Back at the end of November 2023, there was high excitement here on the Ramblings at the arrival of a newly-published book: “Chevengur” by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. Platonov was one of those Soviet authors who, despite his best efforts, was barely able to publish during his lifetime, and Stalin regarded him with hostility. However, his works were finally published in Russia after the fall of the Communist regime, and Robert Chandler has pioneered the translation of his work into English since 1996, after some earlier versions which I believe are not considered entirely successful. But the book which is regarded as his main work, “Chevengur”, was only available in one early version and as excerpts rendered by the Chandlers in 1999. So the release of a full translation in English by Robert and Elizabeth is a major event – hence my great excitement!

I read most of the Platonov available pre-blog, apart from “Happy Moscow“, which I wrote about in the early days of the Ramblings. He’s an author like no other, with a distinctive and individual style of writing, and his stories stay with you. So I was, as you might imagine, keen to read what is is his longest, and considered most significant, work. Written during the period from Summer 1927-May 1929, it was prepared for publication, typset and a single copy printed; at that point, it was decided that the book could not be published, and most of his other works seem to have met the same fate. So we are extremely lucky that the manuscripts survived and we can now read his writings.

Distant dogs let out scary and resonant barks, and tired stars fell now and again from the sky. Maybe, in the very deepest part of the night, amid cool, flat steppe, wanderers were now walking somewhere, and within them, as within Sasha, silence and dying stars were being transformed into the moods of personal life.

Described as the Soviet ‘Don Quixote’, “Chevengur” follows in the main the life of Sasha Dvanov, the adopted son of Zakhar Pavlovich; the latter comes from the old world of traditional crafts but is seduced by the world of modern mechanics and the power of industry. He takes up work as a train mechanic, hypnotised by the machines; however, Sasha is a child of the revolution, and embraces the changes it brings to Russia. Pairing up with Stepan Kopionkin, a fighter for the new cause, the two set off to search for Communism, criss-crossing the steppe to find it. Here they encounter all kinds: those for the revolution, those fighting against it, those following their own agenda and just trying to get what they can out of the turmoil consuming the country.

Eventually, they are led to Chevengur, a small and isolated town where it is believed Communism has been achieved; the bourgeoisie have been eliminated, nobody works for anybody else and everything which is not Communism has been wiped out. However, despite this, it’s not quite clear what Communism actually *is* and whether the Chevengurians are doing things correctly. As the populace drift from day to day, even strong believers in the cause like Sasha and Kopionkin seem unsure; is this really what the revolution was meant to achieve?

Deep in his soul he loved ignorance more than culture: ignorance was an open steppe where the plant of any kind of knowledge might yet grow, whereas culture was a field long overgrown, where the soil’s salts had all been taken up by plants and nothing more could grow. For this reason Dvanov was content that in Russia the Revolution had clean rooted out the few thickets of culture, while the people for their part remained the same as ever—empty and fertile, not a cornfield but wide-open steppe. And Dvanov was in no hurry to sow anything; he considered that good soil could not endure long without spontaneously bearing something precious and unprecedented, as long as the wind of war did not bring with it the seeds of capitalist weeds from Western Europe.

The novel in my version is 477 pages long, so this is obviously a very brief summary of what is a complex, nuanced and often beautifully written novel; and I can’t possibly do it justice in one blog post, so I will just do my best to convey some of its brilliance to you! Platonov is, as I have mentioned, a very singular author whose prose reads like no-one else I can think of (the closes parallel I can come across is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, a fellow Soviet drawer-writer, but his work is strikingly individual in its own way). From the very start, any reader of Platonov is on familiar ground, with his trope of imbuing nature and objects with emotions and feelings on show in the early pages. There is often an almost hypnotic force to his writing which sweeps you along from place to place and through time; and as Sasha and his comrades live through Revolution, Civil War and the aftermath, it becomes harder and harder for them (and the reader!) to pin down just exactly what the correct form of Communism is.

The blacksmith stopped talking, realizing that the man before him was as strange as every other Communist. On the face of it—a man like any other man, but he acted against the common people.

As a story, then, “Chevengur” is compelling, and gives quite an insight into what it must have been like to live through those troubled years. However, there is much, much more going on in the book and as well as capturing the volatile changes which took place during the Revolution and in the years after it, Platonov also explores, perhaps obliquely, the Russian character and soul. Bringing change to a nation as huge as the Russian one was a mammoth task, and Sasha perhaps represents all of those committed people who travelled from place to place trying to drag a reluctant populace (often peasants) into the new world. Platonov himself was committed to the Revolution and supportive of it, yet was able to stand back and be critical of its failures. This comes through in his writing and is no doubt why he was considered unpublishable at the time.

