There are dilapidated edges of old provincial towns. Heroes and images. Alexander's return home, illness and meeting with Sonya
Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) is rightfully considered one of best writers XX century. However, recognition came to him only after death. The novel “Chevengur” was written in 1926-1929, but during the author’s lifetime it was never released. This is not just Plato’s largest novel in terms of volume, but also a kind of milestone in the artist’s work. In it, the writer subjected a critical revision, sometimes bringing to the point of absurdity, the “ultra-revolutionary” ideas that found expression in his early works. Chevengur is the name of the city where a group of communists, intending to make an instant “leap” into communism, organizes the end of the world - the “second coming” for the local bourgeoisie. As a result of the mass shooting, all residents of the city were killed. From this moment, according to the communists, the “end of history” comes - the old things stopped, and a blissful existence began in a world without exploitation, in which the only worker is the sun. In an effort to populate the city with new people, the Chevengurians gather “proletarians”—beggar wanderers—through the steppe. However, the Chevengur commune is dying. Human existence- in the bloody chaos of revolution and civil war... The fate of the country is in a fragment of the fate of one person... The Way of the Cross of the nation as life path an innocent victim of a “turning point.” "Chevengur". A scary and wonderful book!..
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Andrey Platonov
Chevengur
(travel with an open heart)
“The Idea of Life” by Andrei Platonov
Nowadays, Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) is experiencing a special situation that does not often happen to a writer, even posthumously, when a new image of him crystallizes (for us, for art, for history and the future): from the strange, the marginal, even the “holy fool” - harmful literary phenomenon - as criticism defined him during his lifetime, from a remarkable, original master - in the opinion of the literature of the last thirty years - he rises to the most select and responsible circle of classics. Climbing? Yes! But how difficult and long it is and what a colossal difference in grades!
The posthumous Platonov came to us with a burst of the late 50s and early 60s, which stabilized the volume of texts allowed for publication for two decades. Almost half of them then left the handwritten form of existence for the first time. Many things saw the light of day in full form. And yet, until recently, several of the writer’s central works remained unpublished in his homeland. However, without “Chevengur,” the writer’s only novel, without the stories “The Pit” and “The Juvenile Sea,” Plato’s work seems woefully incomplete (for the sake of analogy, imagine Dostoevsky without “Demons” or Sholokhov without “ Quiet Don"). Created by writer art world- and especially the world of these works - amazes, makes you torment with thought and feeling - and some are fascinated, and some are stunned, perplexed, and pose riddles...
Anyone who has delved into Platonov’s works feels that they are always talking about the same thing. Entering for the first time the amazing Platonic the universe, in any of its segments, is immediately penetrated by an intense field of persistent, almost obsessive images, motives, moods - as if it encounters the same sufferer with his persistent pain.
“My ideals are monotonous and constant,” the writer admitted in a letter to his wife and closest friend Maria Alexandrovna. Everyone who knew Andrei Platonovich well speaks of his obsession with a single idea - the “idea of life,” as he himself defined it. The strength of the attraction of readers and researchers to Platonov's prose is largely explained by the mysterious depth of meaning that flickers behind the astonishing ligature of his thought-words. We will be doomed to remain in the superficial layer of his text, content with an indistinct flicker of depth, if we do not recognize the “monotonous and constant ideals” of the artist, his “idea of life.”
It is worth opening any story or story by this writer - and you will soon be pierced by a sad sound languishing over earth Platonov. Everything dies on this earth: people, animals, plants, houses, cars, colors, sounds. Everything deteriorates, grows old, smolders, “burns out” - all living and inanimate nature. Everything in his world bears the stamp of “tormented by death.” In the story “The Origin of the Master” (1927), which is the first part of the novel “Chevengur” (1928-1929), the father of the main character Sasha Dvanov, a fisherman, “contemplating the lake for years... kept thinking about the same thing - about the interest of death” . The concentration of his “curious mind” on this mystery leads to the fact that he throws himself into the lake: “Secretly, he did not believe in death at all, but most importantly, he wanted to see what was there.”
In the history of Russian philosophy there was a thinker who focused his entire teaching on humanity overcoming its “last enemy” - death. It's about about N. F. Fedorov (1829-1903), the author of the two-volume “Philosophy of the Common Cause,” which influenced the formation of the worldview of the still very young Platonov. Recognizing, following a number of natural scientists and philosophers, the internal direction of natural evolution towards the generation of reason, Fedorov made a radical new output about the need for conscious management of evolution: united, fraternal humanity is called upon, in his opinion, to master the elemental destructive forces outside and inside oneself, to go out into space and become its active transformer (the “regulation of nature” project). But the main task will be the final victory over death - the acquisition of immortal status by humanity, and in in full force previously living generations (“scientific resurrection”).
According to the writer’s wife, “Philosophy of a Common Cause” with numerous notes by the author of “Chevengur” was kept in the home library for a long time. The “idea of life” with which Platonov was so imbued has its roots in a deep and complex rethinking of Fedorov’s doctrine of the “common cause”. Its hidden facets are the infinite value of every, even the most modest life; a sharp rejection of death, which gives rise to the situation of “orphanhood”, which requires its overcoming through work and creativity; the inextricable connection of generations, living and dead, “in a common fatherhood.”
