Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

The locomotive’s front wheels—its pony truck— made Zakhar Pavlovich start to worry about the infinity of space.

The stars shone with enthusiasm, but each one was alone. Zakhar Pavlovich wondered what the sky resembled. And he remembered the junction station, where he had sometimes been sent to collect wheel flanges.

“Man has machines! Understand? Man is the starting point for every mechanism, while birds just end in themselves.”

To the two men nature untouched by man seemed charmless and dead—tree and beast alike.

Neither beasts nor trees awoke in Zakhar Pavlovich and the foreman any fellow feeling, since no man had taken part in their production;

there was no precision of craftsmanship in them, not a single conscio...

Whereas any artifact, especially if made from metal, lived an enlivened existence and even—with regard to both structure and strength—seemed m...

How was it that a strength hidden in man’s blood had suddenly manifested itself in exciting machines that were greater than their ...

in labor every man surpasses himself, crafting artifacts that are better and more durable than his...

Usually a metalworker only talks well when he’s had a few drinks; inside a locomotive, however, man always feels he is big and terrible.

From then on Zakhar Pavlovich was known as “Three-Eighths Bolt”; he was less often misled, however, when there was some tool he urgently needed.

Never, though, did anyone realize that Zakhar Pavlovich preferred the name Three-Eighths Bolt to his Christian name;

it was like a crucial part of any and every machine and it somehow allowed Zakhar Pavlovich to share bodily in that true country where ir...

Not once did Zakhar Pavlovich sense time as some solid thing coming toward him; for him it existed only as a riddle in the mechanism of the alarm clock.

But when Zakhar Pavlovich learned the secret of the pendulum, he saw that there was no such thing as time; there was only the evenly balanced taut force of the spring.

Zakhar Pavlovich observed rivers: nothing in them wavered, neither their speed nor the level of their water, and this constancy was a source of bitter anguish.

Zakhar Pavlovich supposed that these evenly balanced forces kept the whole earth in stupor; to him they seemed proof that nothing changes for the better —as villages and people were, so they will remain. In the name of the preservation of the balance of forces in nature, human misfortune keeps being repeated.

No matter how long he lived, Zakhar Pavlovich saw with astonishment, he was neither changing nor growing cleverer;

he stayed exactly the same as when he was ten or fifteen years old. A few of his former foresensings had now become everyday thoughts, but this had not brought about any change for the better.

He had seen his future life as a deep and deep-blue expanse, so far away as ...

Toward the beginning of autumn, the number of holidays increased; one week, three consecutive days were holidays.

Then too, in the light blue mist of his early days, he had loved nails on a fence, the smoke of roadside forges, and the wheels on a cart—because they turned.

“My father came from my mother too—out of her belly. A man kneads her belly and out come bread eaters, as if from nowhere. Just you try begging for that crowd!”

Zakhar Pavlovich sat down. He had suddenly sensed time in another way: time was Proshka’s journey from his mother into alien cities.

Zakhar Pavlovich saw that time was the movement of grief and that it was as tangible an object as any substance, even if nothing could be fashioned from it.

Zakhar Pavlovich was a little startled by Proshka’s early quickness of mind—he himself had been slow to understand people’s ways and had long thought them cleverer than himself.

The next morning Zakhar Pavlovich felt less than his usual desire to go to work. In the evening he felt a sense of anguish and went straight to bed. The bolts, petcocks, and pressure gauges that always stayed on the table could not dispel his boredom and emptiness—he looked at these things and felt he didn’t belong with them.

Zakhar Pavlovich was unable to forget Proshka’s thin little body wandering down the line into a distance where a vast, obstructive nature seemed to have collapsed all around him.

He could see the pitifulness of Proshka, who didn’t even realize how bleak things were for him; he could see the railway line working separately from Proshka and his sharp-witted life—and he was unable to understand what any of this was about; he simply felt sad and couldn’t give a name to his sorrow.

Sasha had no consciousness of himself as a solid and self-sustaining object—he was always imagining something or other with his heart, and this left no room for any representation of his own self.

His life went its way persistently and at a deep level, as if in the cramped warmth of a mother’s dream. He was under the sway of external visions—like a traveler under the sway of fresh countries.

Though more than sixteen years old,1 he had no aims of his own, but then he had no inner resistance to fellow feeling for another life—whether it was the frailty of the stunted grass out in the yard, or a chance nighttime passerby, ...

“What’s up with you all?” he asked, with a remnant of his usual irritation. No one was crying—except Zakhar Pavlovich, who had dirty, involuntary moisture running down from his staring eyes and across his cheeks. “Standing around crying! The whistle hasn’t gone yet!”

“Get on with it and make a new man,” he said. “It’s not so easy to make a damned nut—but you can make a man just like that.”

“Push me a bit deeper into the pipe,” he whispered with swollen, childish lips, clearly aware that he would be born again in nine months’ time. “Ivan Sergeich, call Three-Eighths Bolt. Get the dear fellow to grip me with a locknut.”

The incident occurred thanks to the negligence of the foreman, and also in consequence of a failure properly to observe the rules governing the movement and exploitation of locomotives.

Steam engines are meek creatures, with no will of their own. Zakhar Pavlovich now felt more pity for them than love, and sometimes, in the depot, he would talk to a locomotive face-to-face.

can’t register you by memory. The party will forget you.”

“I was asking because my heart aches—and you think a newspaper will console me? No, my friend, all power is sovereign power—it’s all monarchs and tsars, bishops and holy metropolitans. I’ve been thinking things through.”

“Property must be humbled. And people left without supervision. Things will work out better like that—believe me!”

I mean self-made life.”

“He can’t be right,” Zakhar Pavlovich said as they went back home. “Things can’t be that clear and precise. Or perhaps they can.”

In his old age Zakhar Pavlovich had come to feel angry and bitter. It was important to him now that the revolver should be in the hands of the right person—

he was dreaming of a pair of calipers that would enable him to measure the w...

He had expended everything—yet his many years of activity had not in any way changed the wide-open sky above him, nor had he won anything that might justify a now-weakened body in which some kind of cen...

They’d tell him to go and measure something. He’d do it with his fingers and then off he’d go, holding his hands apart.

By the time his hands had got back to us, a yard would have turned into a fathom.

“Remember. Your father drowned, we know nothing about your mother, and millions of people live without souls—this is something huge and important. A Bolshevik must have an empty heart, so that there’s room in it for everything.”7

“Otherwise . . . otherwise, it’s into the firebox with you and there you are—smoke blown away by the wind!

“Sasha, don’t be upset with me. I’m an orphan too, neither of us has anyone to complain to.”