Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

But not long ago Dostoevsky had entered him, in ink, into the citizens’ register under the title of “Evasive middle peasant without a personally acquired surname,”

Dostoevsky had, you might say, given birth to Half-Baked, for Soviet use.8

the best horses and cows were going to the poorest peasants. But since there was so little livestock, hardly anything was left for the middle peasants—just a sheep apiece for a few of them.

He doesn’t have so much as a spare stake in his plot, and the same half potato’s been stewing in his belly for over two days now.

“In five years’ time, as I see it, no one will have any livestock higher than a chicken.

“You’re right, Half-Baked. This livestock allocation is without sense!”

Socialism will arrive instantaneously and put an end to everything.

And now go your separate ways, poor-peasant comrades, to do battle against ruination and collapse!”

“But what is socialism? What will it be like there? And where will goods come from to augment it?”

And ensure that socialism’s taller than the grass by summer. I’ll be coming to check!”

“So what?” said Kopionkin, without surprise. “It’s out of the pure hands of the poor that socialism must originate—and the kulaks will perish in the struggle.”

Even a day and a night of sedentary life allowed the force of anguish to accumulate in each of their hearts; and for this reason Dvanov and Kopionkin were afraid of the ceilings of huts and aspired to open roads, which sucked out the superfluous blood from their hearts.

Up above them was a high stand of night clouds, still half lit by a sun that had set long before; the air, emptied by the day’s wind, was no longer stirring. The freshness and silence of this wilted space made Dvanov feel weak, and he was beginning to doze off on his trotter.

He was seeking in the past for some parallel to these Soviet days, in order to learn the further agonizing fate of the Revolution and to find a way out for the salvation of his own family.

He used to say to his son that life’s decisive truths exist secretly in abandoned books.

“You’ve probably already existed before. Nothing comes into being without resemblance to something else, without thieving what has already existed.”

Kopionkin dreamed nothing, because for him everything came true while he was awake.

But Kopionkin was unable to speak fluently for more than two minutes, because unauthorized thoughts would slip into his mind and mutilate one another until they lost all meaning, at which point he would bring his words to a stop and listen with interest to the noise

“Friendship of the Poor Peasant” commune was the complication of life with the aim of creating general confusion and of repelling, through all manner of complication, the kulak now lying low.

for the further complication of general life, and second, in order that current events should not be carried away somewhere or other without attention and to no end. After all, anything can happen in the course of twenty-four hours—and you’ll remain here in oblivion, as if amid the tall grass of the steppe.”

Kopionkin stopped in the dried-up stream of his speech, as if on a sandbank, and laid his hand on the hilt of his saber, having forgotten all words in an instant. Everyone looked at him with fear and respect.

Kopionkin gestured at the meeting in vexation. “Let’s have at least one girl always opposing.” “Why, comrade Kopionkin?” “What sillies you are! For the sake of complication, of course!”

“These brigands,” he said, “want to extinguish the dawn. But the dawn is not a candle—it is the great sky where on distant and secret stars lies hidden the noble and mighty future of humanity’s descendants.

For it is beyond doubt that, after the conquest of the terrestrial globe, an hour of destiny will come for the entire universe, the moment of mankind’s last judgment over the universe as a whole.”

You must arrange everything so cleverly and in so complicated a manner that there is no manifestation of communism, even though it is present in reality.

Should you be other, you will serve for twenty-four hours in the position, let us say, of wolf hunter.’

I assure you all that not one brigand will raise a sudden hand against you, because they will not immediately understand you.

“Why?” asked the perplexed chairman. “I shall abstain for the sake of complication!” the man equivocated.

In the evening Dvanov and Kopionkin wanted to ride on farther—to the valley of the Chornaya Kalitva River. Brigands were living openly in two of the settlements there, systematically murdering members of Soviet power throughout the district. But the chairman persuaded them to stay until the evening meeting, so as to think collectively about a monument to the Revolution.

“Complication will now intensify still further and you can be sure that next spring, for complication’s sake, they’ll stop eating the last remnants of the estate and start plowing the earth.”

“Couldn’t be clearer. Sometimes, if a man’s pretending to be ill for the sake of complexity, you only need tell him he’s not ill enough and encourage him to get iller—and he’ll end up getting better all on his own.”

“Yes, he’ll see health as a fresh complication, a rarity he’s overlooked,”

And he had a thought of his own about the word complication: how good and...

Like a current moment: a moment—yet it flowed...

Deep in his soul he loved ignorance more than culture:

ignorance was an open steppe where the plant of any kind of knowledge might yet grow, whereas culture was a field long overgrown, where the soil’s salts had all been taken up by plants and nothing more could grow.

And Dvanov was in no hurry to sow anything; he considered that good soil could not endure long without spontaneously bearing something precious and unprecedented, as long as the wind of war did not bring with it the seeds of capitalist weeds from Western Europe.

Kopionkin could even sense the smell of Rosa’s dress—the smell of dying grass, fused with the hidden warmth of the remains of her life.

He did not know that, in Dvanov’s memory, Sonia Mandrova smelled the same as Rosa Luxemburg.

then he had looked more closely at her rosy cheeks and contemplated the ardent revolutionary blood washing those cheeks from below and the whole of a face that was full of thought yet tearing toward the future.

That same night, with passion, he hacked to pieces a kulak at whose instigation the peasants, a month earlier, had slit open a grain-requisitioning official’s stomach and stuffed it with millet.

That was the first time Kopionkin had cut up a kulak with fury.

Usually, rather than killing with passion, the way he lived his life, he killed with cool indifference, finishing lives off as if driven by some force of calculation and thrifty economy.

Kopionkin saw brigands and members of the White Guard as enemies of minor importance, unworthy of his personal fury, and he killed with the same scrupulous everyday diligence with which a peasant woman weeds her millet.

Halfway through, this note lost track of its meaning: “Plow the Snow—and there will be nothing to fear from thousands of Kronstadts that have overshot the mark.”

“All writing is carried out for the sake of fear, for oppression of the masses,”

“The letters of the alphabet were also invented for the complication of life.

The literate man practices witchcraft through mind—and the man without letters works ...

“Don’t you misform me, comrade Dvanov! With us everything is decided by the majority. And, since nearly everyone is illiterate, the day will come for the illiterate to decree that the literate should unlearn their letters—in the name of universal equality.

All the more so, since getting a few to unlearn their letters will be a lot simpler than teaching everybody from the very beginning.