Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

Dvanov and Nikita finally came to an agreement: Dvanov would carry on living in a naked capacity. The leader made no objection, merely ordering Nikita, “Take care he doesn’t get spoiled in the wind. He’s a Bolshevik intellectual—a rare breed!”

Dvanov pictured this special Bolshevik to himself and said to Nikita, “Soon you lot will be being shot too—but you’ll stay in your clothes. We Bolsheviks don’t dress off the backs of the dead.”

“Just keep on hopping—you can chat later. And I can tell you, my brother, I won’t be spoiling my own drawers. No, you’ll get nothing out of me.”

He woke in the long silence of a night that had come to a standstill, the time when children are said to do their growing. There were tears in his eyes from weeping. He remembered that he would be dying that day and embraced the straw as if it were a living body.

Nikita knew vaguely that a living person’s face never laughs or smiles completely; something in it always remains sad—either the eyes or the mouth.

His internationalist face now expressed no clear feeling; more than that, it was impossible to determine his origin—whether his family were oppressed laborers or professors; all the traits of his personality had been erased by the Revolution.

After two days he recalled why he was living and where he had been sent. But inside every man there also lives a little onlooker—he takes no part either in his actions or in his suffering and is always dispassionate and always the same.

His work is to see and to witness, but he has no say in a man’s life and no one knows the reason for his solitary existence.

While Dvanov was a long way from himself and on the move, this onlooker saw everything within him, although he never warned or helped him. He lived parallel to Dvanov, but he was not Dvanov.

This onlooker is the eunuch of a man’s soul. Here is what he witnessed.

Those travelling on that forgotten morning were wrapped in complaints and dreams, and they did not notice a young man standing among them, apparently asleep on his feet.

He was not carrying any kind of bag or sack; probably he had some other container for flour, or else he was simply a man on the run.

There was such a racket from all the sighing and snoring that you might have thought everyone was at work rather than asleep; life then was so troubled that even sleep seemed like labor.

It seemed to him as if he were with another person; he could see the flophouse, and at the same time he could see himself lying on the stove. He

Seven of the sleepers awoke and sat up.

Strength of the Proletariat usually grew tired not from the road, but from the heaviness of his own weight.

The horse had grown up in the meadows beside the river Bitiug, and memory of the sweet and varied grasses of his birthplace sometimes made him dribble juicy saliva.2

Strength of the Proletariat would independently prefer one road to another and always found the way to wherever Kopionkin’s armed hand was most needed.

Groshikov the brigand had been pursuing Kopionkin for a long time but had never managed to encounter him—precisely because Kopionkin was without any idea where he was going, and Groshikov still more so.

Stitched inside Kopionkin’s hat was a colored poster with a portrait of Rosa Luxemburg. She was portrayed so beautifully that no woman could be a match to her. Kopionkin believed in the poster’s accuracy and, lest he be overcome with emotion, was afraid to unstitch it.

“He still takes me for a little girl—but sometimes I feel sad too.”

“If we carry on like this, there’ll soon be no food left in any of our villages,” Kopionkin said to himself. “We’ll have no rear supply base. How will I get to Rosa then?”

“And tomorrow I’ll set you both free. What’s the use of my dragging disarrayed brigands around with me? What kind of enemies do you think you are? You’re just parasites! You know now that I exist—and that’s enough.”

it’s the White bourgeois sending signals through their radios. See, there’s a smell of burning again.”1

He then bared his saber and began slashing the dangerous air, until he began to feel a cramp where his well-practiced arm was attached to his shoulder.

After this victory Kopionkin felt satisfied; he saw the Revolution as the last remnant of Rosa Luxemburg’s body, and he guarded it even in the smallest of ways.

Kopionkin paid no attention to the taste of the bread; he always ate without relish, slept without fear of dreams, and lived by what was close at hand, not yielding to his own body.

But anyway, grain gives birth to itself in the earth—the peasant just tickles it with his plow, like a woman tickles a cow’s udder. It’s not proper labor. Isn’t that so, mister?”

The moonshine mash was hurriedly being carried out to the pigs’ troughs—causing the pigs, after eating their fill, to charge about the village in delirium.2

power and chastising might of the poorest peasants. No matter that I’m lame—I’m the smartest person here. I can do anything!”

“We’ve got plenty of mind, but no grain.”

“Don’t speak idle words, comrade! Yesterday I signed a decree. Today is a day of thanksgiving in celebration of the village’s deliverance from tsarism. I’ve granted the people total self-will and freedom for twenty-four hours.

The lame man was called Fyodor Dostoevsky.

“You can rename yourselves orally, but on official documents I shall continue for now to designate you in the old way.”

He was thinking about comradely marriage, about the Soviet meaning of life, about the possibility of destroying night for the sake of an increase in harvests,

Tormented by these and many other questions, Dostoevsky was keeping his family awake at night.

Concentrated imagination of the inevitable danger of capitalism made Dostoevsky turn pale. In his mind’s eye he saw White goats eating our young Soviet bark. Stripped naked, the whole Revolution would freeze to death.

Dvanov quickly realized that Dostoevsky thought of socialism simply as a society of good people, and that things and structures meant nothing to him.

“Socialism is like the sun. Its time is summer. It must be built on the fat lands of the high steppe. How many households are there in your village?”

He had no gift for the invention of truth and he could understand it only when he had turned thoughts into events here in his own region, but for him this was a slow process;

‘Get socialism finished by summer!’ So: unsheathe the sword of communism, since we have iron discipline! What kind of Lenin do you think you are? You’re no more than a Soviet watchman. All you’re doing, you damned soul, is dragging out the tempo of disorder and ruination.”

Dostoevsky now felt joy; once and for all, he had seen socialism.

It was a light blue, slightly moist sky, nourished by the breath of fodder crops. The wind was collectively stirring the rich lakes of cultivated fields, and life was so happy as to be noiseless.

All that remained was to determine life’s ...

Dostoevsky had been chosen unanimously for this task—and now here he was, sitting for forty days and nights without sleep, deep in...

Dostoevsky was unable to surface from his deep place of duty.

In the line of duty and political consciousness, they suffered in silence.

“I’ll make you socialism! Even before the rye has ripened, socialism will be ready! I was wondering what was bringing me such anguish. It’s because I was longing for socialism!”

During the first half of the night he had managed to think socialism all the way through, until it became real life.

“What a thing to be thinking about! You’re a White auxiliary, not a district Lenin! Tomorrow you must herd all the livestock together, if anyone has any left, and then divide it up per head and according to your revolutionary sentiment. Simple as that!”