Chevengur itself is almost a dream-like setting; a little town which physically rearranges itself on a regular basis, it’s purged of all its non-revolutionary entities yet efforts to construct communism seem all over the place, changing from moment to moment according to who is interpreting what the correct form should take; no-one really seems to know what it is or how to achieve it. The town almost becomes a negative force, causing the normal Soviet structures to distintegrate, as if the Russian Steppe and character is too much for these new ways of living. Perhaps, therefore, the end of the book is inevitable; that made it no less moving…

Something was already being established on the dreary fields of a Russia that was being forgotten: people unwilling to plow the land to grow rye for their family were now, with patient suffering, establishing a garden of history for eternity and for their own future inseparability. But gardeners, like painters and singers, do not have sturdy, practical minds. All of a sudden, something agitates their weak hearts—and doubt then leads them to uproot plants that had barely begun to blossom and to sow instead the petty grasses of bureaucracy. A garden requires care and a long wait for the first fruits, but grasses ripen quickly and their cultivation requires neither labor nor the expenditure of the soul in patience. And after the garden of the Revolution was chopped down, its meadows had been given over to self-seeding grasses so that everyone could be fed without the torment of labor. Serbinov had indeed seen how little most people worked, since these seed-bearing grasses fed everyone for free. And so it would continue for a long time, until the grasses had eaten up all the soil and people were left with only clay and stone, or until the now-rested gardeners once again planted a cool garden on impoverished land that had been dried by a bleak wind.

Platonov’s characters are a wonderfully rich collection, from Sasha himself, who most likely represents young Platonov with his ideals, to the wonderful Kopionkin with his splendidly named horse, ‘Strength of the Proletariat’. The latter, indeed, has a character all of his own and is just as intelligent as any of the humans surrounding him. Kopionkin has his very own Dulcinea in the form of the (murdered) revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, his touchstone and reason for carrying on. There is Chepurny, a fanatic trying to impose Communism on the town; Sasha’s half-brother, Prokofy, who is a much harsher character; and many, many others, all part of this book’s rich tapestry. A good number of these are what you might call ‘party functionaries’ of the type you might have run across at that time; yet they seem to find it impossible to control the rather odd ‘natural’ Communism of Chevengur. Labouring for the good of all is taken to the extreme here, where nobody will work for anything for themselves, but they’re happy and willing to make things for their neighbours. Is that a better Communism than toeing the party line? Who can tell!

My Platonov collection (some of his works I read from the library, back in the day…)

As you can probably guess, I was gripped by “Chevengur” from the first page, and actually quite devastated when I had to stop reading it during Covid when the brain fog took over. It’s a powerful and unforgettable book, full of humour, irony, dark deeds and much melancholy; the latter perhaps reflects Platonov’s disillusioned state of mind after the setbacks he had seen to the progress in Soviet Russia. The author was a great believer in progress; as well as writing, he also worked on electrification and land reclamation projects, as an engineer and administrator, organizing the digging of ponds and wells, draining of swampland, and building a hydroelectric plant. Perhaps he felt that by doing this he could help the cause, which was something his writing could not seem to do; but he died young, at the age of 51, from TB caught from his son Platon. The latter had been sent to a labour camp, where he contracted the disease, and he pre-deceased his father, as well as infecting him.

But his writing survives, and as I mentioned earlier, his prose is so incredibly descriptive and individual. His portrayal of the landscape of the steppe, nature itself, the sun, skies and stars are vivid; and yet he gives them almost a life of their own, ascribing a sensibility to them, and giving them a melancholy which matches thar of the characters. Platonov’s prose is often poetic, even when describing the darkest of deeds (and there is plenty of ‘cleansing’ of the bourgeois elements which takes place.) He’s so distinctive that I think you would recognise his writing even if you didn’t know it was his.

This wonderful edition of “Chevengur” has a slew of supporting material, which considerably enhanced my reading experience. There is an introduction and superb notes by Robert Chandler, and the latter are vital I think in providing context and background information in a number of places. Vladimir Sharov provides an essay “Platonov’s People” (translated by Oliver Ready) which gives excellent analysis of the Russian people and helps with understanding of why the characters in “Chevengur” behave as they do. And there are a few images too, including one of the cover of the only edition ever prepared of the book during Soviet times, one of the wells constructed under Platonov’s direction, and a sheet of his manuscript. As Chandler reveals, there is a group of scholars in Moscow who have been working for thirty years on transcribing Platonov’s manuscrupts, as there are a number of sources to draw on for his work: heavily-censored published versions, typescripts or sometimes only penciled versions which can be extremely hard to decipher. I salute them all!

Andrey Platonov

Had I finished “Chevengur” by the end of December 2023 it would have featured strongly in my round up of the year’s reading as it’s a magnificent book from start to finish; as a story, as a marvellous piece of writing, as a picture of place and time, and indeed as an example of exactly how you should publish a work like this. A brilliant translation, with all the supporting material you could need, I’m sure Platonov would be very proud to see this edition of his magnum opus. It’s wonderful to see a book like this coming out with the fanfare it has, and as translator Bryan Karetnyk reminds us in his own review of “Chevengur”, we need to be thankful that publishers are still willing to support new Russian literature releases, despite the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

And I have to give thanks to Robert Chandler who, together with his wife Elizabeth and a whole cohort of fellow translators, has devoted huge chunks of his life to bringing Platonov to an English-speaking audience; I can’t express enough gratitude for his work and his commitment to Andrey Platonov and his legacy. Despite it only being January, “Chevengur” will most definitely feature in amongst my books of the year; and now I have to deal with a massing book hangover!!!