Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (NYRB Classics) Translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler.
1 — The son
In May 1938, Andrei Platonov’s 15 year-old-son, Platon, was arrested by the Soviet secret police (KGB) as a terrorist and a spy. Sentenced to ten years in the Siberian gulag, Platon contracted tuberculosis. Although released in October 1940, eight years earlier than his sentence, Platon died of tuberculosis in January 1943. His father, Andrei, died of tuberculosis (supposedly contracted from his son) in January 1951, eight years later. There are two eights, two ways of measuring the gape between life and death, and countless intersections between what must die and what living entails in relation to the god named Freedom.
Acronyms change but the carceral content remains the same. The Soviet secret police was called Cheka from 1917 to 1922, GPU from 1922 to 1924, and NKVD from 1934 to 1943. Until 1953 the designation was MGB and from then to the fairly-recent present, KGB.
2 — My obsession
This book has obsessed me for months. It has distracted me from projects and family. It has manhandled my attention like the first reckless months of new love. My lips are raw from reading it. My notebooks and digital space are covered in Chevengur crumbs.
To get Chevengur out of my system—to “move on,” so to speak—demands a certain discipline, a reckoning with what is given as well as how the given situates itself in time, in relation to temporality. Now is not Then; Here is not There. One commences by stripping off the residual neoliberal subjectification; one tries to read in the light of the room the author presents.
Of Here, or the present US, authors often complain that biography gets over-read into their fiction. This complaint befouls itself when applied to novels written from geographic spaces where the novel plays a double-role of saying what cannot be officially “said.” I began with a biographical detail from Platonov’s life because those details perfume the book; they scent the bones and cling to his strange shifts in tense. In a sense, they also explain the decade of labor involved in the Chandlers translation. The “archive” version of Chevengur wasn’t published in Russian until 2022; the translators worked from archives rather than a published text; the presence of Platonov’s manuscript notes reveals the painstaking effort to provide readers with the definitive translation.
If definitive translations exist, then the Chandlers’ Chevengur will be listed among them. There is no way for me to link all the symbols and evocations—the accordion; the mystical moment; the spiritualism; the barracks culture, etc.—-Platonov weaves into the novel. Proceeding with for what gets left out, I self-soothe with the hope that this book inaugurates a flurry of conversations and events, a virtual cavalcade celebrating 2024 as the Year Chevengur Obsessed Us.
"The prelude to organization is always catastrophe," a younger Platonov wrote an essay titled "The New Gospel." The suffering of the "drought" and famine would be rewarded by Communism's arrival. Early Platonov analogizes communism to the Second Coming of a Messiah. Let it be noted that the formal requirement in the genre of Second Comings is how it begins in fantastic, world-destroying apocalypse.
Like all Messiahs and apocalypses, Platonov’s revolutionary scene is hounded by the challenges posed by its unrecognizability. The characters struggle with discerning the arrival of Communism from its betrayal. How does revelation differ from recognition? Who is positioned to recognize? If ‘apocalypse’ existed—-if it took place in time as an event— would there be such a thing as recognition, retrospectively? The narrative of the illuminated moment is created in the backwards glance that acknowledges it. In this sense, the moment gets lit by being written. We illuminate sacred manuscripts differently, and theory’s delight is implicated in our consciousness of doing so. Critically, the Russian Orthodox sectarians and religious schismatics who believed heaven and the kingdom of God would be established on earth were central to the 19th century zeitgeist that fueled anarchism and apocalyptic thinking. Platanov plays the zeitgeist contrapuntally in Chevengur. He links the extraordinary salvation-hunger to the abject misery produced by famine and war in Russia. Reform is no resolution.
3 — The horse the dude is riding into the sunset
"What interested me now was the transformation of thoughts into an event," Platonov wrote in an autobiographical early passage concerning the death of his mother and siblings, a passage he later removed. These deaths are not peripheral to the novel. Platonov’s mother died between 1927 and 1929, as he was writing Chevengur. We know this due to the splendid and prodigIous end-notes assembled by translators Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.
One endnote tells us that Platonov's handwritten manuscript page for chapter 25, when "Chepurny lay down in the straw," includes an unpublished note by the author: "Help me, mother, to remember and to keep living." Invocations to his dead mother's spirit ripple through Platonov's notebooks; he struggles to justify or accept the death of loved ones by imputing their value as ersatz guardian angels who offer counsel to the living. For Platonov, to know one's dead is to remain in conversation with them. "They are important," he whispers to his notebook.
