Chevengur - by Andrey Platonov (Paperback)

About the Book

"Chevengur is a philosophical novel that is also rich in psychological, social, and sensuous detail. Although it was never publishable in the USSR, it now stands as one of the most celebrated of Soviet novels, and along with The Foundation Pit, it is the most ambitious and moving of Andrey Platonov's efforts to take the measure of a world undergoing revolutionary transformation. Platonov's world is a world of orphans searching for family and home. The Russian people have lost both their Mother Earth and their Father in Heaven. Nothing is left to them but the horizon-a shining but ever-receding future. Thus in part one of the novel Zakhar Pavlovich, a gifted craftsman, moves from traditional village life to the world of industry. He falls in love with steam locomotives; he wishes to harness the power of machines to bring an end to human misery, and yet before long he is disillusioned. In the second part of the book it falls on his adopted son, Sasha Dvanov, to set out across the steppes in pursuit of revolution with, as his companion, Kopionkin, knight errant of the martyred revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Perhaps communism will be born spontaneously of human yearning? The last part of the book finds a group of impatient Bolsheviks who live in the fictional town of Chevengur attempting to make communism happen now. They liquidate the bourgeoisie and the half-bourgeoisie, believing that this will inevitably bring about communism, since nothing else will remain. They relocate all the buildings, so that property will become worn out and cease to oppress the proletariat. Finally, Sasha Dvanov arrives in Chevengur as a herald of communism with a human face-and for the briefest moment it bears one"--

Book Synopsis

A sort of Soviet Don Quixote, this novel about a craftsman who wanders the U.S.S.R. hoping to ease human misery with his inventions is considered one of the most important novels of the Soviet era, and is now available in its full version in English for the first time.


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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1899-1951) was one of the finest Russian writers of the 20th century, though much of his work was suppressed during his lifetime due to his critical view of Stalin (which he maintained alongside his faith in communism). He began publishing poems and articles in 1918 while studying engineering, and much of his work concerns the utopian promise of technology. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he wrote his most politically controversial works--including The Foundation Pit, Soul, and Happy Moscow--though they were first published in the Soviet Union over three decades later.

Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler are co-translators of many works from the Russian, best known for bringing Vasily Grossman's work--including The People Immortal, Stalingrad, and Life and Fate--to English-language audiences. Their previous translations of Platonov--The Foundation Pit, Soul, and Happy Moscow (all NYRB Classics)--have won prizes in the U.S. and U.K. They live in London.