How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities
Andrei Platonov’s “Chevengur” depicts a Communist utopia, but Stalin loathed his writing, calling the author “scum.”
By Benjamin Kinkel
The bumptious and harrowing music of the novel’s first two sections is already enough to make “Chevengur” one of the more amazing works of twentieth-century fiction. In the third and final part, however, the work becomes less an ordinary novel, of whatever extraordinary kind, than a different genre of writing entirely. It evolves into a kind of utopia, not in the usual sense of a work depicting a world better than our own but in the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson’s sense of portraying a society undeniably and radically other than the one we know.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/chevengur-andrei-platonov-book-review