How to Read Platonov like a Communist
Chevengur, Don Quixote and Lenin, Idiots and Fools, State and Revolution
August 1929. Andrey Platonov, writer and engineer, has penned a letter to Maxim Gorky. He is unable to publish his latest novel, Chevengur, in its entirety. He appeals to the revolution’s literary darling for help. Gorky’s reply praises Platonov for being a master of “a very distinct language.” However, Platonov’s anarchist tendencies are too evident. Worse his novel’s characters, especially the revolutionaries, appear as “eccentrics and half-wits.” Gorky does not think the censors will ever approve of his novel and helpfully suggests that Platonov should turn some of it into a play, where he might have some success.
Gorky’s remark about Platonov’s characters is not unfair. Platonov leaves no room for doubt that his characters are foolish. They are extraordinary in a pejorative sense – it would be better if they were ordinary. Since Chevengur was censored we might be tempted to assume it is samizdat. Yet Chevengur’s “eccentrics and half-wits” – let’s just call them fools – build a kind of Communism. They listen to each other, solve their problems together, help each other see reason. And then, through someone else’s idiocy, they are exterminated.
The fools of Chevengur are the core of the novel’s utopian and radical dimensions. Chevengur’s main characters, Sasha Dvanov and Stepan Kopionkin, are reflections of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. Here Don Quixote’s meagre steed, Racinate, appears as a powerful cart horse named, amusingly, “Strength of the Proletariat.” Kopionkin even has his Dulcinea. It is none other than Rosa Luxemburg. Although she is no longer alive, it is her memory that drives Kopionkin and guides his actions. He keeps a photo of her in his cap.
Kopionkin often speaks in ridiculous Soviet phrases, he is hasty and quick to violence. When a forester invites Kopionkin and Dvanov in for dinner he makes the mistake of referring to them as bosses: “‘Kulak cretin!’ replied Kopionkin, with quick rage. ‘Our power isn’t terror, it’s the meditativeness of the masses.’” The forester corrects himself and we are told that “[t]he Revolution had convinced Kopionkin once and for all of the submissiveness of every enemy.” Such absurd sentences abound in Chevengur, especially when describing Kopionkin.
Ostensibly, the novel is about Dvanov and Kopionkin’s search across Russia for communism. The Civil War and the New Economic Policy (NEP) had rendered communism obscure and scattered traitors and counter revolutionaries amongst the populace. They will eventually but separately arrive at Chevengur, far inland on the steppe. Chevengur functions as a kind of Mecca and every fool they meet along thier journey ends up there. Chevengur is a strange society, but its a utopian one. When Dvanov finally arrives he walks down the street, “not yet understanding anything but seeing that life was good in Chevengur.”
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. Marxism, as one of the last comprehensive Weltanschauung (worldviews) built its own extensive terminology and ideas. Russian revolutionaries sought to adhere to this lexicon, and by the time of Stalin this lexicon had become inflexible, being reduced to less than language. In Chevengur Platonov’s relationship to this language is still open. He parodies it and produces ridiculous effects with it, but his characters are still capable of thought.
In The Foundation Pit, which Platonov writes after the first collectivization (1928-1930) the characters not only talk in phrases torn from Soviet propaganda, but the narrative itself is written in this manner. This is apparent from the very first sentence of the text, where we are told that Voschev has turned 30 in his “private life” and that he has been dismissed from his factory job “on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.” At one memorable point one-character calls another a “class superfluidity” as if this is supposed to be some great insult. Everyone in The Foundation Pit -with some fleeting exceptions – is an idiot. And there is something sinister about an idiot.
The archetypal literary fool is Don Quixote. Yet what we should make of Don Quixote is far from obvious. We know him idiomatically, when we are told to not tilt at windmills, a warning about misdirected efforts. Don Quixote’s foolishness, however, is more than quotidian; it has world historical implications. He is a figure that signals a transition, sitting on the edge of new incomprehensible era. This makes him tragic as well. For György Lukács, Don Quixote is the surest sign that the era of the epic has ended, and the era of transcendental homelessness has begun. Don Quixote is a fool because he does not understand his fate, because he persists in a world that is no more. World history has passed him by.