Like their author, Chevengur’s characters also regularly invoke the dead as both partners and lovers. Each of the revolutionists lives alone with the ghosts in his head. The jubilant, man-hunting veteran warrior, Stepan Kopionkin, rides about on the horse named Strength of the Proletariat like a statue looking for a plinth to mount. He is the Vanguard riding the animal labor. I wept at Platonov’s genius upon realizing the symbolism of that horse named after the virtue of the exploited class’, a horse the Vanguard is riding relentlessly, riding and extolling in monologues at sunset, toasting and celebrating, theorizing ad infinitum with such profound and committed thoughtlessness that they are unable to recognize the Other they are riding when encountering it in the flesh, rather than they symbol.
Vanguard machismo aside, most of Kopionkin’s interpersonal conversations are dialogues and monologues directed to his dead love, Rosa— "He loved the dead, since Rosa Luxembourg was among them” — or his dead mother. I will be forced to return to this thread. (And I wish I had time to defend Rosa from Kopionkin’s patriarchal maw.)
4 — Aside on alter egos
According to Robert Chandler’s afterword (which deserves an its own essay), the adoptee, Sasha Dvanov, represents the idealistic Platonov of the past-revolutionary period while Scribinov represents the "somewhat disillusioned Platonov of the 1920’s.”
5 —- Digression involving another obsession whose name is Vera Figner
In 1825, the Decembrists stormed Tsar Alexander II’s winter palace, opening what some have called ‘the age of revolution’. It is indisputable that the Decembrists’ attempted insurrection altered what was considered possible. Revolutionists were born, raised, and complicated by the churn of these events. The revolutions that followed owed their gesture to the Decembrists.
In 1861, the Tsar (who had been ruling since 1818) was forced to finally liberate the serfs. This created a large class of peasantry who found themselves “property-owners” overnight. Serfs were given small plots of land that they worked for centuries. The landowning nobility and feudal class retreated to their salons and smothered themselves in luxury to quiet their alarm. Nevertheless, the salon, itself, drew reading into the spaces of power. Books containing radical ideas circulated among the children of the landowning nobility. One of these children, Vera Figner, became a revolutionist.
Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Northwestern University Press, 1991) interposes itself against the archival imprint of revolutionary journals that foreground the labor and vision of men. Figner was 75 years old when the book was published in 1927. In the introduction, she says that one must write because "the dead do not rise but there is resurrection in books." Figner also recalls a warning from Eleanor Duse, when they met abroad: "Write: you must write; your experience must not be lost."
What Figner brings to the revolutionary memoir is intentionally gendered. She frames her intellectual journey as a series of relational epiphanies: the knowledge of self in relation to others, the ecologies of affect and signification, etc, where feelings signify. Lived experience socializes us for the roles we’re expected to play. Figner’s resistance to these roles begins early. She was fussy, hot-tempered, and spirited. She fought with her siblings until the nurse pulled her away. Then, Vera would "mop the floor," which is how the nurse described her graphic, physical, floor-writhing rage.
Her first experience of shame as a child— something revolving around a broken lock— led her to adopt her first principle. The experience of shame taught her "to take the blame on yourself." Punishment is preferable to guilt. And guilt may have nothing to do with innocence.
Class expectations loomed over her future. She loathed her time at the Smolny Institute, an exclusive boarding school for the daughters of the nobility (which would become the Bolshevik headquarters in 1917). At Smolny, she was taught to believe that she had no duty or responsibility for peasants or Russians or the masses: her sole responsibility was to those of her class.a lack of duty or sense of responsibility towards others.
Where school gave her despair, novels gave her the world. Figner insists that she learned more about life and humanity from the idealistic heroes in the literature given to her by her mother. At the same time, her early bildungsromanism included an "an abundance of joy," which Figner believed needed to be shared and rendered in common. Joy connected her to others; it created brothers, sisters, a family. And joy was not indistinct from the revolutionary character Figner acquired from literature.
