Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov Narrated by Rich Miller

Overview

Chevengur is a revolutionary novel about revolutionary ardor and despair. Zakhar Pavlovich comes from a world of traditional crafts to work as a train mechanic, motivated by his belief in the transformative power of industry. His adopted son, Sasha Dvanov, embraces revolution, which will transform everything: the words we speak and the lives we live, souls, and bodies, the soil underfoot and the sun overhead. Seeking communism, Dvanov joins up with Stepan Kopionkin, a warrior for the cause whose steed is the fearsome cart horse Strength of the Proletariat. Together they cross the steppe, encountering counterrevolutionaries, desperados, and visionaries of all kinds. At last they reach the isolated town of Chevengur. There communism is believed to have been achieved because everything that is not communism has been eliminated. And yet even in Chevengur the revolution recedes from sight.



Comic, ironic, grotesque, disturbingly poetic in its use of language, and profoundly sorrowful, Chevengur-here published in a new English translation based on the most authoritative Russian text-is the most ambitious of the extraordinary novels that the great Andrey Platonov wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, when Soviet Russia was moving from revolutionary euphoria to state terror.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

At nearly 100 years old, Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur is a tome of revolution and grief. What may at first encounter seem a Quixotian expedition across the central Russian steppe, quickly turns into a philosophical novel probing the deepest questions on Russia’s October revolution and the communist society that would follow it. Centered around the fictional city of Chevengur, located in Russia’s central steppe, Platonov’s novel offers a glimpse into what an open and enlightened philosophical debate might have looked like in the early days of the Soviet Union...with flashes of romance and much of the open steppe, the novel promises both the seasoned Russophile and the curious newcomer something unique on every page.” —Jack McClelland, On the Seawall

“Chevengur is unlike anything else in Russian or Soviet literature. The period in which it was written, as the revolution gives way to Stalinism, is also a time in which language is torn asunder...This is a novel where man and men, in all their foolishness, live together, at least for a while.” —Duncan Stuart, “Exit Only”  

"Platonov is not just a voice of his generation but a sage to our own, warning us that the flaws of human idealism are condemned to overshadow its realized visions.” —Michael Barron, The Washington Post

"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.” —Anastasia Edel, The Atlantic

"While it’s a commonplace to say a writer has a style all his own, no one quite resembles Platonov. He’s simultaneously a documentarian sharing a slideshow of the Soviet Union’s bloody history and a fabulist forging a prescient Russian version of magical realism. His touch is light. Without a conventional plot or character development, he leaves readers with vivid memories....More than translators, the Chandlers are in the business of literary reclamation. They previously translated Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, Soul and Happy Moscow, all of which have their roots in Chevengur. Without the Chandlers, English-speakers would probably know Vasily Grossman as a mere footnote to Russian literature, rather than the author of Life and Fate, one of the previous century’s supreme novels. Without the Chandlers, Platonov, too, might have remained an obscurity among Anglophone readers. Now we have Platonov and his finest novel, Chevengur, thanks to the Chandlers." —Patrick Kurp, The Wall Street Journal

"By turns picaresque, ethereal, tragic and poetic, Chevengur is without doubt one of the great 20th-century modernist parables. Taken together with Platonov’s other major novel, The Foundation Pit—also available in translation by the Chandlers—it firmly establishes the author alongside Vasily Grossman as one of the great Soviet writers." —Bryan Karetnyk, Financial Times

"A superb work of Soviet-era Russian literature in a welcome, well-annotated new translation." —Kirkus Starred Review

“[Chevengur] is at once comic and rich in pathos: Platonov’s depictions of the long-suffering peasantry can veer toward the absurd...but he draws them in great detail, lending them gravity and humanity through measured prose and a bend toward realism.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“Like many of Platonov’s remarkable fictions...Chevengur offers contemporary readers a wholly imagined, often surprising and by turns terrifying and delightful world. It is one in which magic realism doesn’t predominate but which is invested by an otherworldly testimony about our dizzyingly unbelievable history, and brought to memorable life by a man who wasn’t afraid of telling all that he knew, believed and hoped.” —Scott Bradfield, The Spectator

“There is only one planet that we share, and the sense of belonging to this planet emerges, in miniature, on the steppes of Chevengur…. The speech of Platonov’s characters is the voice of the voiceless, but it is also the noise of grasses being digested in hungry stomachs, the silence of Kopionkin’s horse, and the murmur of the steppes.” —Maria Chehonadskih, The Nation

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2023-09-09
A splendidly subversive tale of the Russian Revolution and civil war from the great laureate of the working class.

It’s astounding that Stalin, after reading Platonov and scrawling “Bastard” on one page, allowed him to escape the Gulag. Platonov’s town of Chevengur slumbers on Russia’s high steppes, where crops fail and peasants leave their farms to seek work in the cities and mines, while a few holdovers resort to “eating raw grass, clay, and bark.” Into this region, ripe for revolution, is born the Christlike Sasha Dvanov, whose father has committed suicide just to see what the afterlife is like. God appears in Platonov’s vivid novel; so does Lenin, and so does a revolutionary Don Quixote who worships the late Bolshevik icon Rosa Luxemburg, on whose behalf he swears vengeance for her assassination. This Kopionkin, whose name means “spear,” is a man of action, while Sasha speaks of big dreams: “Cultured plants will make the earth brighter and more clearly visible from other planets,” he instructs a commissar named, yes, Fyodor Dostoevsky. “And then, the circulation of moisture will increase. The sky will become bluer and more transparent!” Communism isn’t born on the land quite so seamlessly. Instead, civil war breaks out, Kopionkin riding out to meet the enemy on a Rocinante named “Strength of the Proletariat,” a horse that, he growls, has “more revolutionary consciousness than any of you.” People starve, careful plans disintegrate, Bolshevik leaders admit to never having read Marx, and the masses falter: “The communism of Chevengur was defenseless during these dark steppe hours, since people had temporarily curtailed their convictions, allowing the power of sleep to heal the exhaustion occasioned by their inner life of the previous day.” All are all too human in the face of this strange new ideology, which, Platonov daringly makes clear, is as much religious as political.

A superb work of Soviet-era Russian literature in a welcome, well-annotated new translation.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194716203
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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