It is not just Lukács who makes of Don Quixote a herald. Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, sees Don Quixote as heralding a different transition. This time it is our departure from the Renaissance world and the rules of knowledge that govern it. Don Quixote is, for Foucault, “the negative of the Renaissance world.” Don Quixote’s errors are often ones of resemblance. This object looks like another object. The Windmills are imposing, like giants. A washbasin shares the shape of the infamous Helmet of Manbrino, etc. ,etc. For Foucault this makes a mockery of the role resemblance played in the Renaissance and signals a move closer to our own current paradigm: only a fool would think that because two things resemble each other they are connected.
Platonov’s Don Quixotes signal another transition. Yes, Don Quixotes, plural. Platonov takes literature’s greatest fool and multiples him. It will take more than an single individual to build communism, after all. Dvanov and Kopionkin are travelling through the wilderness when they come across a set of human footprints leading to a building. They inspect the building and tell the man inside to come out. He at first refuses, but eventually emerges. He is covered head to toe in armor and wears the red army star upon his helmet. A communist knight, our comrade Pashintsev. He has been living alone, believing the revolution to have been let down since 1919. He tells Dvanov and Kopionkin that he “lives without the least leadership – and the result is excellent.” He works to preserve the memory of the revolution in his abandoned compound and wards of officials with threats of grenades and various explosive. Yet he defused them all long ago and sleeps peacefully every night next to his impotent defenses.
Don Quixote reappears sixty pages later in the guise of Cherpurny, the Chevengurian. When Dvanov meets him, Cherpurny tells him that he is “From Communism…heard of such a place?” Leaving town and returning to Chevengur, Cherpuny is stopped. He has not paid for his night in the inn. Yet he has no money, because money is not needed in Chevengur.
He had no money and could not possibly have had any money. Chevengur had no budget, to the joy of the provincial authorities, who assumed that life in the town was proceeding on a sound, self-supporting foundation. In reality, however, the citizens of Chevengur had long ago decided that a happy life was preferable to any kind of labor, construction, and mutual accounting that required the sacrifice of man’s comradely body, which lives only once. Chepurny was unable to pay for his lodging. “Take what you want,” he said. “I’m a naked Communist.”
Don Quixote, too, refused to pay for a night’s lodging. For who has ever heard of knight paying to stay in an inn? There are now three Don Quixotes in Platonov’s story. One seeks to defend communism from its enemies (Kopionkin), one lives without leadership (Pashintev), one lives in a town that has supposedly achieved communism (Cherpurny). There is much in Don Quixote to suggest that Cervantes wants his hero to be a figure of mockery, out of time and overzealous. Yet these are not the only readings of Quixote possible. Quixote’s insistence, his removal from the immediate concerns of the world, gives him a sort of strength of character. Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno suggests that Quixote’s foolishness is also bravery, and models a conviction that is essential. I have written about this before, but I will quote Unamuno again:
Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. There is only one way of hitting the nail on the head and that is by hammering on the shoe a hundred times. And there is only one way of achieving a real triumph and that is by facing ridicule with serenity.
The term fool is seen as interchangeable with the term idiot. Both will make poor choices. One classic distinction, however, is that a fool is capable of great vision, occasionally seeing further or deeper than the general populace. The association of foolishness with madness links it to this prophetic capacity. Idiot, on the other hand, has no such connotation. There are no idiots who have suddenly seen things clearly, except of those who are becoming-unidiotic. A fool sees what is not, but that also means they see what may be. An idiot does not see at all. The idler is a fool, the inflexible bureaucrat an idiot. The naive romantic is a fool, the man who cannot see his marriage fall apart is an idiot.
Chevengur is a novel of fools, and the turn of its plot, its tragic descent begins with an idiot. The Foundation Pit is a novel of idiots, and its one hero is a fool. In a crucial moment in The Foundation Pit, Voschez punches a kulak and in this moment is described as “without thought.” Meanwhile, the citizens of Chevengur are often thinking, and often forcing each other to think. When Kopionkin and Dvanov first take their leave of Pashintev he watches his “fellow-thinkers pass out of sight.” In chapter 39 it appears as if Chevengur’s peace is at risk of falling apart. Dvanov, Kopionkin, Cherpurny and others discuss what communism is and how they are to procced. They consider each other’s view points and devise a plan of action. They may be fools, but they are not without thought and are far from impotent.
November, 1928. The Soviet Central Committee, now controlled almost totally by Stalin, approves plans for 20% of the U.S.S.R’s farmland to be collectivized by 1933. It represents a crass, bloody and somewhat successful solution to a problem that has been plaguing the USSR since at least 1921. The Soviet Union struggled to get sufficient productivity from peasants in the 1920s. Poor weather conditions and the ravages of the civil war led to starvation. Platonov suggests Chevengur takes place around this time (1921/22). Characters talk of Lenin as if he lives and breathes, and Dvanov is kicked out of the home of his foster family because they cannot afford to feed him.
