Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

It surprised him that, degenerate though he was, his mind was still able to determine the truth—and he did not trouble his mind with longing thoughts about the woman he had just met.

Something was already being established on the dreary fields of a Russia that was being forgotten: people unwilling to plow the land to grow rye for their family were now, with patient suffering, establishing a garden of history for eternity and for their own future inseparability.

All of a sudden, something agitates their weak hearts—and doubt then leads them to uproot plants that had barely begun to blossom and to sow instead the petty grasses of bureaucracy.

A garden requires care and a long wait for the first fruits, but grasses ripen quickly and their cultivation requires neither labor nor t...

And after the garden of the Revolution was chopped down, its meadows had been given over to self-seeding grasses so that everyone coul...

And so it would continue for a long time, until the grasses had eaten up all the soil and people were left with only clay and stone, or until the now-rested gardeners once again planted a cool garden on impoverished land that had been dried by a bleak wind.

The young woman showed Serbinov into her room and then disappeared for a while. The room was empty, as if someone were not living there but only contemplating.

Through the window Serbinov could see the same degraded Moscow River.

love came in the guise of a fact, in the guise of a definite, limited substance—so that it could be accomplished and come to an end.

Serbinov denied the presence in love not only of any idea but even of any feeling; he considered it to be nothing more than a rounded body.

And so he did not try to enjoy anything; he saw world history as a useless bureaucratic institution,

where the weight and meaning of existence is taken away from a human being with painstaking precision.

“Sonia. In full, Sofia Alexandrovna. I live very well—either I’m working, or I’m waiting for someone.” “Meetings bring brief joys,”

“But waiting for people is also a joy,” said Sonia, “and if you sometimes meet them too, the joy can last long. There’s nothing I love more than waiting for someone—I’m almost always waiting.”

Sofia Alexandrovna’s hands looked thin and old, and her fingers were wrinkled like a washerwoman’s. And these maimed hands were of some comfort to Serbinov, lessening his jealousy of the man who would win her.

“I’ve loved, but I haven’t had children,” Sofia Alexandrovna replied. “There are enough people in the world anyway. But if a flower could grow out of me, I’d gladly give birth to it.”

“You’re really saying you love flowers most of all? I don’t call that love—it sounds more like hurt. Because you’re no longer growing, no longer giving birth to yourself.”

“Nothing at all,” Simon repeated. And he began to hope for a relief to his jealousy, imagining that in the end Sofia Alexandrovna would turn out to be like himself—unhappy and lifeless in the midst of life. He did not like happy or successful people, because they are always departing for fresh, distant places of life and abandoning those near and dear to them.

Fearful of being left behind by everyone, he had coupled himself to the Bolsheviks—but this had not helped.

am bowed down greatly, For my loins are filled with a vile disease’ means ‘I am cowed, For my lions are filled with death and wily fleas’”;

“History was set in motion by a base loser who invented the future so as to exploit the present—he thrust everyone out of their dwellings, then remained behind, where it was warm, habitable, and settled”;

“I am a byproduct of my mother, along with her menstruation, and so I am unable to respect anything.

I fear the chill of being left on my own. I curse the fluid population, among whom I wish f...

“And in society I shall be not a member, but a fre...

Was this person better than him? If so, then they must be stopped. Otherwise they would get ahead of him and never be an equal friend.

there was a method he had not previously employed in his human economy, and this was why he always ended up with a deficit.

What if he embraced this Sofia Alexandrovna, making himself into the image of a tenderly demented man wanting to marry her and no one else?

Then Simon could develop passion within him, overcome this stubborn body of a higher human being, leave a trace of himself inside this body, realize at least momentarily his enduring bond with others—and go on his way, calm and ...

someone could have hacked at him with an ax

All he could sense was a faint smell of sweat from Sofia Alexandrovna’s armpits. He wanted to put his mouth to those hard, sweat-stiffened hairs and suck on them.

“and I didn’t love him. But without him I started to feel bored. When we lived in the same city, I felt calmer. I always live in one city but love another.”

“While I don’t love any city,” said Serbinov. “I just like to be where there are always lots of people out on the streets.”

“But then it’s so easy to be with him! He feels his faith, and so people feel calmer in his presence. If there were many such men in the world, women would rarely get married.”

“There’d be no point. Marriage is embraces, jealousy, blood . . . I was married for one month.

With someone like him, though, there’s probably no need for anything. Merely leaning against him is enough to make things all right.”

“I’m supposed to be going to look for steppe grass. A few years ago it was lice that threatened socialism.9 Now it’s steppe grass. Come with me!”

Now he did not know what to live for. The last person for whom Serbinov’s own death would have remained forever beyond consolation—this last person had died.

He could fail to love her, he had lost her address, but he had lived because his mother had shielded him for many years, walling him off with her need for him from the many other people who did not need him at all.

Now this protective wall had collapsed—somewhere on the very edge of Moscow, almost in the country, an old woman who had taken better care of her son than of herself was lying in a coffin, and there was more life in ...

And Serbinov felt the freedom and lightness of the life that was left to him. No one w...

It turned out that Simon had been able to go on living because he sensed his mother’s love and safeguarded her peace by remaining whole in the world.

His mother had served him as a defense, as a blind against everyone alien to him;

thanks to his mother he had imagined the world to be in ...

and without her everything had been laid bare. It was no longer obligatory to live, since there was no one alive for whom hi...

He cried later, in a night beer hall, where there was music and dancing, though his tears were occasioned not by his mother but by the multitude of actresses and people beyond his reach.

The graves were crowded closely together and Simon’s mother’s grave, covered with fresh dust of the earth, stood out among frail, ancient mounds.

Serbinov and Sofia Alexandrovna were standing under an old tree; its leaves rustled evenly in the flow of a constant wind, as if time had become audible in its passage and was being carried past up above them.

She wanted to grieve and feel pity for Serbinov, but she merely felt a little dismal from the long noise of the unceasing wind and the sight of the abandoned crosses.

Serbinov stood before her, himself like a helpless cross, and she did not know how to help him in his senseless anguish, so he would feel better.

the cemetery seemed deserted and wooden crosses had taken the places of the living who should come there, to grieve and remember.