How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities

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Benjamin Kunkel writes on the Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899-1951), on his troubled relationship with the authorities despite his passionate belief in the Communist cause, and on his novel “Chevengur,” newly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.

The novel’s first readers were understandably perplexed. On the one hand, here was “an honest attempt to portray the beginning of a communist society,” as Platonov described his efforts in a letter to his powerful colleague Maxim Gorky, in 1929, in a bid to secure official approval for the book’s publication. Platonov seems to have sincerely thought that his novel depicted the advent of Soviet socialism in a favorable enough light.

Addressing each other as “Comrade,” they set out across the post-revolutionary landscape, surveying peasant life and ultimately reaching, by separate routes, a place named Chevengur, whose inhabitants are rumored to have swapped stark famine for the teeming abundance of Communism. Sasha “liked the word Chevengur. It sounded like the enticing hum of an unknown country.” Marx famously said that all world-historical events happen twice, first as tragedy and then as farce.

 

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