The economic crisis following the civil war required backtracking from the communists. Crass histories, written after the ascendancy of the Cold Warrior™, suggest Lenin and his comrades were dogmatists. Yet Lenin and the General Committee also spent much time debating how to proceed and agreeing they would need to change plans and policy to prevent disaster. The return of markets and currency began to slowly ease their problems. Lenin argued that the if the choices were delaying communism or using force to make the peasant acquiesce, then it was better to delay. Better to take the slow road to communism than speed towards destruction.
It is easy to read this change as a mea culpa. Sorry lads, communism is impossible. This change, the infamous NEP, might be touted as a sure sign of the impracticality of communism. Many thought Russia was ill suited to communism. This was a country mostly of peasants, and communism was suppose to be about the workers.
From a certain perspective this is all true. It was foolish to seize government and abolish money, to introduce soviets and mass democracy, and to expect a successful revolution in such a backward country. Wasn’t it the case that there would need to be a democratic transition to socialism? Yet in 1917, when Lenin thought revolutionary take over was possible, he leapt at the chance; “History will never forgive us if we miss this opportunity.” On what grounds could the revolution succeed? Lenin, however, also knew that there needed to be one revolution to inspire others, and that someone must take the plunge. In this he was right.
After the fall of Soviet Russia and the eclipse of the communist horizon, we now tell a story of the follies of revolution. Soviet history is a straight line that leads from the storming of the Winter Palace to the gulag. Lost here are the oscillations of revolutionary history. We talk of the victims of communism, but many of those were themselves communists. As Enzo Traverso points out in Left-Wing Melancholia, “the remembrance of the victims seems unable to coexist with the recollection of their hopes, of their struggles and their defeats.” Cold War(ior) historians offer a simple lineage: Lenin paves the way for Stalin and Stalin institutes the Gulag. In this history there is no sign of the communists who helped carry Lenin to power, very little on the varieties of communist (but plenty on their vulgarities), no picture of the disunified and fracture nature of Soviet society immediately after the revolution and no picture of the great contradiction at the heart of Lenin’s enterprise. Lenin wanted to smash the state by going through the state. In the end the attempt to preserve the revolution and fight against the Whites required strengthening the state. If it is true that Lenin paves the way for Stalin, it is true only insofar as he left, at the time of his death, a strong bureaucratic state and not a feeble one. As the 1920s drew on, the foolish hopes of the revolutionaries were being transformed into the inflexible idiocy of bureaucracy.
October 1927. Leon Trotsky, hero of the revolution, general of the Red Army, delivers a speech to the Central Committee. Others, described vividly by Victor Serge as men who “had no suspicion that they were really no more than restless ghosts of future suicides and firing-squad victims”, booed Trotsky’s speech. Platonov began work on Chevengur in the summer of 1927. As Platonov writes his novel the last vestiges of revolution fidelity are being eroded and Stalin’s rule is being cemented. Still, it is too soon for the despair to set in. The idiocy of the Stalinist period has not yet been fully realized and enabled. All Platonov’s zealous revolutionaries say and do ridiculous things. Yet they are redeemed. It is only towards the end of the novel that a truly sinister character appears: Simon Serbinov. Serbinov is no fool. Rather, he is an idiot.
Serbinov comes across the town of Chevengur. Serbinov is to make a report on land usage and cultivation. He arrives in Chevengur and although he finds it bewildering the town folk are kind to him. Stopping Cherpurny he asks why the citizen’s residents labor so uselessly. Cherpurny gives an answer that is perfect: “But we’re not working for use. We’re working for one another.” There is of course irony here, working for one another might entail better cultivation practices and more efficient industry. But it is Cherpurny, the provincial fool and idle dreamer who gives a more communist answer than Serbinov can imagine. Cherpurny then says to Serbinov “it seems you’re not a party member”. The joke is not on Cherpurny but Serbinov who is “unable to understand what stood before his vision.” Ultimately Serbinov will write a critical report of Chevengur. Shortly afterwards the town is attacked, and its residents die defending it. The Chevengurians believe they are being attacked by the White Army, but it has been strongly implied throughout the novel that the civil war is over. More plausible is that the government has arrived to wipe out an idea of communism that cannot conform to party bureaucracy. It is Cherpurny who is the a fool when he tells Serbinov “don’t worry – you’ll get used to thing here, you wont come to harm.” A reassurance a child might give. It is Serbinov and his army that are idiots when they reach out, like a malicious teenager, to crush the bug before them.
