Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

In the clarity of his feeling Sasha already possessed this new world—but it was something that could only be made; it couldn’t be told in words.

But after a while Sasha’s studies were curtailed, and for a long time. The party ordered him to the front line of the Civil War—to the steppe town of Urochev.

Back home he sat at the little corner table where Sasha had always sat, and he began spelling out passages from Sasha’s algebra book, understanding nothing but gradually finding consolation for himself.9

At the station, Dvanov felt the anxious call of space that was abandoned and forgotten.

Like everyone, he was attracted by earth’s far distance, as if everything distant and invisible missed him and were calling to him.

The engine was abruptly and repeatedly cutting off steam and they could sense a resonant flow of air from the friction of its hurtling body.

But the frightened driver was endlessly demanding more steam; he was even helping to feed the firebox himself, and he didn’t once move the regulator from its extreme position.

Running beneath him, close at hand, was the strong, firm earth, which was waiting for his life yet which, in a moment, would be abruptly orphaned.

The earth was unattainable and was slipping away as if alive.

The Chinese ate all the fish soup the Russian sailors had refused, then used bread to mop up all the nourishing moisture from the sides of the soup pails and said to the sailors, in reply to their questions about death, “We love death! We love it very much!”

Sasha had caught typhus, which kept returning, not leaving his sick body for eight months and then developing into pneumonia.

He lay in forgetfulness of life and only occasionally in the winter nights did he hear locomotive whistles and recall what they were;

Before Easter, Zakhar Pavlovich made a coffin for his adopted son; it was sturdy and splendid, with bolts and flanges—a last gift from a master-craftsman father to his son.

every ten years Zakhar Pavlovich intended to dig Sasha up from the grave, so as to see his son and sense himself together with him.

“I feel well too. But why are you so thin? Is it that death was inside you but you said no to it?” “Did you want me to die?” asked Sasha.

“I don’t know,” answered Sonia. “It happens. Many people start dying, then remain.”

One teacher says we’re stinking dough and he’ll make us into a sweet pie. He can say what he likes—after all, we’re going to learn politics from him, aren’t we?”4

But soon I won’t be, and nor will the others, because I’ll become a teacher of children and they’ll start getting clever from when they’re only little. And no one will call them stinking dough.”

Zakhar Pavlovich quietly carried out the coffin and chopped it up into firewood. “What we need now is a cradle,”

and yes, it’s good she exists. She’s an orphan too.”

After Sonia had left, Sasha felt frightened and immediately lay down to sleep until morning, so as to see a new day and have no memory of the night.

life didn’t want to forget it...

Sasha pictured to himself the darkness over the tundra; people exiled from the earth’s warm places had gone there to live. These people had made a local railway line, in order to carry logs for the constru...

Sasha imagined he was an engine driver on this line transporting timber to build new cities, and in his mind he did all the work of the driver—crossing sections of unpeopled wilderness, taking on water at stations, whistling in the middle of a blizzard, braking, talking to his assistant—before...

he would have liked to take the trees, the air, and the track and place them inside himself, so they would protect him and leave him no time to die.

And there was something else that Dvanov wanted to remember, but the effort was heavier than the memory, and his thought disappeared round a bend of consciousness in sleep, like a bird from a wheel beginning to turn.

In many houses, the children tried to escape the cold by warming themselves against the hot bodies of typhic mothers.

speed, apparently, reduces the power of gravity and the weight of body and life—and this is why people in unhappiness try to keep moving.

This was why Russian pilgrims and wanderers were constantly on the move—through movement they were dispersing the weight of the nation’s grieving soul.

then he would disappear into some gully or other, where he lived in the twilight of his own hut and hoped for something.

The masses had their wants too—they might have come up with some kind of self-made life of their own.

“Sasha,” she said, “they’re about to send us out to the villages, to teach childhood how to read and write, but I’d rather work in a flower shop.” Sasha answered, “Nearly everyone loves flowers anyway, but who loves other people’s children? There’s only their parents.” Sonia was unable to grasp this; she was still full of sensations of life that prevented her from thinking correctly. And she went on her way feeling hurt.

“Yes, we will!” said Sonia. “Kiss me on the cheek and I’ll kiss your forehead. That’s how people say goodbye—I’ve seen them—and there’s no one else for me to say goodbye to.”

Dvanov touched Sonia’s cheek with his lips and felt the dry wreath of her own lips on his forehead. Sonia turned away and stroked the fence with a tormented, uncertain hand.

Dvanov wanted to help Sonia, but he just bent down toward her and sensed the smell of faded grass given off by her hair. Then the young woman turned round and came to life again. Zakhar Pavlovich was standing on the threshold with an unfinished ...

He was thinking about the day when water would be shining on the high, dry ground—that, he thought, would be socialism.

“Yes,” God admitted straightforwardly. “With their eyes they see, with their hands they feel—yet they don’t believe. But they acknowledge the sun—even though they’ve never got hold of it in person. May they grieve right down to their roots, down to bare bark.”

But it was clear that the river was dying; it was being choked by silt from the ravines and was not so much flowing along its course as spreading out sideways into bogs.

Over these bogs already hung the melancholy of night. Fish had sunk down to the riverbed, birds had flown away to the silent remoteness of nests, and insects had gone still in crevices of lifeless sedge.

In this world now fading and setting, Dvanov conversed freely with himself. He liked to talk alone in open spaces, but if anyone overheard him he would feel as ashamed as a lover caught with his beloved in the darkness of love.

It takes words to turn current feeling into thought, and that is why a thoughtful man talks. But conversing with oneself is art, whereas conversing with others is entertainment.

“But all the same, nature’s a down-to-earth event. These streams and hillocks people sing about are not merely poetry. They make it possible to give water to the soil, to cows, and to people.

Nikita raised his rifle but first unburdened his oppressed soul at the expense of God: “By the scrotum of Jesus Christ, by the rib of the Mother of God, and by the whole Christian generation—fire!”

Dvanov heard. He squeezed the leg with both hands, and the leg turned into the fragrant living body of the being he had not known and would never know but now she had become unexpectedly necessary to him.

Dvanov understood the mystery of her hair, his heart rose up toward his throat and he cried out in the oblivion of his liberation and at once felt a soothing and satisfied peace.

Nature had not failed to take from Dvanov what his mother, unconscious and without m...

the seed of generation, so that new people should become a family. It was the time before death—and in delusio...

inadvertently he felt astonished at the insignificance of thought before this bird of immortality that had touched him with a trembling and wind-beaten wing.

Dvanov regretted that the vision of Sonia would now never be repeated; he did not recall anything else of his life.

You look at man the way the monkey looked at Robinson Crusoe. You understand everything back to front—and that’s what makes it a good read.”7