Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

Pockmarked Fyodor went outside. Kopionkin took out his revolver and laid it on the table. Fyodor’s sick wife looked numbly down at him. She was lying on the stove, hiccupping in fear, more and more violently. “Seems someone’s thinking of you,” Kopionkin said with concern. “Any idea who?”

Kopionkin at once came to like pockmarked Fyodor because of his homespun longing for true power and authority—all the more so since Sasha Dvanov liked to say that Soviet power was the reign of a multitude of ordinary, unimpressive people.

Dvanov crossed a public garden. Used as he was to the steppe and its airy freedom, he felt disorientated by the mass of people.

“Time will keep passing.” Zakhar Pavlovich was sitting in the entrance room, polishing Sasha’s battered childhood shoes, to keep them intact longer for the sake of memory. He embraced Sasha and began to cry, since his love for his adopted son was constantly growing.

“What will we do with our mothers and fathers in the communism to come?”

Are you coming too? Or are you too smart now, cleverer than any of us?”1

Shumilin said no more; he put more trust in papers, it seemed, than in people. And so they walked on in silence, each feeling awkward before the other.

two atmospheres of pressure within the hall. “If you could collect the whole party together here,” he was reasoning, “we could set up an electricity-generating station. I’ll be damned if we couldn’t power it on the party’s breath alone!”

Fufaev himself, preferring the future to the past, had never spoken about this; Fufaev looked on the past as a now-useless fact, something that had been destroyed once and for all, and he kept his medals in a trunk at home, not on his chest.

Gopner had learned about the medals only from Fufaev’s boastful wife, who knew every detail of her husband’s life as precisely as if she had given birth to him herself.

But sometimes people gave Fufaev more practical advice. Pre-revolutionary archives, for example, could be used to heat children’s homes.

At night Fufaev dreamed of scrap materials of every kind, in the guise of abstract mountains of anonymous old junk. He would wake in shock, appalled by his own position of responsibility, since he was an honorable man.

Better, he suggested, to send a circular instructing the citizens of the old world to keep a close guard on their clutter, in case it should ever be required by the Revolution. Not that it ever really would be required, since the new world would be constructed from eternal material never to be discarded.

“After all, you and I are subjects now, not objects, damn it.8 Though just what that means, it’s not so easy to grasp.”

“Quite right!” But even if the secretary had been quite wrong, there were so many people present that they’d have done things their own way anyway.

The further the Revolution went, the more resistance it met from tired machines and artifacts that had long outworked their operational life and kept going only thanks to the mastery with which they were spurred on by mechanics and engineers.

The secretary was now talking about doomed comrades detailed to grain-requisitioning detachments. All too often our red banner had served as a drape for their coffins.

Striding bast shoes, no one inside them— Striding the steppe, with people beside them .

The fireman was at that moment looking at the city, illuminated only by stars, and wondering what would happen if it all went up in flames. The bare earth from beneath the city would become farmed fields. The fire brigade would become a village militia unit and his work would be calmer and easier.

He could not think blindly—first he had to put his mental agitation into words. Only then, on hearing these words, could he feel anything clearly.

Probably, he also read books aloud, to transform enigmatic dead signs into things of sound that he could sense.

He was dressed in the uniform of a true Communist—a greatcoat off the shoulders of a deserter from the tsarist war.1

“From Communism,” the visitor replied. “Heard of such a place?” “Some village named in memory of the future?”

“What do you mean? Aren’t you a party member? It’s an inhabited point and locality, a whole district center. In the past it was called Chevengur.

If Dvanov closed his eyes, he thought he could hear water letting out an even, sustained moan as it disappeared down a funnel into the earth.

The chairman of the Chevengur District ExecComm took a pinch of snuff and kept trying to sneeze. The meeting had gone silent for some reason; probably they were all thinking.

The moon up in the sky and a vast laboring district beneath it—all deep in communism, like a fish in a lake.3 All that we lack is recognition.”

“I got carried away,” the Chevengurian admitted. “But with no moon, things are better still. We’ve got lamps, with lampshades.”

Strength of the Proletariat—had grown fat and swollen during these weeks of standstill. At night he would growl and snarl, from stagnant strength and long yearning for open steppe.

During the day, men would come to the village soviet yard and walk around the horse several times. Strength of the Proletariat would look at his spectators grimly, lift up his head, and let out a sullen yawn.

but Strength of the Proletariat was too powerfully built to gallop for long and he soon returned to his usual capacious stride.

Whether or not there was a path beneath the horse was unclear—but the earth’s far edge had freshened with light and Strength of the Proletariat wanted to reach this edge as soon as possible, thinking it was where Kopionkin needed to go.

“Yes,” said Chepurny. “Let’s go. I’m missing my Klavdiusha.” “Who’s that? Your spouse?” “We don’t have spouses—only female comrades-in-arms.”

After studying the article about co-operatives, Alexey Alexeyevich took Soviet power to his heart, accepting it as a warm and communal good.

Until then, Alexey Alexeyevich had felt only fear of socialism—but now that socialism was called general co-operation, he fell sincerely in love with it.

And the sky above the orchards, above the small district churches and the town’s stationary property, lay buried in his mind as a touching recollection—even if the nature of this recollection was not something everyone could understand.

Alexey Alexeyevich was now fully in possession of himself, feeling the sky’s warmth as if it were his own childhood and his mother’s skin; as in some distant time long passed into buried eternal memory, nourishment for all people was flowing from the sky’s solar center, like a mother’s blood along an umbilical cord.

Only partially did Chevengur belong to people; the density of these small and agitated beings was far greater, but this was not something that the old Chevengurians took into account.

KOPIONKIN had never found time to read Karl Marx. Confronted with Chepurny’s erudition, he felt troubled.

“Does everyone here have to read Karl Marx?”

I haven’t read him either, not in all my born days. I’ve just picked up a little at rallies and demonstrations—enough for agitation and propaganda.

He had not yet seen in Chevengur any sign of clear, evident socialism—of a beauty amid nature so touching, so steadfast and edifying that it might be the birthplace of a second Rosa Luxemburg or a place for the scientific resurrection of the first, who had perished on German bourgeois soil.

And Chepurny had replied, “Nothing. We don’t have needs or tasks. You can live for yourself, internally! Life’s good here in Chevengur—we’ve mobilized the sun for eternal work and disbanded society forever.”3

“We can see all right,” another Chevengurian replied with conviction. “We live in a comradely way, but your horse is a bourgeois.”

The blue heights standing over Chevengur filled Kopionkin with anguish; the road to his friend lay beyond the strength of his steed.

“Is this whole town simply a brigandry reserve?” he thought jealously. “I’ll give these reptiles a taste of communism right now—I’ll ram it right down their gullets.”

“Even my horse has taken against them. They think communism’s an empty piffle, just a matter of reason and material benefit. But what about the body of communism—where’s that to be seen?”

Sometimes the man turned round and yelled out reproaches, saying that in Chevengur man neither labored nor ran, and that all taxes and obligations were now borne by the sun.

“Here, comrade, man is allowed rest. It was only the bourgeoisie who were always hurrying. They needed to guzzle and oppress. But we eat calmly and are friends to one another . . . There now—there’s your soviet.”

In an arc over the main door were the words COME UNTO ME, ALL YE THAT LABOR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST.