Chevengur
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A sort of Soviet Don Quixote, this novel about a craftsman who wanders the U.S.S.R. hoping to ease human misery with his inventions is considered one of the most important novels of the Soviet era, and is now available in its full version in English for the first time.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ambitious and thoughtful adventure from Platonov (1899–1951; Happy Moscow), denied publication by the Soviet Union, follows an orphan born in poverty who comes of age during the Russian Revolution. Deeply sensitive Sasha Dvanov leaves his foster father—the eccentric craftsman and mechanic Zakhar Pavlovich—to join up with revolutionary forces. Before long, he falls in with Kopionkin, a wandering champion of socialism dedicated to the memory of the martyred Polish German socialist Rosa Luxemburg. Kopionkin rides a workhorse turned warhorse whom he calls Strength of the Proletariat, and he and Sasha form a Quixotic duo, riding across the frigid Russian steppe in search of true socialism. The work is at once comic and rich in pathos: Platonov's depictions of the long-suffering peasantry can veer toward the absurd (a devout communist named Pashintsev defends his corner of the revolution with makeshift armor and dud grenades), but he draws them in great detail, lending them gravity and humanity through measured prose and a bend toward realism. Eventually, Dvanov and Kopionkin are drawn to Chevengur, a remote steppe community that claims to have reached a state of socialist utopia with little guidance from Marx, where their idealism collides with the real world. Philosophical and oblique, Platonov's rich story is undeniable.
