Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

so why, I ask you now, should we be struggling to think on its behalf? To the class, that’s an insult—they’ll categorize us as residual scum just like that. And here we must close the meeting, since everything is clear now and we all feel calm at heart.”

In the evening, Chepurny set off toward the provincial capital,5 with the same horse that Prokofy had used to fetch the proletariat.

Having done this, Chepurny rode on farther, convinced that a sick person was a lukewarm counterrevolutionary.

But then Chepurny recalled that it was now up to the whole proletariat to do his thinking for him—and so, liberated from tyranny of mind, assured of the truth to come, he fell asleep in the lone, rumbling cart, with only a light sense of his own life and a faint sense of longing for the proletariat that must have just fallen asleep back in Chevengur.

The tall steppe grass continued to pass by, as if on its way back to Chevengur, while the man went on riding forward, half-asleep, not seeing the stars shining down from their dense height, from a future that was eternal but already attainable, from the ordered quiet where these stars moved as comrades—remaining close enough to remember one another, and staying far enough apart not to lose their differences and pointless mutual attraction.

He sensed its quiet communism as a warm peace throughout his body—though it was not the personal higher ideal he had secluded away in a small, anxious part of his chest.

This made him want to carry out a thorough check of the town’s communism, so that it might immediately awake passion in him, since Rosa Luxemburg had loved communism and he respected Rosa.

“She was a woman who knew what to do with a revolver. What we have here is a Revolution Memorial Reserve, like I had, like you saw when you spent the night there.”

People were lying on their backs, while a difficult, troubled night slowly unfolded above them, so quiet that it seemed as if words were sometimes being uttered up there and the sleepers were sighing in reply.

“I wasn’t talking, I was thinking,” he said. “Till you come out with words, you don’t become clever. There’s no cleverness in silence, only torment of feeling.”

“Seems you must be clever,” said Kopionkin. “You sound like a political meeting.”

“I became clever because I made a man out of myself on my own, without parents or anyone else. All the life stuff and other stuff I had to obtain for myself—and then expend it all . . . Think it through in your mind, out loud!”

It’s not communism—it’s a plague! It’s time you left this town, comrade Kopionkin. Time you went somewhere far distant.”

“So the child died from your communism, did he?” Kopionkin said sternly. “But you think communism’s a mere social condition— and that’s why there’s no such thing as communism here!

You’ll have to answer to me for all this! You snatched the whole town away from the road of revolution, capital soul that you are!” Addressing the streets around him, he called out, “Pashintsev!”

Chepurny was not afraid. His conscience tormented him; the smallest child in Chevengur had died from communism and he was unable to formulate any justification to himself.

“What are we to do? Is it true? Have we really got capitalism here? Maybe the child’s already lived through his minute? What’s happened, where’s communism gone? I saw it myself, we cleared a space for it.”

“You shouldn’t have,” Chepurny consoled her. “We could have given your boy Chevengur as his inheritance, but he refused it and died.”

“Even your dream is precious to me. It means your boy lived a little longer in you and in Chevengur.”

“My child isn’t precious to you. What matters to you is some thought of your own. Go away and leave me—I’m used to being left on my own. I’ve still got a long time to lie with him until morning—don’t waste my last hours with him.”

content that—even if only in dream, only in his mother’s mind—the boy had lived on with a remnant of his soul and not died in Chevengur immediately and forever.

Communism, then, did exist in Chevengur and it operated indep...

Chepurny was unable to see or sense communism clearly in nighttime Chevengur, even though...

“They lie in the dark with the deceased— and that makes them feel good. How come?”

“Why didn’t the woman come out and join you?” he asked, in criticism of all the Chevengurians. “Why did she hide away with her child? She must have felt better in that room than inside your communism.”

“If she stayed with her little one, it’s because all they have is their shared blood and this communism of yours. If she’d left the dead child, you’d have no ground to stand on.”

“The only communism in Chevengur is in a dark place, with a little boy and one woman.

But why do you think communism moves forward in me? Because Rosa and I have profound work to do—even if she is one hundred percent dead.”

She wanted payment in bread and cloth—it had been a year of all-round hunger.

‘No, to hell with you! My mother brought me into this world—and now you want to finish me off.’ And so I went calmly back home. I missed her, but I did right by my family.”

“The very highest. She showed me her documents. Seven years studying pedagogy alone. She schooled the minds of the children of civil servants.”

“Chepurny,” he said, “when Sasha arrives, send Proshka packing. He’s a reptile through and through.”

At night, Kirey would look at the sky, which seemed to him like the Pacific Ocean. As for the stars, they were like the lights of ships, sailing past his birthplace on their way to the far west.

Yakov Titych had also fallen silent. Here in Chevengur he had found some felt boots and used them to resole a pair of bast shoes,3 and he would sing mournful songs in a rough voice.

He intended these songs for his own soul, as a substitute for movement into the distance, but this had not stopped him from working on the bast shoes—s...

Yakov Titych forswore his old age. He considered himself twenty-five years old, rather than fifty, since throughout half his years he had been either ill or asleep. This, therefore, counted as loss, rather than gain.

“I’ll slip out, I’ll hit the main road, and my soul will be free from me. There I’ll be, a stranger to all, and I won’t need me. And my life can disappear back to wherever it first came to me from.”

“But life’s good in Chevengur too!” “The town’s empty. All right for a wanderer wanting a rest.

But the houses stand without need, there’s no steadiness in the sun, and the people are pitiless. A man comes, a man goes—but there’s no care for pe...

Why was a man’s main mark now a star, not a cross or a circle?

who explained that the red star signified the earth’s five continents,

Chepurny held the star in his hands and saw at once that dry old continents were neither here nor there; the star was a man, spreading his arms and legs wide apart to embrace another man.

The other didn’t understand why human beings should want to embrace.

Chepurny’s lucid reply was that it wasn’t our fault; it was simply that our bodies were constructed for embraces, since otherwise we ...

Chevengur had no art, although at one time Chepurny had longed for it; any melodic sound, however, even if directed toward the height of the unresponsive stars, freely transformed itself into a reminder of the Revolution, into a sense of conscience with regard to your own—and the class’s—still unrealized triumph.

The bell-ringer grew weary and lay down to sleep on the floor of the belltower. In Kopionkin, however, feelings could linger for a long time, even whole years.

He was unable to convey anything of these feelings to others and he could expend the life that happened within him only in longing, which h...

The sun, the only flower amid the fruitless sky, was shining down over the town and the steppe, and the irritated pressure of its overripe strength was forcing the bright heat of its flowering into the earth.

Chepurny walked beside Sasha, trying to explain communism to him, but without success. Finally, noticing the sun, he pointed at

“Up there. We don’t torment people. Instead, we live off the sun’s surplus power.” “Why surplus?”