Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

So it would be with him, Simon; the one remaining person who would have visited him when he lay dead and beneath a cross was now lying in a coffin beneath his feet.

Gradually, they traced a large circle around the whole of the cemetery, finding no refuge, and then returned to the grave of Simon’s mother.

Simon felt how his heart had grown weak from waiting and how he needed to pass on his grief and loneliness to another, friendly body and, perhaps, take from Sofia Alexandrovna what was precious to her, so that she would always regret her loss—hidden within Serbinov—and therefore remember him.

Even family property is considered shared only after the mutual love of husband and wife; all his life Serbinov had been aware that exchange of blood and body brings about the exchange of other everyday things and that it’s never the other way round,

since only what is valuable can make one cease to begrudge what is cheap.

Nevertheless, Serbinov also accepted that his mind thought like this only bec...

lifted her from the hard tree root to the soft mound of his mother’s grave,

into lumps of earth containing the petty dust—carried on spades from deep in the ground—of other people’s coffins.

To help Kopionkin feel at home in Chevengur, he wrote down for him every day a chapter from the life story of Rosa Luxemburg, drawing on his imagination; and for Kirey—who now cared for Sasha with the anguish of warm friendship and who kept an eye on him at night lest he suddenly disappear from Chevengur—he dragged up from the riverbed a small black tree trunk that Kirey wanted to carve into a wooden weapon.

“Life’s beauties,” Piusia remarked of the gypsies. He had been sorting through the others’ newly washed rags, hanging them out to dry on wattle fences. “Substantial stuff,” said Zheyev. “Only there’s not a trace of revolution to be seen in their bodies,” Kopionkin informed them.

“Without consciousness, there can be no beauty of face,” he added, finding a bowl that had served before communism to collect capital for the furnishing of churches.

“A woman without revolution is a mere half woman, the kind I can do without.

She can help you get to sleep quicker, but that’s the end of it. She’s no fighting thing, she...

Sasha gazed at the houses and wattle fences—marveling at all the warmth of working hands now hidden in them, at the number of lives that had grown cold in vain, never reaching an on-coming person, and which were now present in these walls, beams, and roofs.

“Everyone here has forgotten himself in work. That makes life easier for them, but it means happiness keeps being deferred.”

Sasha watched these birds with the same yearning with which he had once watched flies living beneath the ceiling during his childhood with Zakhar Pavlovich.

“I’ve come from the capital to look for steppe grass. I didn’t expect to find any, but it’s growing in sound supply,” replied Simon Serbinov. “And who are you two?”

And we’d have known you’re a true Bolshevik. But you show up with a hefty briefcase and a tiny revolver—you’re a pen-pusher, not a party member . . . Come on, Sasha, let’s go back home!”

Serbinov hadn’t even been thinking about his mission. Once again, he was trying to remember Sasha’s familiar face. But he couldn’t—and this disturbed him.

“No,” Sasha explained, “it’s increased. Even the town is overgrown with grass.”

All he could now see was his own pitifulness in this town, and he thought that he was like a stone in a river. The Revolution was passing over him, and he remained on the riverbed, weighed down by his attachment to his own self.

“And why’s your town all cramped together when there’s open space all around it?” Serbinov asked further.

“You work laboriously,” said Serbinov, to keep from smiling. “But I’ve seen your labors, and they’re useless.”

“But we’re not working for use. We’re working for one another.” Serbinov was no longer laughing—he could not understand. “What do you mean?” he asked.

No one can endure constant torment of body for the sake of some object.” He then noticed Serbinov’s dispirited look and smiled. “Don’t worry—you’ll get used to things here, you won’t come to harm.”

Instead, there were only a great many happy but useless things. It was unlikely that the area under cultivation had decreased; on the contrary, it had increased at the expense of the replanned, now closely cramped town, but there was no one who could sit down and provide information about such matters, since there was not a single sensible clerical worker to be found among the town’s population.

This was Serbinov’s usual way of writing about those whom he could not hope to acquire as comrades.

He felt as if he were separated from Moscow not only by space but also by time—and he curled his body tight under the bedding, feeling his own legs and chest as a second and no less pitiful person whom he was warming and caressing.

The last people were quietly walking around Chevengur, and someone on the clay tower began a song; rather than rely on the light from the bonfire alone, he wanted to be heard in the steppe.

The tune was similar to “Little Apple,” but it was considerably more artful and affecting, perhaps a kind of Bolshevik foxtrot that Serbinov had not heard before.

The Chevengurians met their future wives in silence. They stood beneath the lighthouse fire but did not take a step toward their wives or utter a word of greeting;

these new arrivals were people and comrades, but they were, at the same time, women.

Moreover, he was afraid to observe women—out of conscience before Rosa Luxemburg—and so he went off to appease Strength of the...

“Your measures have been executed. Before you stand your future spouses, conveyed to Chevengur in marching order—and for Zheyev I’ve allured a special beggar woman.”

People have been organizing counterrevolution. Hostile whirlwinds are already blowing across the steppe.3 We alone remain with honor.”

“Prosha,” Chepurny asked in the dark, “who was it, I ask you now, gifted you the music?” “A passing bourgeois. I discounted the man’s life, then gifted myself his music. There’s no pleasure in Chevengur except for the bell—but that’s religion.”

“I can give you my greatcoat,” he said, “and I’ll put myself at your disposal for twenty-four hours. Take whatever you want, but don’t ask for my horse!

Don’t make me angry! How would I get to Germany then?”

“to combat the burdens of the proletariat. Here now he has delivered women to us, in appropriate quantity, even if on the low side in what truly counts.

Can someone tell me, I ask you now, why we respect the conditions of nature?

Because these conditions are what we eat! And why have we reached out and beckoned women to us? Because we respect nature for food, and women for love. Here I declare our gratitude to the women who have entered Chevengur as comrades of a special build, and may they live as one with us and nourish themselves with peace...

previous men had always begun with them right at the end, but these ones were taking their ti...

And so the women pulled their coats—the men’s coats and greatcoats in which Klavdiusha had just dressed them—right up to their noses, covering the openings of their mouths. They wer...

they were afraid that their bodies would be tortured, almost destroyed by these dry, patient men in soldiers’ greatcoats, with faces stre...

They had given away their body, their place of age and blossoming, in exchange for food, and since procurement of food had always entailed loss, their bodies had been...

For this reason they looked like little girls or old women—like worn-out mothers or young...

In the course of the journey Prokofy had tried to hold them tight, taking them into the phaeton for testing, but they had cried out from his ...

Among these new Chevengur parishioners, only Klavdiusha appeared comfortable and plump, but Prokofy already had feelings for her.

Others had been comrades to him everywhere, but only through shared sorrow and cramped life—not by origin from the same womb.

Kopionkin made his way the length of Chevengur. He wanted a glimpse of steppe; imperceptibly, he had grown accustomed to Chevengur’s cramped bustle and it was a long time since he had ridden out into the open.