Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

“What we have here, Fyodor Fyodorovich, is not some mechanism. It’s people’s lives.

And you can’t set people straight just like that—they need to order their own lives.

I used to think that the Revolution was a locomotive, but now I can...

Sasha felt a sense of loss and longing with regard to past time; time constantly comes into being and vanishes, while man with his hope for the future stays in one place.

And Sasha understood why Chepurny and the Chevengur Bolsheviks so desired communism. It was the end of history, the end of time. Time moves only in nature—while man can’t escape melancholy.

Walking along the steppe horizon, as if up on a mountain, was a tall, distant man; his entire torso was surrounded by air, only the soles of his feet barely touching the earth’s boundary line. It was toward this distant man that the Chevengurians were running—but he kept on walking and began to disappear on the far side of visibility. After rushing across half the steppe, the Chevengurians started back, alone as before. Chepurny appeared somewhat later, also at a run. He was alarmed and overwrought.

Seems they’re like me—they want the International. What’s one town to them when there’s a whole world beyond?”

“I’ll soon be on my way too. That man was going somewhere, but you just sit around and exist. If only your communism truly had come to be—but there’s not a damned sign of it here! Ask Sasha—he’s as upset as I am.”

At this point Chepurny clearly sensed that the Chevengur proletariat desired the International—the distant, the foreign, the heterogeneous—so as to unite with them, so that all earth’s motley life could grow together as a single bush.

Dvanov was lying in the Chevengur grass and, wherever his life might aspire, its aims had to be amid homesteads and people, because farther away lay only grass that had wilted in the unpeopled steppe and a sky that, through its indifference, signified the isolated orphanhood of people on earth.

Perhaps that was why a heart kept on beating—because it is afraid of being left alone in a world that is wide open and the same all over; through its beating, the heart is linked to the depth of the human race, which has charged it with life and meaning.

This meaning, however, could not be distant and incomprehensible; for a heart to be able to beat, it had to lie close at hand, not far from the chest. Otherwise, th...

Even if it were no good, even if its houses stood in an impenetrable heap and its people were silent, he would still rather live there...

With the utilitarian sensuality of labor, Gopner listened to the struggling machine.

Chevengur had known whole months of total silence. This was the first time anyone had heard the racket of a laboring machine.

What was it they had in Chevengur? Communism—or back again? Should he stay, or was it all right to leave? Now, at last, he asked.

“Yes,” Sasha replied. “It’s communism.” “But how come I don’t see it anywhere?

Or is it still just thin on the ground? I ought to be feeling joy and sorrow—my heart gives way easily. I’m even scared of music. Someone only has to play a few notes on a...

“Communism originates from Communists and exists among them.

Why do you keep searching for it, comrade Kopionkin, when it’s already stored inside you? Here in Chevengur there’s nothing to hinder communism, so it comes into being of itself.”

Sasha wandered off beyond the town boundary, where the stars shone farther away and more quietly, being located not over the town but over expanses already being laid waste by autumn.

“Why, comrade Chepurny, is it wrong to love a cockroach?” Sasha asked hesitantly. “Maybe it’s all right. Maybe if you don’t want a cockroach, you’re never going to want a comrade either.”

“After all, his cockroach too has chosen to make a life for itself in Chevengur.”

He could not at this moment have leaped onto Strength of the Proletariat and galloped across the steppe mud to Germany and the grave of Rosa Luxemburg, so as to glimpse her earthen mound before it was washed away by the autumn rains.

Chepurny was not supposed to be wandering about and observing; this had been a mistake on his part. He often forgot that there was no longer a RevCom in Chevengur and that he was not its chairman.

Now Chepurny recalled that he was not Soviet power and he walked away in shame, afraid that Pashintsev and the two others were now saying to themselves, “Thinks he’s ever so good and clever, wants to be the wealthy director of all the poor of communism!”

“You’re in Chevengur now,” said Chepurny. The touching look of these women made him tense and unsure of himself. “Look around you. We have communism here—will you be able to cope with it?”

“We’ve seen worse than anything you’ve got here—yet we’re none the worse for it.

“Feed us, then put us to bed. Fair shares of bread—and shared love too!”8

“You’ll share your body with me, you won’t begrudge me your things, and you’ll forget your comrade—I tell you verily!”9

“Don’t touch that box!” yelled Karchuk, scared it would be damaged. “I didn’t make it for you!”

“A sweet welcome you give us! If you can’t pucker your mouth, then don’t wish for cranberries!”

four months he had traveled slowly through the deep, native silence of remote parts. During meetings of district party committees he had helped local Bolsheviks to prize peasant life from its smallholding roots, and in village reading huts he had read aloud stories by Gleb Uspensky.

And so, with the happiness of a man of culture,

he was now again enjoying the city where he had been born, doing the rounds of his favorite haunts, examining elegant items in shopwindows, listening to the silent running of precious cars and inhaling their exhaust fumes as if they were an exciting perfume.

Serbinov went up to her, emboldened by fear of loneliness. “And there I was, thinking I’d already lost you,” he said. “I was walking around looking for you.”

“Do you want to go for a little walk with me?” the woman then asked. “That’s what I’ve just asked you,” Serbinov replied, without grounds.

She walked, laughed, and talked or fell silent as she wished.

She did not keep a watchful eye on her life, or know how to adapt herself to the likes and dislikes of her companion.

Serbinov tried to find ways to be pleasing to her, but nothing came of this—she d...

Then Serbinov gave up hope and thought with submissive sorrow about time—how it was now hurrying by, bringing closer his eternal parting from this happy woman who w...

Only too often he had lightheartedly pronounced the words “See you soon!” to a comrade or to someone he loved—and then never again set eyes on them in the world, or had any chance of being able to see them again.

“It can be easier when you’re exhausted—you can even live alone. And your comrades are left with the benefits of your labor. But as for me, I don’t want to give myself away, I want to remain whole.”

Serbinov sensed in his short-term friend a kind of unshakable structure—something so independent that it was as if she were invulnerable to people or were the end product of some unknown, deceased social class whose strength no longer operated in the world.

He then pictured her as a remnant of an aristocratic breed; had all aristocrats been like her, then history would never have produced anything to follow them—on the contrary, they would ...

was inhabited by people who were either perishing or else struggling toward ...

Many Russians were bent on destroying their own gifts an...

But this woman, instead of ruining herself, had made herself.

And this, perhaps, was why she so moved Serbinov, since he was unable to make himself and was perishing, while still glimpsing the beautiful human being promised by the music.

Or was all this merely his own melancholy, his sense that his own most vital necessity lay out of reach and ...