16 September 2024
Martin Dewhirst reviews Chevengur by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, Harvill Secker, London, 2023, xxiv + 567 pp. ISBN 9781843431527. £18.99/£22.00.
In 1916 the writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) made what was, I suppose, his greatest contribution to the study of literature by coining (and misspelling) the term ostran[n]eniye, defamiliarisation, distancing, estrangement or, indirectly, much later, Verfremdung. Readers and audiences may suddenly realise that there is a different, perhaps more insightful, way of perceiving or comprehending something that they had previously taken for granted. On occasion this can lead one to a revelation, perhaps with a capital R.
Platonov knew Shklovsky quite well, especially in the 1920s (see pp. 539 and 561-564), but I don’t think they liked one another very much. Nonetheless, in several of the former’s most significant works I sense that Shklovsky’s discovery is very much present, especially in the choice of language, the all-important style, which is unique but, at least to a non-Russian, somewhat disconcerting.
Did all that many Russians about a century ago really think and talk as they are presented as doing in the Chandlers’ brilliant translation of this remarkable novel? Much of what the characters think and say is extremely interesting and original (for a few examples see the last part of this review), and/but do many/most Russians today really talk and think in a similar non-European, non-Western way, as presented by Putin’s propaganda merchants? Have they really not understood what is and is not feasible, the importance of logistics, the desirability of first clearing the backlog (is there a word in Russian for that?) before moving on, the need to undertake innumerable ‘small deeds’ that need to be cleared out of the way before tackling the great new plans of their leaders so as to be sure to get the timing right? Platonov was writing this great novel from the summer of 1927 up to May 1929, just as the NEP was being brought to an end and the collectivisation of the peasants and agriculture and the first Five-Year Plan for the industrialisation of the USSR were being planned. The miracle is that a few copies (more than one, I suspect) of Chevengur were actually printed and its author was not arrested.
In sum, as a recent, very perceptive, critic has written, ‘Platonov’s characters are not at home in language. They repeatedly stumble, caught between the down-to-earth speech of the Russian village and the Sovietspeak being imposed on them through newspapers, political meetings, and incomprehensible party directives.’ (p. 514) I would add only that the Russian language seems not to have a good Slavonic word for the concept of ‘progress’. The country and its leaders have to use a Western word for it, and seem to go round and round in a circle that it can’t move out of, even today.
Reading and rereading this rather long novel and periodically dipping into the Russian original, it wasn’t until I got to page 412 and chapter 41 (of 45), set, uniquely, in Moscow and beginning, ‘Simon Serbinov was riding across Moscow in a tram’ (Had Bulgakov and Pasternak somehow read Chevengur?!) that I felt I was on familiar ground. Simon S. takes his latest lady friend, Sofia Alexandrovna, to a cemetery and hides a photograph of his recently deceased mother in her grave, ‘so that he need not remember his mother or suffer on her account.’ (p. 430) (Serbinov, we learn from the footnotes, ‘is modeled on Viktor Shklovsky’). And then Serbinov, not a very enthusiastic member of the Bolshevik Party, goes off on a komandirovka – working visit – to Chevengur (see pages 436 to 445) ‘to look for steppe grass’. He is not very impressed by what he sees and learns there, writes a report for Moscow and gets himself shot and killed there. ‘He was aware [of] what his heart was up to and did not particularly wish it to succeed.’ (p. 472) Chevengur wasn’t a success, it wasn’t ‘working’, so, the attentive reader might deduce, the October Revolution had turned out to lead to yet another Russian failure/collapse/literal ‘dead end’ and to another imminent bloody Revolution, currently, in 1928-29 being planned by Stalin. (But would that prove to be any more successful?)
