A 1929 Soviet novel shows how dangerous ideas can destroy a society.
As Vladimir Putin’s army continues to wage war in Ukraine—destroying cities and villages, murdering civilians, and kidnapping children—many people may find themselves probing the culture of modern Russia in an effort to make sense of the atrocities. In the past, those looking to art or literature to better understand Russian society might have picked up works by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. But these writers feel less relevant today: The 19th century is receding into the distance, and so are the glorified or mystical qualities its authors ascribed to Russia and its people.
Today, few books offer the level of insight into modern Russian history as Chevengur does, a 1929 novel by the Soviet writer Andrey Platonov, composed as the Bolsheviks established the Soviet Union and consolidated power. Never published in its entirety in his lifetime, Platonov’s epic of the Russian Revolution has recently been translated into English by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, the first such undertaking since 1978.
Chevengur shows how an embrace of violence destroys the soul of a nation, and lays bare humanity’s inexhaustible capacity for carnage in the search for a better future. Terror isn’t a side effect of the Revolution, the novel suggests, but rather something endemic to Russian society. In Chevengur’s Russia, centuries-old injustices translate into merciless anger, human life has no value, and absurd ideas are worth dying for. The ease with which Putin’s Russia accepts and perpetuates brutality ceases to confound once one has witnessed Platonov’s rendering of a country that seems to run on violence.
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Despite having been born in Russia, I discovered Platonov relatively late in life. He wasn’t taught in Soviet schools, and tamizdat (banned material published abroad and smuggled back to the U.S.S.R.) wasn’t available in the provincial town where I grew up. Though Platonov was himself a Communist who took part in the Bolshevik revolution, he owed his obscurity to Joseph Stalin, who disliked his depictions of the savage undercurrents of the revolutionary dream. (Platonov simply saw his book as a truthful ode to Soviet power.) His four novels and numerous plays, scripts, stories, and sketches thus weren’t available in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s. He died at the age of 51 in 1951 after contracting tuberculosis from his son, a victim of the Gulag.
Even after Stalin’s death two years later, and during glasnost, the period of liberalization that led to the rediscovery of Platonov’s work, he was eclipsed by other previously banned writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I hadn’t even heard the name Platonov until I moved to America in the late 1990s and merged my book collection with my husband’s. One summer evening in California, I plucked a plain green volume with a mysterious name—Chevengur—from our bookcase and didn’t put it down until I read the last sentence. I remain under its spell.
Set from 1913 to the mid-1920s, a dramatic decade that spanned World War I, revolutions, famines, epidemics, and civil war, Chevengur charts the breakup of the old Russia and the birth of the new communist world. Like War and Peace, Chevengur is a portrait of a society in crisis. But unlike Tolstoy, whose epic is wrapped into an entertaining upper-crust-family saga, Platonov begins his story in an entirely different social milieu: a Russian village where misery is a “habit rather than a torment.” Part coming-of-age novel, part odyssey, part dystopian chronicle, Chevengur has no epic battle scenes, no love triangles, and no glory. It shows the Revolution and the country that engendered it as they were—strewn with dead bodies, broken promises, and dreams turned into nightmares.
Chevengur’s protagonist is Alexander Dvanov, a meek orphan whose fisherman father drowned himself to see whether death might be better than life: a legitimate question in a village where mothers poison babies who haven’t “taken care to die in advance,” while men roam the steppe “in search of bread and salvation.” Platonov presents these conditions not as a condemnation, but rather as an inevitability. The classic Russian question—who’s to blame—need not be asked. The answer is life itself.
Having survived the famine and a lonely childhood, Dvanov joins the Bolshevik Party, does his best to empty his heart of earthly affections, and, on the Party’s bidding, sets out to “look for communism amid the spontaneous initiative of the population” in Russian towns and villages engulfed in civil war. With his comrade Stepan Kopionkin, a quixotic figure who rides a horse named Strength of the Proletariat, Dvanov meanders through his rapidly changing country, where Bolsheviks dream of death for the bourgeoisie and happiness for the dispossessed. Their quest takes them to Chevengur, a small town lost in the steppe, whose new leaders have recently implemented communism.
In Chevengur, all bourgeois “enemies” have been shot to death or driven out, their property expropriated and divided among the poor. The town’s population has been reduced to just 11 Bolsheviks, emphasizing the irony of a revolution that was intended to benefit the masses, but that in the end serves only the very few. In Chevengur, the church is emptied of God: The revolutionary committee now meets there instead. No one is exploited, because all work is relegated to the sun, which grows crops for food. There is no cultivating or harvesting; people eat only what grows on its own. Their only business is tending to their souls.
Yet even in this Bolshevik kingdom on Earth, happiness is hard to come by. Relieved of the need to labor, people wander around aimlessly, waiting for comrades from far and wide to join their communist paradise, but nobody comes. When one of the townspeople brings a score of listless outsiders to Chevengur to alleviate the residents’ anxiety (and hankering for women), the newcomers are interested only in food and housing, not in the dream of communism. Then a child dies, and one of the Bolsheviks secretly begins hoarding the town’s assets.
Having destroyed their enemies, the Chevengurians are incapable of building anew. The community deteriorates slowly and irrevocably, and soon, an unknown cavalry detachment unleashes a violent attack on the town, ultimately leading to its demise. In the end, the novel reflects the foolish ineptitude of leaders who fail to improve circumstances at home while dreaming of fixing the entire world.
But Chevengur makes clear that the blame falls partially on the people, and not just on their brutal overlords. “Wherever there is a mass of people,” Platonov writes, “there immediately appears a leader” in whom the mass “ensures its vain hopes.” Meanwhile, the leader “extracts from the mass” whatever is necessary. In Russia, this mutual dependence has been exacerbated by centuries of harsh autocratic rule. “Doesn’t matter who—but we must have somebody,” a group of village elders says to Dvanov, begging him to dispatch an authority to guide them. (In Russian, the word for “authority” shares a root with the verb that means “to own.”) This longing appears to come along with an unquestioning, almost religious submission to the leaders’ will. “Lenin tooketh away—and now he giveth,” a woman rejoices inside a store that finally has some food, after years of nationwide starvation caused by the Bolsheviks.
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So drastic was the upheaval Platonov witnessed during and after the Revolution that he invented something of a new type of written Russian to express it. In Chevengur, grammar and syntax are intentionally broken (the book sounded almost foreign to me when I first read it in Russian). Time, space, and viewpoints shift abruptly. And yet the reader is entranced by Platonov’s strange, evocative prose, where a single passage bridges heaven and Earth:
Chevengur’s one and only laborer—the luminary of warmth, comradeship and communism—settled down for the night; the moon—luminary of the lonely, luminary of wanderers who wander in vain—gradually began to shine in its place. Illuminated only by timid moonlight, the steppe and its expanses seemed to lie in the world beyond, where life is pale, thoughtful and without feeling and where the flickering silence makes a man’s shadow rustle the grass.
To fully grasp the novel, you have to read it slowly and abandon all else for its duration.
In Chevengur, we see the mechanism by which people are sucked into violence: Stoke injustices, sanction hatred, and reward unquestioning loyalty to authorities. Almost 100 years after Platonov’s writing, long after the abstract and economically misguided beliefs that fueled the Russian Revolution proved unviable, Russia remains stuck. In the aftermath of the radical meltdown of its society, its people are doomed to either follow the grandiose and unrealistic ideas of their leaders or silently watch the bloodshed unleashed in their names. Stalin banned Platonov for a reason: No other Soviet book delivered such finite judgment on the dream of the Revolution. Happiness cannot be hammered into people. Violence begets only violence.
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