishes the Revolution’s future powers, the peasant replies, “Pull the other one. Who’s your revolution going to help if the entire people is dying?” 

 On returning to the provincial capital to report to his boss, Sasha is surprised to find small shops open, no rationing, and food sold on the street. At first he thinks the city had been taken by the Whites. Instead, it’s the New Economic Policy in action. The Revolution now has “another look on its face... Lenin tooketh away and now he giveth.” At a district committee meeting, the secretary, Gopner says the N.E.P. is the revolution moving forward under its own steam, according to the proletariat’s wishes, not “hauled along” by institutions. At the meeting, Sasha Dvanov meets Chepurny, chair of the revolutionary committee at a district centre called “Chevengur.” He claims that at Chevengur they have already organized communism and invites Sasha to visit. Thus third part of the novel begins.

 In a flashback chapter, the author traces Chevengur’s recent history. This account of Chepurny and his team organizing the killing and expulsion of the village bourgeoisie is horrific because it is presented in a distant, objective manner. The eleven supporters of the revolution now have the village to themselves, although they eventually welcome two hundred half-clothed, lice-ridden wanderers who have “nothing but each other.” 

 At first the inhabitants take life easy, living first on the food stores left by the bourgeoisie, and later on self-seeded vegetables and edible plants from the steppe. “No one knew whether there would be winter under communism,” the author writes, “or whether there would always been the warmth of summer.” The Chevengurians enjoy the summer sun and discuss what communism means. When Gopner arrives in the village he informs Sasha and Chepurny that no one there is working, to which Chepurny replies that here, people have “only one profession, the soul” and there is no working class; “now the sun labours on our behalf.” In fact, none of the newcomers have families, and with all material needs fulfilled, they don’t need to help each other, so there is no sense of community, yet everyone is lonely. 

After a beggarwoman’s child dies in Chevengur, however, the leaders are upset that their village wasn’t able to offer the child more help. When an ill, elderly man self-isolates and makes a pet of a cockroach, Chepurny intervenes and goes in search of digestible food for him. Thus begins a movement of Chevengurians helping each other - repairing roofs, gathering grain, cutting firewood and cooking. Here, the author is suggesting that communism is an ongoing project, always developing, never complete, a work-in-progress. 

 Having started to build a community, the inhabitants of Chevengur, mostly male, decide they need wives. “You talk comradeship,” one says, “but women are our truest companions.” Prokofy (“Prosha”) Dvanov (who, as a boy, evicted Sasha from his family) is chosen to go out and find women for the village. 

 In Men Without Women, Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929, author Eliot Borenstein notes that the “masculinist myth” was popular during the early period of communism, but that later, home and family were considered compatible with socialism. In Platonov’s novel, male camaraderie is valued, partly for survival; however, where women appear in Chevengur, they are shown in a positive and sympathetic light. 

For instance, when Sasha is making his way home after the train wreck, he takes shelter in a railway worker’s hut where a woman is giving birth and finds the experience unsettling. In the morning, he meets the midwife, who remarks, “It’s hard work giving birth. If a man were ever to give birth, he’d be bowing down at the very feet of his wife and his mother-in-law.” Kopionkin’s chaste preoccupation with Rosa Luxemburg’s spirit is depicted as odd, but the Chevengurians’ wish for women in their midst is not. 

Mothers are revered; the wife of Sasha’s superior nurtures her children even when seriously ill. Typhoid fever makes her run a dangerously high temperature, but her two little children snuggle against her overheated body to keep warm during the cold winter night. 

 Sonia, Sasha’s friend, is the most vivid woman character, and the hope of the future. As a child, Sonia was as disadvantaged as Sasha; her single mother gave her away to an aunt to raise. Despite being unwanted, she is a cheerful, hopeful girl who loves flowers. Though interested in botany and desirous of becoming a florist, she willingly trains as a teacher to bring literacy to rural villages. 

 “Nearly everyone loves flowers anyway,” she tells Sasha, “but who loves other people’s children? There’s only their parents.” For a while it seems that Sasha and Sonia will fall in love, and work together for the new society, but although they meet again, and have a special spark between them, they never go beyond friendship. 

 Late in the novel, Sonia meets a government official, Simon Serbinov, on a train to Moscow, where she is now a factory worker. To Serbinov, whose soul is “benighted and full of fear,” she seems “endowed with some kind of refreshing life.” Most people he knows seem determined to destroy their own gifts and talents, but “this woman, instead of ruining herself, had made herself.” In Serbinov, she stirs “longing and shame”; he sees her body as “burning with the tension of a mature, restrained life.” 