Platonov on this occasion got off relatively lightly but, perhaps to deflect attention away from his novel, he soon got into trouble for a much shorter work, Vprok (‘For Future Use’). (The Soviet regime was always talking about the future, as if to discourage people from interfering in the here and now.) But to judge from the very helpful commentaries and Notes (pp. 481-567), and despite or because of the innumerable references and allusions to religion, notably Christianity (Is Serbinov the twelfth disciple?!), Platonov didn’t give up on the aggressively atheist Bolshevik regime and apparently wasn’t even detained, let alone arrested, during the mass purges in the later 1930s. (Neither was Shklovsky, so far as I know – another miracle!) But what a tragedy that this great writer, twenty years younger than Stalin, died two years before him…
I have a few quibbles about this generally excellent translation. I would have preferred ‘understood’ to have been replaced much more often by ‘realised’ and ‘people’ by the admittedly more cumbersome ‘human beings’. Perhaps there could and should have been a note that ‘truth’ for Platonov is very often ‘pravda’, not ‘istina’ – the latter appears to be of little interest to him. But it would be better to use the remaining space to provide a few examples of interesting views and statements of other readers and of some of the characters in this phenomenal novel.
The true hero of Chevengur is ‘the Russian people as a whole – as a collective orphan, deprived by the revolution of both their Mother Earth and their Father in Heaven.’ (p. xvi)
‘If infinity really did exist, it would simply unravel in all that space and there would no longer be anything hard. Infinity – huh! There has to be a dead end somewhere.’ (p. 41)
‘…in labor every man surpasses himself, crafting artifacts that are better and more durable than his own day-to-day significance.’ (p. 43)
‘A Bolshevik must have an empty heart. So that there’s room in it for everything.’ (p. 71)
‘…inside every man there also lives a little onlooker – he takes no part either in his actions or in his suffering and is always dispassionate and always the same. His work is to see and to witness, but he has no say in a man’s life and no one knows the reason for his solitary existence.’ (pp. 118-119)
‘This leader knew nothing, but he gave out information about everything.’ (p. 120)
‘Arsakov had written that the only steady improvement comes from second-rate people. Excessive mind is of no use at all […] People […] begin to act much too early, having understood little. […] It is sufficient to leave history in peace for fifty years, in order for all effortlessly to attain an intoxicating prosperity.’ (p. 151)
(Dvanov explains the relativity of time and space:) ‘The recumbent figure eight denotes the eternity of time, while the upright double-ended arrow denotes the infinity of space.’ (p. 160)
‘Dvanov was content that in Russia the Revolution had clean rooted out the few thickets of culture, while the people for their part remained the same as ever – empty and fertile, not a cornfield but wide-open steppe.’ (p. 161)
‘Pashintsev rapped himself on his low skull, where his brain must have been compressed to make room for all his thinking.’ (p. 170)
‘“Get it?” Fufaev quietly asked Gopner. “The bourgeoisie are scrap material too. We must take them in hand and make good use of them.”’ (p. 211)
‘“… The smartest people are in power already, so they no longer bother to use their minds.”’ (p. 281)
‘“Communism’s no joke – it’s the end of the world!”’ (p. 317)
‘ Might it not be better to keep all of communism and its happiness in careful reserve, in order to release it to the masses now and again in fractional portions and according to class need, thus safeguarding the inexhaustibility of both property and happiness?’ (p. 385, and on this point see also pp. 306-309 and p. 386 – it isn’t clear to me whether Chevengur disintegrates and collapses after it ‘merely’ attains socialism or after it achieves communism.)
Writing with great insight about Platonov, Vladimir Sharov has this to say: ‘If evil is reversible and death not eternal, then to kill those who are stopping us from building an earthly paradise for the people, in the quickest and easiest way possible, is no sin; and later, nothing will stop us restoring what we took away – by resurrecting the dead for life together in pastures green. Something similar applies to the noosphere as well. Here, too, the murder of man by man is no sin: we are, after all, part of a single universal organism in which cells that are harmful and sick are killed and consumed for the common good by those that are healthy and useful.’ (p. 507)
Might Mr. Putin be a secret Platonovist?! Platonov too never gave up, and neither should his grateful readers. May there be more and more of them. This is a ‘must read to the end’ book!
