In search of utopia: Chevengur, by Andrey Platonov, reviewed

It has been a long journey into the light for the greatest Russian modernist most people have probably never heard of: Andrey Platonov. Born in 1899 in Voronezh, he started professional life as a mechanic and land-reclamation engineer, making him one of those rare writers with an affinity for both people and machines. In the mid-1920s, he was branded an ‘anarchic’ spirit by Maxim Gorky, who nevertheless admired his work. His great early novels were openly critical of the Soviet policy of ‘total collectivisation’ – which, in Platonov’s nightmare scenarios, tends to collectivise people to death. The best and longest, Chevengur – now available in a handsome translation, with an abundance of fascinating historical notes – wasn’t properly published in his lifetime, partly because he was relatively unknown but also because he was being read by the wrong people. (Stalin reportedly scrawled ‘scum’ in the margin of one of his early stories.)

Based on Platonov’s experiences touring collective farms in the Volga, Chevengur follows the converging storylines of Russia’s poorest people in the early 20th century, along with some of its most nobly aspiring community organisers and its most horrifically destructive political apparatchiks. They live and work in small towns and rural hamlets where many subsist on nothing but sunflower seeds and fantasies of fulfilment about a collective Soviet future that, as they soon learn, turns out to be built on the bodies of slaughtered kulaks and bourgeois landowners.

The central character, Sasha Dvanov, is an orphan. As he searches for a home in an endlessly hungry world, he encounters political thugs, ideologues and highway robbers belonging to both Red armies and White. Yet – like his creator – he never gives up believing in a beautiful future even when he watches it being built on a rocky, arid historical present that looks irredeemably ugly.