Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

“Now our cause is assured!” said Chepurny once they’d completed this task. “No proletarian in the world is poorer than a corpse.”

He had tobacco, but no paper; he had smoked all his documents long ago

Luy would have left the city behind and not delivered Kopionkin’s letter at all, except that the city lay on his direct path to Petrograd and the shores of the Baltic Sea. From there—from the cold of the empty plains of the Revolution—ships departed into the dark of the seas, to conquer in due course the warm bourgeois countries.

He listened to the river’s speech, thought about the peaceful life, the happiness beyond the earth’s horizon, toward which every river floated but where they would never take him—and gradually lowered his dry head into the damp grasses, passing from calm of thought into sleep.

Luy walked over to him and pulled up the hooked bream. The bream went still in his hand, opened its gills, and started to die from frightened exhaustion.

The foot-walker sat down for a smoke and to have a look at the constructions of the opposing city.

Gopner took the fish from Luy’s hand and threw it back into the water. “Maybe it’ll get its breath back,” he explained.

“It won’t come back to life now,” Luy doubted. “As for that comrade, he’s someone I need to see face-to-face.”

“Communism and back again. So comrade Kopionkin writes.”

Luy’s body lacked unity of organization and construction. There was no coordination of the limbs and extremities, which grew out of him with the profligacy of branches and the sticky strength of timber.

But he did not manage to catch any chub that day, because the wind soon got up, banks of storm clouds appeared behind the towers of the city, and he had to go back to his room.

But sitting in a room with his wife was dreary, and he always longed to visit comrades— especially Sasha and Zakhar Pavlovich.

Zakhar Pavlovich was lying down. Sasha was reading a book, clasping above it his dry hands, which had grown unused to people.

“Tomorrow I’ll speak to the district committee. I’ll get them to transfer me to office work too. I know all the political literature, I could be directing on a mass scale. And they go and make me a stoker—and fourth grade, at that. They don’t see the human being in me!”

“Some weather!” Zakhar Pavlovich said to himself. “And soon I’ll be losing my son again.”

What’s needed in this Chevengur of yours is a whole relationship of people. Are you really telling me that’s been sorted once and for all?”

“Well, I don’t,” Zakhar Pavlovich said to the uncomprehending Gopner. “And I can tell you one thing for sure. I can make you anything you like out of iron, but there’s no way I can make a Communist out of a man!”

No one’s been making anyone into a Communist. People have made themselves, damn it, into themselves.”

“Well, that’s another story! What I wanted to say is that this local power of yours i...

If people didn’t put up with maltreatment, if they just cracked or split like cast iron, then we’d end up with the most excellent of governing powers.”

“I’m talking about my home life. For every pound of living flesh on her, my wife’s got five pounds of petty-bourgeois ideology. Quite a counterweight!”

“Oh, she’ll keep going on sunflower seeds. She doesn’t need much. Me and her don’t have love—just the plain fact. Same with the proletariat. What gave birth to it wasn’t love—just fact.”

After the burial of the bourgeoisie, Chepurny—Kopionkin learned— had had no idea how to live for happiness, and he had gone off, for the sake of concentration, into distant meadows, to foresense communism in the living grass and in solitude.

“Since nothing is said in Karl Marx about residual classes, then they can’t exist.”

Chevengur, serving as a close-knit defense against low-lying spaces in which Chepurny sensed an ingrained inhumanity. But for this vegetation, but for these patient, fraternal grasses that were like unhappy people, the steppe would have been unendurable; but the wind bore through the grass the seed of its multiplication—and a man, with pressure in his heart, was walking through it toward communism.

at a time when the whole town was lying low in expectation of communism, and when he himself, in his sorrow, needed friendship.

Had he been able to embrace Klavdiusha, he could calmly have waited another two or three days for communism;

but as things were, with no one to bear the weight of his comradely feelings, it was impossible for him to continue any longer; even though no one was able to formulate the firm and eternal meaning of life, nevertheless you forget about this meaning when you live in friendship and the inseparable presence of comrades, when life’s trou...

there are no comrades now! Or is it kinsfolk you’re waiting for?”

Forgotten reserves, from centuries of the life of the soul, helped the old inhabitants of Chevengur to bear the remnants of their lives with full dignity of patience and hope.

But for Chepurny and his scarce comrades it was harder—there were no books, no old tales, where communism had been written down, where it had been made into a song they could understand and call on for comfort in the hour of danger;

Karl Marx looked down from the walls like an alien Sabaoth, and his terrifying books were unable to lead a man to any re...

posters from Moscow and the provincial capital depicted the hydra of counterrevolution and trains transporting cloth and calico to co-operative villages, but nowhere could Chepurny see a touching picture of the future in the name of which this hydra was to be beheaded and laden trains sent on their way. He had only the support of his own inspired heart, only its difficult strength with which to win this future, knocki...

“We must hurry up and finish off communism,” Chepurny reassured himself. “Then that comrade will return to Chevengur too.”

An hour later he called the Chevengur Bolsheviks—eleven men including himself

“Come on, lads, we must make communism quickly—otherwise its historical moment will pass. Let Pro...

As soon as Prokofy began communicating by heart the work of Karl Marx, as proof of the Revolution’s necessarily step-by-step progress and the long calm of Soviet power, Chepurny went taut from keen attention and radically rejected any postponement of communism.

“I cannot deviate from Marx, comrade Chepurny,” Prokofy would say with humble subordination of spirit. “If that’s what his book says, then theory must be followed letter by letter.”

But the remnants of the Chevengur bourgeoisie did not obey this word-of-mouth decree pasted up with moistened flour on walls, fences, and shutters.

Some of the capitalists asked if the Soviet regime would take them on as manual laborers, without wages or rations, while others begged to be allowed to live in the former churches and show fellow feeling with Soviet power, if only from a distance. “No and no again!” replied Piusia. “You’re no longer people, and all nature has changed.”

They did not all realize that this smell was the dust of their own belongings, but they had all, through their breathing, refreshed their blood with it.

Toward midnight the rain stopped, and the sky went still in exhaustion. A sad summer darkness lay over Chevengur, now quiet, empty, and terrible. With cautious heart, Chepurny closed the wide-open gates in front of the house of the former Zavyn-Duvailo and wondered what had happened to the town’s dogs;

Chepurny pressed the cork deeper into the bottle, so the wine wouldn’t lose its taste before the arrival of the proletariat, and he threw a towel over the buns to keep off the dust.

In spite of these empty, well-furnished homes, not one of the ten other Chevengur Bolsheviks had chosen to spend the night in ease;

instead, they were all lying together on the floor of a communal brick building requisitioned in 1917 for a revolution then without shelter.

Chepurny was able to formulate his feelings only with the help of memories;

he made his way into the future with a dark, expectant heart, sensing at least the edges of the Revolution and so managing to keep to the right course.

There were not even any cows anywhere; life had renounced this place and gone off to die in the tall steppe grass, relinquishing its dead fate to eleven men, ten of whom were sleeping while one was wandering about, with the sorrow of obscure danger.

Chepurny went still and began to feel afraid: Would the sun rise in the morning, would morning ever come—now that the old world was no longer?

Deep inside him, from his belly to his neck, he had sensed a kind of dry, narrow stream, constantly stirring his heart and carrying the sorrow of life into his child’s mind;