Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

With all the power of a chest that has been quiet too long, he yelled out an indignant cry and set off at a resonant gallop, as if over granite, into the steppe’s autumn silence.

No one but Pashintsev witnessed this wild gallop across the steppe, followed by the disappearance of horse and rider into a distant gloom similar to the birth of night.

“He won’t be back soon,” he thought. “Now it’s my turn to conquer Chevengur, to bring joy to Kopionkin.”

Outside in the world, however, there was no thought at all. There was only the earth, going to seed as it stretched out into emptiness, while the waning sun worked in the sky like some boring artificial object and the Chevengurians thought not about cannons but about one another.

“She’s in Moscow, working in a factory there. She remembers you. I’ve noticed that here in Chevengur people are like ideas for one another. And for her, you are an idea. Peace of soul still comes to her from you. You’re an active warmth.”

Sasha had never seen Moscow, so all he could imagine of it was Sofia Alexandrovna. And his heart filled with shame and the viscous burden of memory.

There had been a time when warmth of life had come to him from Sonia. He might have confined himself until death in the cramped space of a single person—and only now did he understand that terrible unrealized life in which he might have remained forever, as in a building that has collapsed.

“Sasha, my Sasha! Why did you never tell me that she’s in torment in the grave and that her wound is hurting? Why am I living here, abandoning her to lonely suffering in the grave?”

“Where’s my horse, you bastards? Where is my Strength of the Proletariat? You poisoned her in your shed, you deceived me with communism, you’ll be the death of me.” And Kopionkin collapsed back, returning to sleep.

Moscow was a thousand versts away, and his mother too was now lying in the orphanhood of the grave, suffering in the earth.

“Why reproach me?” he whispered. “What about my father? Isn’t he suffering at the bottom of the lake? Isn’t he still waiting for me? I remember too.”

Strength of the Proletariat stopped eating grass and cautiously made his way over to Kopionkin, not stamping his hooves.

Serbinov’s stomach was no longer aching and he had forgotten that this town was the alien location of a weeklong mission—his body had gotten used to the town’s smell and to the thin steppe air.

The artist had sculpted this monument to his chosen dear comrade with an inspired tenderness and the roughness of unskilled labor—and the result had been a cohabitation, a symbiosis that revealed the honesty of Chepurny’s art.

“It should have been made from stone, not clay,” he said. “As it stands, time and weather will melt it away. This isn’t art. This marks the end of the worldwide prerevolutionary abuse of both art and labor. It’s the first time I see something without falsehood and exploitation.”

“That’s it. You lived by a lake, not in a hut. The sky was your only covering. For you, the birds up in the sky were like our family flies.”

After looking over the heavens again, Prokofy calculated that the sky covers much more property than a ceiling. The whole of Chevengur lay under the sky like the furniture of a best room in a family of others.

It was essential that he immediately classify Chevengur as a family room and name himself as the elder brother with a right to all the furniture under the clear sky.

When he went out into the steppe for food, Kirey noticed that the sky above him had grown paler than before, and the calls of the few birds were more muted, while in his chest he felt weakness of spirit.

But the time of rest and equanimity would pass—and Kirey would start to feel unhappiness, and life’s meaninglessness without the substance of love.

The world would blossom around him, the sky would turn into a blue silence, the air would become audible, and the birds over the steppe would be singing about their own imminent disappearance, and all this would seem to Kirey to be a creation higher than his own life—yet after renewed kinship with Grusha, the world would again seem hazy and pitiful, and Kirey would cease to envy it.

The remaining others, who were many years younger, saw the women as mothers and merely warmed themselves with them, since the air in ...

At this, Kopionkin’s thoughts changed; he had once seen an unneeded man weeping in the wartime steppe. The man had been sitting on a stone, a wind of autumn weather blowing in his face, and not even the Red Army transport train would accept him, because he had lost all his documents—and the man himself had a wound in his groin and it was unclear whether he was weeping on account of being left behind or because his groin had become empty while his life and head had been preserved in full.

“Yes, I would protect him, Sasha. I can’t control myself before a man in grief and bitterness. I’d have taken him up on my horse with me and carried him away into life’s distance.”

“I won’t. Let the man find himself in the midst of communism. Then he’ll join up with humanity of his own accord.”

That evening it began to rain in the steppe, but the rain passed by the edge of Chevengur, leaving the town dry. This phenomenon did not surprise Chepurny;

he was aware that nature had long known about communism in the town and did not w...

A whole group of others, however, set off into the steppe, accompanied by Chepurny and Piusia, to inspect the we...

Kopionkin had little sense of the usefulness of conversation and was now telling Sasha that air and water are cheap things, but necessary—and that much the same can be said about stones; they too are needed for something. Kopionkin’s words served not to express meaning but to convey his feelings toward Sasha; silence was something he found troubling.

“Rosa, comrade Dvanov,” Kopionkin replied in alarm. “There was more communism in her than in all Chevengur. That’s why the bourgeoisie killed her—while this town’s still in one piece, even with elemental nature all around it.”