N. A. Nekrasov's poem, "Saša," taught her "how to live" as a revolutionist: "To make my words coincide with my actions; to demand this consistency from myself and others. And this became the watchword of my life." (It still gives me goosebumps.) The logic of her character, in her own words: "It was incomprehensible for me not to act upon that which I had acknowledged as true.” Her soul “crystallized”, or came into itself in that Byronic key, on the day when she asked her father for advice with a difficult decision and realized he had no fucking clue. "One must make his great decisions for himself," Figner resolved. So she moved to Zurich and pursued a medical degree that would permit her to heal others. While in Zurich, she got married. But her views on healing shifted from individual cases of healthcare to the structural lack of economic conditions. For Vera, the problems of healthcare and social suffering she witnessed were inseparable. Poverty and healthcare went together. The decision to leave her medical degree behind was, to her, a choice towards life and against status. "I decided to go, in order that my deeds might not disprove my words," she wrote. And so deciding, she acted without looking back.
Around this time, Alexander Ulyanov, Vladimir Lenin's brother, was executed for being involved in a failed conspiracy to assassinate Alexander III. Theory was being negotiated in the field, on the ground, between barricades where nihilism met communism. Questions about direct action played out in prison sentences. Prison formed new solidarities between revolutionists.
Figner’s arrest introduced her to Vladimir Nabokov's father and Lev Tolstoy, both of whom occupied positions of power in the tsarist prison system. Tolstoy didn't reproach the struggle she fought for the peasants; he only asked why she had to kill the tsar, since a new one would pop up behind him. "The desire to be silent" descended upon Vera. Imprisoned for decades in a tsarist prison, Vera wore a gray prison coat with a yellow diamond patch on the back. Her co-prisoners called her "queen."
The carceral society has been called kazarmnyy kommunizm ("barracks communism") or Nechaevshchina ("Nechayevism") after Segrey Nechayaev, the Russian revolutionary whose 1869 book, The Catechism of a Revolutionary, is best known for its slogan: "the ends justify the means." Nechayev’s first article of faith is critical reading:
- The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, affairs, feelings, attachments, property, or even a name. Everything in him is consumed by a unique, exclusive interest, a single idea, a single passion: revolution.
- In the depths of his being, not only in his words, but also in his deeds, he has severed every link with the civil order, with the whole of the civilized world, with all the laws, propriety, conventions and morals of this world. He is its implacable enemy, and if he continues to live in it, it is only in order that he might destroy it.
[Nechayev inspired the nihilist revolutionist's character in Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Dostoevsky also based the brutal murder of Shatov, a member of the clandestine cell, on the November 1869 assassination of Ivanov, an apostate from Nechayev's revolutionary band of brothers.]
What Figner brings to history is a first-person account foregrounding women. It is indisputable that the abysmal, relentless suffering of Russian mothers created many women revolutionists, as Figner reveals. Her anarchist chafes against the imposition of teleology, a mode she associates with authoritarian Russian Orthodox leaders. No, things did not have to be this way, Figner insists. Russians did not have to suffer miserably for a god or a tsar or a notion of national greatness. Dissent didn’t have to culminate in purges and the assertion of omnipotent dictatorial power. Figner posits a sort of counterfactual hope, a relentless optimism in progress and social change. Those evil novels can be indicted for wild hopefulness as well as revolutionary character.
I mention Figner because a lot rode on the "one-spark theory" and the activist belief that Russian peasants were ready for revolution: all they needed was an intellectual spark. (Platonov circles this point in Chevyngur)…. Like American Baptist missionaries bumbling through Romania in the early 1990’s, the revolutionists brought books and lessons to their target audience. Unlike Baptist missionaries in Iron Bloc countries, Figner’s comrades actually relocated to the villages, providing medical assistance and education, and made their lives among the peasants.
Refusing the given world, building from the radical re-visioning such refusal permits, missionaries and revolutionists proselytized and sought teachable moments between the poverty, grief, flood, loss. The promised deliverance. They outlined the actions which led to salvation. They guaranteed a world greater than suffering alone, and being abandoned to reckon with it.
6 —- Foundations
While typing just now, my thoughts bumped into Zura’s, who was reading Platonov’s Foundation Pit at 12:29 am today in Turkey. (The Platonovmania is global, as it should be.) Zura’s quote it touches on the exhaustion of the mothers—-and the way Platonov dragged this obsession across various novels.
Where Vera Figner dialogued with her absent mother in the prison cell, Platonov dialogued with his dead mother ("and the “Others”) in Chevengur. One could even venture to say he builds conflict between fathers and mothers into theory, through literature. In Platonov's telling, it is the fatherlessness of "the others" (the mysterious group of displaced refugees wandering through Russia) that makes them malleable and hungry for leadership. The search for a father may lead mankind to god, nation, or political ideal. Their accomplishment consisted in surviving and living despite their orphanhood.
