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When the Russian novelist Andrey Platonov wrote to Maxim Gorky, doyen of Soviet literature, in the late summer of 1929, he was desperate. “I ask you to read my manuscript,” he pleaded. “It is not being published . . . They say that the Revolution is incorrectly portrayed and that the work as a whole will be seen as counter-revolutionary.”
The work in question was Chevengur, Platonov’s first, longest and, in many ways, most ambitious and brutal novel. Having read it, Gorky’s advice was unambiguous. “Whatever you may have wished,” he cautioned, “you have portrayed reality in a . . . light that is, of course, unacceptable.”
On paper at least, Platonov was a model Soviet writer. Poet, playwright, philosopher and engineer, the working-class son of a mechanic, he was a proletarian true believer who, in parallel with his literary endeavours, played an active role in the development of the Soviet project. Just before writing the novel, the author was working as a land-reclamation expert in the Volga region, overseeing the digging of wells, the draining of swamps and the construction of a hydroelectric power station.
Yet as Chevengur shows, his meticulous eye for detail could all too easily spot the ironies, absurdities and contradictions of Soviet reality. He was, as Robert Chandler suggests in his introduction to this superb new co-translation, “betrayed by his own talent” — which explains why the complete novel remained unpublished in Russia until glasnost in the late 1980s.
Based partly on the author’s experiences in the Russian south in the early 1920s, Chevengur masterfully weaves together the dreams and desolations of the starving and dispossessed rural communities living through the savage early years of Bolshevik regulate. Surviving on a diet of raw grass, tree bark and faith in the “bright future” promised them by party apparatchiks, these men and women come face to face with obscene violence and brutality. Revolutionary euphoria gives way to state-sponsored terror.
Billed by its publisher as “the Soviet Don Quixote”, Chevengur might well have been written as a homage to Cervantes’ masterpiece. Orphaned after his father drowns himself having decided to “[give] death a try”, Sasha Dvanov, the novel’s Christlike hero, seeks a home amid the civil war that followed the events of 1917. We see him touring the hungry steppe alongside Stepan Kopionkin, a knight-errant of the revolution who rides astride a dray horse named “Strength of the Proletariat” and whose beloved Dulcinea is none other than the ghost of Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.
As they make their way through villages and communes, encountering counter-revolutionaries, mercenaries and modern-day inquisitors, they eventually reach the isolated town of Chevengur. This mysterious place, “named in memory of the future”, seems to exist on the cusp between reality and myth — a place where communism is said to have been realised because everything that is not communism has been zealously eradicated. If Cervantes’ magnum opus was about the “human need to withstand suffering”, as the critic Harold Bloom wrote, then Chevengur pushes the theory to its limits.
Platonov was not one to shy away from airing heretical opinions. In the 1930s, his depiction of forced collectivisation in a story that did make it into print so enraged the top brass that Stalin himself notoriously scrawled “bastard” in the margin. It is a miracle that he avoided the gulag and continued to publish — albeit subject to heavy censorship — until his death from tuberculosis in 1951.
And Chevengur’s brutal honesty is startling. At one point, Platonov has an angry peasant challenge a Bolshevik commissar. “All very clever,” he says. “You give us the land, then confiscate every last grain we grow on it. Well, if that’s the way it is, may you choke on that land. The only land left to us peasants now is the horizon. Who do you think you’re fooling?” To see such sentiments expressed out loud during the tyrannical early years of Bolshevism in Russia is breathtaking.
This new English edition of the work is based on the most authoritative version of the text recently established by experts in Moscow. Overflowing with Platonov’s often perilous honesty, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s moving translation captures all the dazzling horror of this Soviet utopia, where not only have people been slaughtered for their political outlook, but “after their bodies, their souls had been executed too”.
By turns picaresque, ethereal, tragic and poetic, Chevengur is without doubt one of the great 20th-century modernist parables. Taken together with Platonov’s other major novel, The Foundation Pit — also available in translation by the Chandlers — it firmly establishes the author alongside Vasily Grossman as one of the great Soviet writers.
Platonov’s tortuous path into the canon is but the latest in an ongoing reappraisal of Russian literature — one now inevitably entangled with responses to the war in Ukraine and Russia’s harshening of domestic policy and threats to self-expression.
This publication of Chevengur should remind us of the debt we owe translators — and publishers, such as Harvill Secker, still willing to bet big on Russian titles — for their efforts to keep channels of communication open. No matter how tempting it may be, we cannot afford to look away now.
Chevengur, by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Harvill Secker £22, 592 pages
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