June 1926. Vladmir Nabokov gives a talk to the Aykhenvald-Tatarinov literary circle in Berlin. He has been living in Berlin for under a year. The talk is titled, rather wonderfully, “A Few Words on the Wretchedness of Soviet Fiction and an Attempt to Determine Its Cause.” Nabokov has read a novel so bad it has caused him to swear off Soviet literature for an entire year! This novel is Feodor Gladkov’s Cement. Cement is a classic of proletarian fiction, the story of Gleb who returns from the front unable to make sense of the new Soviet world. He cannot accept that his wife is his equal, he follows up on old grudges, but he will put everything aside to make sure that work can continue, the Whites can be fought off, and the local factory reopened. Gleb speaks in what Nabokov calls a “idiotic and pretentious tone”, his speech full of strange propagandistic locutions. The horrors of Soviet literature are contagion for Nabokov: even Pilnyak succumbs to this “bombastic verbiage.” With a few other examples Nabokov concludes that the Russian Revolution cannot produce any good literature, for good literature cannot be based on class analysis. It has as its subject Man.
There are many ways in which Chevengur mirrors Cement. Yet Platonov’s story is infinitely weirder and infinitely more ambiguous. And it is ambiguous because it takes in the fullness of its characters. They disagree often about what to do yet maintain a strange commitment to comradeliness. I once had a professor recommend Cement to me. He said it was a wonderful novel where people come together, work together and get things done. There was in fact a utopia dimension of this novel, a belief in common people working together. Platonov, if anything, is more utopian and more communist. The Chevengurians are weird, but they are weird in different ways. The crushing homogeneity of The Foundation Pit – all men saying the same things and working towards the same goal - is replaced by a dynamic hamlet of foolish revolutionaries. But although they are fools, they listen to each other and work for each other. Chevengur works because of its tragic dimension, this much is true. A good optimistic novel is a rare thing indeed. And it also works because it is about Man, as Nabokov says all good novels must be. But it is about Man in the plural.
Platonov transcends Gladkov’s brutish novel. With Platonov’s awareness of the limits and horror of Soviet life perhaps it is more useful to compare him to Victor Serge, whose novels chart the tragedy of the revolution. Yet Serge’s works are all novels of defeat. Serge’s Conquered City, written in 1931 and 1932, focuses entirely on the Red Terror, with the not so subtle suggestion that it paved the way for Stalin. Serge’s protagonists are corrupted by the power they wield. Platonov, writing four years before Serge, shows protagonists who are doomed by the power they don’t wield. Serge, turning from revolutionary zeal to despair, has his novels fit a more classic format. I mean this literally; in Richard Greenman’s introduction he says Conquered City is easily compared to Sophocles’ Oedipus the Tyrant. The structure of classical tragedy is a fate that cannot be escape. No matter what, Oedipus must follow the path he is on. And in Conquered City the unleashing of the terror sets the revolutionaries on a path that will culminate in Stalinism. In Chevengur, however, Platonov betrays his revolutionary idealism by imposing disaster from without. It is Serbinov who brings ruin upon the town, a town that however ridiculously it was run, could address its problems. It is in The Foundation Pit that Platonov returns to a traditional tragic structure. There is nothing that will stop the excavation of the pit, the men are guided blindly, as if by fate, into the chilling close of the novel where they lay Nastya, the child of communism, in her grave.
Chevengur achieves something incredible. Serge returns to art of the novel by turning away from communist optimism. Gladkov’s optimism is ridiculous and uncritical, inhuman almost. We often ask, could there be any good Soviet literature? What does a communist novel look like? I think this is a difficult question, precisely for the reasons Nabokov identifies. Contenders include pseudo-unamists like James Joyce (if you are unconvinced he was more than a stylistic radical, see here) and Boris Pilynak’s Naked Year, which throws out all the old rules of literature just as the old rules of capitalism have been thrown out by the revolution. We should add Platonov’s Chevengur to this list. This is a novel where man and men, in all their foolishness, live together, at least for a while. Don Quixote’s greatest achievement, Miguel de Unamuno reminds us, was his conviction, strong enough to turn everyone else into a fool as well. This may well be the only antidote to sheer idiocy.
Thank you!