The mother is missing, friends. The mother is always dead or bent over in the pieta posture. Hers is the body invoked for apology and penance.
7 — Language tasked to order
Platonov plays with the way official language (see also academic lingo, specialized lingos, lexicons rendered salient by their capacity to estrange peasants and workers) intrudes on the mysterious and attempts to establish order, to provide a language in which things can be known: "Red as the circulars!" "A man’s skin and nails are Soviet power. How come you can’t formulate that for yourself?" "None of this can be formulated in a resolution."
The verbs "expend" and "extract" impinge upon the present moment. I hear climate change as the unimagined horizon that empires, including the US, the Soviet, and the Chinese, would normalize for maximum resource extraction during that industrialist’s wet-dream commonly called the Cold War.
The men attempt to theorize a future ("The sun gets by without any Bolsheviks–and a correct attitude to the sun is part of our consciousness"), but theory, like god, transcends the plane of life. The men on the field wrangle with their ghosts —-ghosts, by the way, are radically heretical for the Russian revolutionists; one could even take Platonov’s ghosts to be the ‘real’ sabotage indulged by the Vanguard who was waiting for Communism to appear. Forget the dead, for it is the dead who distract us from building the future. In Chevengur, however, the men wait and wait with guns in their arms and death surrounding them. The ornamental nature of their cliff-notes-Marxism lends it a supra-natural feel that remains external to the famines and basic needs of the peasants. It is as if Platonov’s vanguardists read the catechism, take their first Communion, and wait for the unrecognizable miracle.
8 —- The others & their others
Inspired by Don Quixote, Platonov’s novel plays into the epic form. This is immediately visible in the character of the horse named Strength of the Proletariat. But the attempt to spoof chivalric romances is prismatic and multi-faceted. Sure, Platonov wryly and cheekedly condemns the lover to continue romancing his dead revolutionary idol, Rosa, into the corpse and maggots phase of tenderness. But he also condemns himself. He condemns the vanguard, the village, the Russian people, civilization, modernity, religion; only the landscape escapes condemnation.
How to describe the Platonovian mix of playfulness, absurdity, affection, disorientation, and despair? Epically, everything (and it’s mother) is at stake in Chevengur. One might read it as a love letter to the first love, the one whose failure implicates all the “others”. And “others” are tremendous in this book. The unidentified mass of impoverished refugees who may or may not constitute the Proletariat remain a mystery. Characters discuss them and try to find a place for them in Marx’s theory. Platonov’s brilliance extends to the use of capitalization, showing how the masses flip flop between the others and the Others and even “comrade other,” as seen in the dialogue excerpted below.
End-notes attend to idioms. The "Bolshevik foxtrot”, for example, is an oxymoron based on statements by 19s0’s Bolsheviks of the foxtrot as a bourgeois decadence likely to corrupt and rot the proletarian soul.
It seems fair to drag my mother’s ghost into space where the ghosts of the mothers are never quite buried.
“Men who can’t dance are dangerous,” my mom used to say. “Men who can’t dance seek their ecstasy from guns.”
[May she never Rest in Peace. May the mothers continue to rail from beyond the grave at the stupidity involved in our hunger for exemplarity and our desire to be the latest exceptional gumdrop in the pageant of personal branding.']
Once, when I was a boy, I shaved a kitten and buried it in the snow. I didn’t understand whether or not it was human. And then the kitten caught a fever and died. —- Impossible to resist astonishment at what is happening here, inside these conversations, in these words so meticulously and lovingly translated by the Chandlers.
Platonov brings theory to literature; every theme that would preoccupy the Soviets is given to the reader. One finds the tension between urban and rural, the trope of technocracy’s failure to provide for those whom it objectifies, the stereotype of the technocrat as a frivolous, lazy armchair-dweller who commands serfs on paper while pretending to liberate them, the mistrust of ‘outsiders’ that will turn into the mistrust of ‘foreigners’ that will evolve into the fear of free-thinking intellectuals.
9 — The lice in the heart of the heart of the village
The village lacks phones or means to communicate with the outer world.
In lieu of books, the men exchange incoherent interjections among themselves: "We are comrades! Comrades to the oppressed countries of the world!" When alone, they repeat these things to the sky, as if sending missives to the missing proletariat.