 Sonia was married for a month, and has loved but hasn’t had children; she says there are enough people in the world anyway. If she could give birth to a flower, however, she would. Of Sasha, she tells Serbinov, “It’s so easy to be with him. He feels his faith and people feel calmer in his presence....Merely leaning against him is enough to make things all right.” 

 Feeling unworthy of her, Serbinov resolves not to do anything to “extinguish her flame”; however, when his mother dies, he decides to “pass on his grief and loneliness to another friendly body, and perhaps take from [Sonia] what was precious to her, so that she will always regret her loss...and remember him.” (Later, Serbinov may be responsible for the downfall of Chevengur.) 

 The first women to come to Chevengur are two “gypsies” sent by Proshka to “hire themselves out as wives.” One is young and taciturn, the older wrinkled and gaptoothed; both show the ravages of hardship and hunger. The elder says, “You can’t put us through worse than what we’ve been through already,” and approaches a woodcrafter named Karchuk in a direct manner: “Good evening, husband. Feed us, then put us to bed. Fair shares of bread, and shared love.” When Karchuk says, “I’m all right as things are. I’m thinking about my comrade,” she replies, “If you can’t pucker your mouth, then don’t ask for cranberries,” and leaves.

 When Proshka Dvanov returns with ten more women, all thin and dirty, Chepurny makes a speech of welcome, hoping these “comrades of a special build” will be happy in Chevengur. In a sensitively written passage, the author says that the women are afraid of being tortured. “They had given away their body, their place of age and blossoming in exchange for food...[and] looked like worn-out mothers or younger, undernourished sisters...The caresses of husbands would be painful and frightening to them.” Discussing them with Chepurny, Sasha says that women like this “don’t make wives,” but that he’s seen mothers looking like them. 

The two realize that the women, who are as much orphans as the men, should choose the men, not vice versa, and that they may want to be like sisters, daughters or mothers to the men they select, not sexual partners. Most of the women choose older men. Only one says she would like a baby. 

 The only unsympathetic woman character is Klavdiuska, the village prostitute from the old regime. She finds a soul-mate in Proshka (Prokofy)  Dvanov, as both are self-serving, profit-motivated people with little community spirit. On returning with the “wives”, Prokofy warns that counter-revolutionary activity is going on in the outside world. As Sasha, Chepurny and others are making plans and weapons to defend the village, Klavdiuska and Prokofy set up housekeeping in the brick Bolshevik headquarters, where formerly the men had slept and sheltered communally under the same roof. On inviting Sasha over for tea, Prokofy finds his jealousy of the former foster child surging to the fore. Afraid that the newer residents of Chevengur will flee, leaving Sasha to inherit the village, Prokofy decides to claim the village goods in the guise of doing an inventory in the name of communism. Klavdiuska takes the furniture in their home to her aunt’s, out of town, where she waits for him until he can acquires Chevengur and move all the town’s goods to some other village. 

 Meanwhile, as Sasha and Kopionkin try to prepare for an attack, they examine their feelings. Kopionkin says that Rosa Luxemburg means more to him than Chevengur. Sasha, however, “lives by Chevengur alone” and its everyday people. Sasha recalls that at one time “the warmth of life had come to him from Sonia,” but that he might have “confined himself until death in the cramped space of another person.” Here the “masculinist myth” manifests itself. Clearly Sasha would prefer to die nobly for a cause rather than live humbly for one. 

 “Cossacks! Cadets on horseback!” shouts Chepurny, rushing in from the steppe. It is unclear whether these troops are counter-revolutionaries or Red Army troops, sent by the government in response Simon Serbinov’s negative report on Chevengur. In the blood bath that ensues, most of the Chevengur leaders are killed. Kopionkin dies from his wounds, but Sasha survives. 

 He rides Strength of the Proletariat toward his home village and Lake Mutevo,  where he swam and fished as a child, and “the lake which had brought peace to his father.” There he drowns himself, returning to nature, family and an afterlife better than this world - things Russian peasants valued most.

 Some commentators see Sasha’s suicide as the author’s condemnation of the Soviet communist experiment. The final scene, however, suggests otherwise. When Zakhar Pavlovich arrives, searching for Sasha, Prokofy is weeping with regret at his selfish ways.  We see Zakhar's enduring love for his adopted son, and Proshka's repentance.  Platonov sends a message, too, in having one particular, significant character survive the fall of Chevengur - Strength of the Proletariat.