Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

Not one proletarian was hurrying down into Chevengur, probably not realizing that communism had been prepared for them there, along with rest and communal property.

Half of the people were dressed only as far as their waists, while the other half wore only a greatcoat or long sackcloth cloak, with nothing beneath it but a dry, well-worn body, accustomed to weather, wandering, and need of all kinds.

With calm indifference, the proletariat stayed put on that Chevengur burial mound, not looking down at the man standing alone at the edge of the town ...

Yesterday’s exhausted sun was rising over the deserted shelterlessness of the steppe and its light was empty—as if it were rising over an alien and forgotten country, inhabited only by these abandoned people on the burial mound, huddling together ...

When property lies between people, they calmly expend their powers on concerns about that property, but when there is nothing between people, then they choose not to part from one another and to preserve one another from cold in their sleep.

Chepurny had seen this same burial mound, the same unexpected appearance of the class poor and the same cool sun, doing no real work on behalf of the sparsely inhabited steppe.

So it had once been, but he was unable, in his weak mind, to ascertain when. It was conceivable that Prokofy might have been able to divine Chepurny’s memory, but even that was unlikely, since all that Chepurny was now seeing had been known to him long ago—although this was impossible, given that the Revolution had begun only recently.

The sight of the proletariat clinging to the burial mound filled him wit...

Gradually, however, he came to think that this present day would pass. It had already happened once before and it had passed then— which meant...

“But if it weren’t for the Revolution, you’d never glimpse a burial mound like this, let alon...

“Though it’s true that I also buried my mother twice. I walked behind her coffin, wept, and remembered that I’d already walked behind this same coffin, kissed these same deadene...

“What others? Not the class of residual scum again!”

These others are simply others. Worse than proletariat—no one and nobody.”1

Chepurny had always had a tender sense of the proletariat and known that it existed in the world as an inexhaustible concerted force, helping the sun to feed the cadres of the bourgeoisie, since the sun was enough for nourishment but not for greed.

He had half understood that the noise in an empty place—the hum filling his ears in night shelters out in the steppe—was the sound of the oppressed labor of the world’s working class as it moved forward, day and night, to secure food, property, and rest for its personal enemies, whom these substances of proletarian labor enabled to multiply.

but he had also discovered for himself a reassuring secret: that, rather than gazing at nature with admiration, the proletariat destroys it through labor.

The bourgeois lives for nature— and makes children;

the working man, on the other hand, lives for his comrades—an...

Was labor still necessary under socialism—or would nature, left to follow its own course, provid...

who held that, in the absence of capitalism, the solar system alone would give communism the power of life, since work and zeal of all kinds had been invented by the exploiters, for the acquisition of abnormal...

What he saw, however, were people not marching but plodding along at their own pace; he saw comrades the like of whom he had never encountered—entirely without revolutionary worth or notable class characteristics.

These people were anonymous others, living without the least significance, without pride, and without connection to the impending worldwide triumph.

Maybe these proletarians and others served as one another’s only possessions, their only property of life—and perhaps this was why they watched one another with such concern, barely noticing Chevengur and carefully guarding their comrades from flies, just as the bourgeoisie guarded their homes and livestock.

but so that you can put to use all property won from the bourgeoisie and organize a broad brotherly family for the sake of the town’s integrity.

Now we are inescapably brothers and family, in that our economy is socially united in a single household. So: live here honorably, at the head of the RevCom!”

Every brother has a father, while many of us have been utter and absolute fatherlessness from our first days.

For one another, we are both goods and the only good of true value, since we have no other property reserve of any kind, movable or unmovable.

Also, it’s a shame you didn’t enter Chevengur from the other side. There you would have seen our symbo...

‘Best to destroy the entire well-ordered world and acquire one another in bare necessity—and so, proletarians of all lands, unite first of all!’

The proletariat and others from the burial mound then moved off into the depth of the town,

not coming out with anything themselves and not making use of Chepurny’s speech to develop their own consciousness;

they lived without any surplus, because there had been no reasons in time or nature for either th...

on the contrary, the mother of each of them had been first to weep, after inadvertently being made pregnant by a pass...

They were others in the world and nothing had been prepared for them there—less than for a blade of grass, which has its own little rootlet, its place a...

These others had been born with no possibili...

because their parents had conceived them not through surplus of body but through nighttime anguish ...

had they lived too happily and evidently, they would have been annihilated by those who are real, those who count in the state’s population and who sleep in their own houses.

Mind should not exist in these others—mind and enlivened feeling could exist only in people who possessed a free reserve of body and the warmth of peace over their heads,

while the others’ parents had only the remnants of a body exhausted by labor and etched by caustic grief, and such higher qualities as mind and plaintiveness of heart and feeling had disappeared due...

And the others had emerged from their mothers’ depths into the very deepest misfortune, because each mother had disappeared as soon as her legs could ...

Left behind, the little other had to make himself into a future person, relying on no one, sensing only the f...

State people, sound, settled people—living in the comfort of class solidarity and bodily habits, in an accumulation of tranquility—create around themselves a likeness of their mother’s womb and so are able to continue growing and bettering themselves, as in the childhood now far behind them;

these others, however, had their first sense of the world in cold, in grass made moist by traces of their mother, and in aloneness—due to the absence of any continuing motherly strength to protect them.

Their early life—as well as the expanses of earth they had crossed and that corresponded to the life they had lived through and gotten the better of—was remembered by these others as something alien to...

And what were the thinly populated roads in the image of which the world continued to exi...

After being born, a child demands nothing from its mother—the child loves her, and even orphan-others never felt resentment toward the mothers who had forsaken them immediately and irrevocably.

Even a child abandoned immediately after leaving the womb turns an inquisitive face toward the world; he wants to exchange nature for people, and it is the father who appears as a first friend and comrade after the mother’s insistent warmth, when life is no longer constrained by her affectionate hands.

Not one other, as a little boy, had found his father and helper.

and so the father had turned into an enemy and hater of the mother—absent everywhere, constantly dooming his powerless son to the risk of a life without help and therefore without success.

And so the life of the others was fatherlessness—a life that continued on an empty earth without that first comrade who might have taken them by the hand and led them toward people, so as to leave them an inheritance of people, ready to replace him when he died.