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.

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Andrey Platonov (1899-1951) was one of the finest Russian writers of the twentieth 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. Robert Chandler's translations from Russian include works by Alexander Pushkin, Andrey Platonov, Vasily Grossman and Hamid Ismailov. He is the editor and main translator of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, and together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski he co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Elizabeth Chandler is a pseudonym for Mary Claire Helldorfer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the popular Kissed by an Angel and Dark Secrets series. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Rich Miller, a man whose heart beats for renewal and revival in the church, serves as president and a speaker for Freedom in Christ Ministries. He has coauthored Getting Anger Under Control and Grace That Breaks the Chains, as well as authoring 40 Days of Grace and the youth book To My Dear Slimeball. He and his wife live in the mountains of western North Carolina. Rich Miller, a man whose heart beats for renewal and revival in the church, serves as president and a speaker for Freedom in Christ Ministries. He has coauthored Getting Anger Under Control and Grace That Breaks the Chains, as well as authoring 40 Days of Grace and the youth book To My Dear Slimeball. He and his wife live in the mountains of western North Carolina.

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