Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

Pashintsev,

“I have been basely exiled, comrade—cast down into the pit!” “What about your grenades?”

“Who cares about heads?” said Pashintsev. “What’s dearest to me is my heart. But I do have something to put on my head—and to hold in my hand.”

“Think people have never seen a living body before? Yours isn’t such a charm as all that—no different from what gets put in a coffin!”

“But you haven’t grasped the root of this evil,”

“I was dismissed from the RevReserve in good order—alive and clothed, though bran...

But then, when my own fellow villagers saw me—a man of the past and, what’s more, defeated by an army—they...

Pashintsev understood that it was in the name of communism and the poor that he was now walking naked and barefoot, and so he was untroubled by the thought of women to come.

she covered her eyes with her scarf, like a Tatar woman.

Kopionkin asked Pashintsev to pay no attention to a toad of this kind; she was a bourgeois and all she did was complain.

First, she needed a shawl, then Moscow—and now she was pestering a naked proletarian.

Pashintsev felt somewhat embarrassed and he put on his visor and mail shirt, leaving the greate...

the sun, the troubling smell of human beings, and the houses’ cramped closeness made life seem like a dream beneath a padded quilt.

“Now you’re dressed every bit like a citizen,” pronounced Kopionkin. “Though it makes you less like yourself.”

Withered orchards stood sadly in the middle of roads and in empty places; after being transplanted several times, and carried about on shoulders, they had lost their strength, in spite of the sun and rains.

“These devils have constructed communism for themselves—but no such luck for the trees!”

The few stray children, whom they came across now and again in the clearings, had grown stout from air, freedom, and the absence of daily nurture.

As for the adults—the nature of their lives in Chevengur...

Kopionkin did not detect any new feelings in them; from a distance they appeared as if ...

“Bourgeoisie are lying there,” said Piusia. “And for good measure me and Chepurny knocked their souls out of them too.” With satisfaction Kopionkin tested the sunken earth of the grave with one foot. “Yes,” he said, “I’m sure there was no other way.”

said Piusia, in vindication of fact. “It’s our turn to live.”

Pashintsev, for his part, felt offended that the grave had not been properly filled in and packed down; it should have been made level, and an old orchard should have been moved there by hand—then the trees would have sucked the remains of capitalism out of t...

Thanks to this awareness, Piusia had fallen silent in the mass of the Chevengur collective, recognizing once and for all that the Revolution was smarter than himself.

Nothing scared him more than offices and written documents—at the sight of them he would instantly turn mute and feel weak and gloomy from head to toe, sensing the might of the black magic of thought and literacy.

instead of writing long reports on punitive measures against capital, Piusia had made these measures public and open, proposing that captured la...

Kopionkin stood in thought over the common grave of the bourgeoisie, which was without trees, without a mound, and without memory.

He felt confusedly that this was in order for Rosa Luxemburg’s faraway grave to possess a tree, a mound, and eternal memory.

“No, if you were dismissed, it was because you didn’t finish off the bourgeoisie en masse, because you didn’t fully kill them to death. You didn’t even pack down the earth!”

Here Kopionkin was much mistaken. The Chevengur bourgeoisie had been slaughtered definitively and conscientiously. Not even life beyond the grave could bring them any joy: after their bodies, their souls had been executed too.

The soil in Chevengur was too narrow for communism—it was infested with property and propertied people.

but the living quarters had been occupied since time immemorial by strange people who smelled of candle wax.

Chepurny had gone out specially into the fields and looked at fresh, open places: Was it there th...

But he had decided against this, since Chevengur’s tools and buildings, created by oppressed hands, would then have been lost t...

First, Chepurny had appointed a commission, and the commission had informed him of the necessity for a Second Coming.

Moreover, Piusia knew their means of life and sustenance, and he was ready to kill any one of them by hand, even without use of a weapon.

His soul had not known peace since the day he was appointed chairman of the Cheka; he had felt continually irritated that petty bourgeoisie were eating Soviet bread and living in his houses (Piusia had worked for twenty years as a stonemason), and that these reptiles remained quietly positioned athwart the Revolution.

The most elderly and gap-toothed representatives of the bourgeoisie transformed the meek Pi...

As he reflected, Prokofy shook back his meditative, Socialist Revolutionary long hair.

“On the basis of the Second Coming!” Prokofy articulated with precision. “That’s what they want—so let them have it! We won’t be to blame.”

Chepurny then read that Soviet power was conceding to the bourgeoisie the entire infinite sky, equipped with stars and heavenly bodies, with the object of the organization there of eternal bliss;

but as for the earth, foundational structures, and domestic inventory, these were to remain below—in exchange for the sky—and wholly in the hands of the proletariat and laboring peasantry.

Why had Prokofy scheduled the Second Coming for Wednesday, in two days’ time, rather than for that very evening?

Only three bourgeois from the list failed to appear—two had been crushed by their own houses, while the third had died of old age.

“With her progidy?” Piusia repeated.

“We can do without progidies.”

The bourgeoisie had laid in reserves of salt and flour for nourishment during the passage of the Second Coming, so they could pass through it safely and then carry on with their lives.

Then a moist, maternal substance resembling candle wax began to show through his hair; but Duvailo did not fall—instead he sat down on his domestic bundle.

“Wrap a swaddling band round my throat, woman,” Duvailo said patiently. “My soul’s all flowing out of me there.” And he fell from his bundle onto the earth, embracing the earth with outstretched arms and legs—as a master embraces his mistress.

“What’s going on here, I’d like to know! Bourgeois are still breathing on the earth—and you two are seeking communism in mere words!”

Chepurny touched their throats with the back of his hand, the way a mechanic tests the temperature of a bearing, and it seemed to him that these bourgeois were still alive.