Join the Pushkin Club for the launch of the ground-breaking new translation of Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, published recently by Harvill Secker (UK) and New York Review of Books (US).
Andrey Platonov
Chevengur is a novel about revolutionary ardour 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 a 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.
About the speaker
Robert Chandler's translations from Russian include many works by Vasily Grossman – two of which have been dramatised at length on BBC Radio 4 – and by Andrey Platonov. He has also compiled three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales, and of Russian poetry. He is a co-translator of three volumes of memoirs and stories by Teffi and the author of a short biography of Alexander Pushkin. He has also translated Sappho for Everyman’s Poetry, and his translation of poems by Apollinaire and Khlebnikov will come out in August 2024. His translations have won prizes in both the UK and the USA and his own poems have appeared in the TLS and elsewhere. Teaching has become increasingly important to him over the years.