History meets us in events on the ground, where the lice make their appearance. After the first world war (and during the Russian civil war), a typhus epidemic carried by lice killed between two and three million people. Vladimir Lenin held a meeting in 1919 to strategize around the epidemic. "All attention to this problem, comrades," Lenin announced. "Either lice will conquer socialism or socialism will conquer lice." (The significance of lice carrying a disease that travels on foreign bodies and is brought into the heart of the nation or village is an image that xenophobes and propagandists will not relinquish.)
When a refugee-cum-proletariat child gets sick with typhus, the vanguardists employ every measure in their power to care for and save this child. But the child dies of typhus anyway. The mother calmly accepts this death, and mourns. The vanguardists, however, cannot process their grief, given what death of an innocent, possibly proletariat child signifies for Communism. Stunned, the men discuss the dead child as an "alienated body" that had been failed by both Tsarism and communism.
Irreality pervades Cepurny’s musings as he lays in tall grass and wonders how suffering can continue under communism. Is this extraordinary present suffering (which seems to resemble the extraordinary prior suffering) evidence that Communism isn’t here?
"And what are we to do about the horses, and the cows, and the sparrows?" he wonders before soothing himself with theory. The Proletariat will be here soon to solve it. The Petty Bourgeoisie is finished, buried, dispossessed—and yet, they must still exist somewhere. The refugees take residence in the village, replacing the small-land owning farmers.
But “somewhere on the outskirts of . . . an accordion began to play.” Kopionkin is “unsettled” by the mystery of this instrument. He is perturbed by its failure to declare its interest, and rankled by the invitation it extends, an invitation that is not resolved when man goes to meet the accordion.
Chepurny remains tormented by "conscience" because "the smallest child Chevengur had died from communism and he was unable to formulate any justification to himself." One could read this as a self-interrogating critique of Marxism’s reliance on structure to explain everything. One could read it as hole in the machinery of Proletkult. One could speculate that Platonov the older is addressing Platonov the younger, who has not yet watched his son be sentenced to prison. One might even worry that over-focus on the abstract enables us to erase the living.
Theory’s power comes from its ideological rigor. The vanguardists left grasping for explanation opens into that mystical space Platonov courts, or makes visible. Perhaps this is where explanation is rejected for mythology and propaganda, for telling a story that will defend the theory and conquer other minds with its narration.
The death of one child from typhus is a blight on the village–it "snatched the whole town from the road of revolution."
10 — Avowals and disavowals
And so the Vanguard wait for the Proletariat to save them.
The famished, alienated Proletariat is tasked with accomplishing this critical step in the coming of Communism.
The Peasants float in a sort of limbo between the communal ideal of village life and the Petty Bourgeois landowners who have come from the city.
The Proletariat must be imported, since they aren’t indigenous to the village. Or maybe they are being treated like the horse beneath the statue of the self-mythologizing warrior in the plaza. Or maybe the men haven’t read enough literature to distinguish the humans from the legend. Or else a theory must be written that makes for what exists in that There, in that particular Russia . . .
As for the Peasants, no one knows what on earth to do with them. Their theoretical role is missing from the script.
What is significant when everything is a sign and justification?
Beckett’s Godot came to mind as the vanguard waited for the proletariat to emerge from peasants who were waiting for God.
And we wait, too. As American statesmen issue balmy statements that cosplay “red lines,” the Neo-Nice (liberal) intellectuals build a case for ethnic cleansing from their gargantuan silences. The fear of being mis-read continues to define our cowardice. As armchair warriors shift their investment portfolios to reflect an increased demand for weapons and drones, President Biden reassures himself that the US economy will be saved by the war on Palestinians. The Christian Evangelical Zionists titillate themselves publicly with promises of second comings on the horizon and Jesus-rule in our lifetime. Forms, shapes, and intellectual prevarications assemble themselves in the pageant of optics with the expectation of saving something in a war that cannot be justified on the basis of security. It is a dream-war, a scene from a mythological dream being scripted for the eschatological social imaginary. It stains every surface with its bombs. It marks no justice and no peace: simply death of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Intoxicated by novels, Figner imagined a different world. She lived her life as if this world were possible. Any world is possible. What is impossible is the perversity of accepting a world as loud, deadly, dedicated to economic inequality, vicious (and exultant in its viciousness), and meaningless as the one that has been given to us.
Perhaps Morbid Swither said it best—- the nothing else matters book changes everything. May the curse of its beauty damn your plans, radicalize your tended silences, and vacate the slumber of your nights.
