A review by patfield
Chevengur by Andrey Platonov

5.0

Time to stop being lazy and actually write a review for once, well once again, I have a couple other books i have been meaning to write about, but I haven't gotten around to those, but I am not here to write about Cunning Folk and Boy's Life, both great books in, though Boy's Life is leagues above Cunning Folk, but I digress, I am here to talk about Chevengur by Andrey Platonov and translated by the famous husband and wife translating duo, NO!!! not Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, but Richard and Elizabeth Chandler. Chevengur, written in 1928, published in fragments in a soviet magazine, the novel was banned in the Soviet Union till 1988 with the first publication in English being released a decade earlier. The novel, much like the steppes of Central Asia Alexander Borodin meditates on in his piece The Steppes of Central Asia, Chevengur is a sprawling novel in terms of its geography, but very tight with it's central cast. Unlike War & Peace, where there is a character for each day of the week, Chevengur instead hones in on a few key players to drive it's thematic point home. In short, this is basically the Soviet Don Quixote, you follow about four characters, one consistently throughout the novel, as they try to get by in post Tsarist revolution Russia as a new force suddenly starts taking hold, that palpable force is communism, and the cast serve as its missionaries in one capacity or another. This is an episodic novel in that the plot creeps along aimlessly, which harkens back to the steppe imagery, a sprawling landscape that you wander along from point to point as you creep along the horizon with not much in the way of variety, so the novel shines not in the plot, but in the multitude of character interactions you read about along the way as you read about how Communism is shaping the current landscape. Also, given the prevalence of the landscape in this novel, the descriptions of the scenery is straight up beautiful and full of symbolism to dissect whether it's a mythological like with the Cyclops from The Odyssey, biblical references galore such as references to Saul / Paul, the 12 apostles, fish / Christ or general quotes of scripture, or an allusion to some Russian folktale like with the Rusalka or quotes of Dostoevsky, lots of those, thankfully, the NYRB edition contains bountiful endnotes to trap these elusive details for the reader. In short, this is one of my favorite books of the year, if the idea of reading a satirical novel about post revolutionary Russia with a comedic style that would be fit for Don Quixote, then this is the book for you.