Fedorov in many ways anticipated the cosmic, active-evolutionary direction in scientific and philosophical thought of the 20th century, marked by the names of K. E. Tsiolkovsky, V. I. Vernadsky, A. V. Chizhevsky, whose ideas influenced the broadest movement of feelings and minds of the 20s years and were picked up by poetry and journalism of that time. Here, previously unheard of themes of universal labor, radical transformation of the world, and mastery of space were persistently heard. The revolutionary era is perceived not only as social revolution, but - as a universal cataclysm, an “ontological” revolution aimed at the re-creation of not only society, but also the earth, and man himself in his natural basis. Thus, for Platonov, the ongoing revolution foreshadows another, “cosmic intellectual revolution,” when “thought will easily and quickly destroy death with its systematic work - science.” The hearts of the heroes of Plato’s prose, which tells about the very first years of the revolution, were illuminated with such hope. And if in the stories about the pre-revolutionary time the melancholy, the “heartfelt need” of its “spiritual poor” comes from the meaninglessness of an existence doomed to death, then here it is not for nothing that they believed in the revolution as the beginning of the “future century”. In Platonov, the eschatological aspirations of the people seem to come to life, but with the significant amendment that the “future century” is supposed to be built by oneself, and not obtained in a supernatural way: “Alexander... believed that the revolution is the end of the world. In the future world, Zakhar Pavlovich’s anxiety will instantly be destroyed, and the fisherman father will find what he willfully drowned for (that is, the solution to death. - S.S.). In his clear feeling, Alexander already had that New World, but it can only be done, not told.” And indeed, Alexander Dvanov and his comrades are participating in the immediate implementation of this “future world.”
Teacher Nekhvoraiko shod the horses of his Red Army detachment in bast shoes so as not to drown in the swamp, and at night he drove the Cossacks out of the city of Urochev. And after a few paragraphs we hear sad music: they are carrying “the cooled body of the deceased Nekhvoraiko.” People in the novel begin to die with him: they are killed, or their eyes get sick and die, or they give up their lives, like Sasha Dvanov in last pages novel.
In the meantime, Sasha is leaving Urochev. He is summoned to the province. But instead of a business trip, the hero’s strange wandering begins. Very quickly a feeling of some kind of vague, delirious feverish dream arises. The main thing that is seen in it is the road; the heroes move along it, stop, suddenly rush forward, return and set off again. Who dreams of this? Obviously, not only Sasha, since he, too, is one of the faces in this dream.
But at first, it’s as if it’s his dream. Everything that happens around is imbued with an infinitely sad feeling. For a moment, nameless villages, roads, and railway stations rush in and disappear forever. “Strangers, unknown people” flash from corners forgotten by life - and then disappear. And this human disunity in the world gives rise to such piercing pain that the soul is ready to share the fate of each of the disappearing forgotten specks of dust: “to stick to them and together disappear from the order of life.”
“The gray sadness of a cloudy day”, smooth, demon sunlight floods it special place, that strange landscape that the author dreamed of in “Chevengur”. Just as in the sleep of an individual his soul may act, here - in the larger space of universal sleep - the Russian soul lives in some kind of languid oblivion. Its depth and bottom are rising. And gradually it begins to seem more and more that Sasha Dvanov and the other main and barely glimpsed heroes are not just literary characters, but as if different incarnations people's soul, and Platonov himself, as the Russian Plato, is a contemplator and exponent of its main “ideas”.
In extreme poverty, hunger, illness, physical poverty, mental exhaustion, death of Platonov and his “ hidden heroes"always saw the naked face human destiny, the fundamental fragility of existence. “The commander was lying opposite the commissar... his book was open on the description of Raphael; Dvanov looked at the page - there Raphael was called the living god of early happy humanity, born on the warm shores of the Mediterranean Sea. But Dvanov could not imagine that time: the wind blew there, and the men plowed the land at dawn, and mothers died of little children.” This is how Sasha reasoned when he woke up at dawn in a stopped carriage. And then, forced to drive the train himself, due to his inexperience, he collides with someone coming towards him. Death, many deaths: the spirit leaves the body, the eyes fade, “turning into a round mineral” reflecting the sky - either man returns to nature, or nature returns to man. The incomprehensibility of the transition from the miracle of living life to a lifeless body attracts, almost fascinates the author. Where does the entire working factory of the body, the sophistication of instinct, the calculation of the mind, the trembling of the soul, the teeming memory that contains the whole world disappear? This riddle forces Platonov to endlessly imagine in his works the moment of transition from life to death. It is, of course, not resolved by this, but it is persistently placed before the reader’s feelings and reflections.
We invite you to get acquainted with one of the most famous works Andrey Platonovich Platonov. We are talking about a socio-philosophical novel, in the first edition entitled “Builders of Spring”. Today this work is known as "Chevengur". In 1928 Platonov completed "Chevengur". A summary of this novel is presented in our article. Some researchers believe that this work can be included in the “philosophical trilogy”, which includes, in addition to him, the stories “Dzhan” and “The Pit”.
"Chevengur" begins with the story that every 5 years people had to leave villages for cities or forests due to crop failure. At this time, Zakhar Pavlovich remained alone in the village. Many products passed through his hands for his long life- from the frying pan to the alarm clock. However, the hero himself had nothing: no home, no family. One night, Zakhar Pavlovich heard the distant whistle of a steam locomotive. The next morning he went to the city.
Service in the locomotive depot became new page in the life of Zakhar Pavlovich. The artful world, which he had long loved, became open to him again. The hero decided to stay in this world forever.
Dvanov family
Let's move on to getting to know the Dvanov family, describing summary. "Chevengur" by Platonov is a work in which some of its members play an important role. In total, 16 children were born in this family, of which only 7 survived. The eighth child was adopted Sasha. His father, a fisherman, drowned out of curiosity. He just wanted to find out what happens after death. Adopted Sasha is the same age as Proshka Dvanov. When another twin was born into this family during a hungry year, Dvanov sewed a begging bag for his adopted son and sent him to beg.
Sasha went to the cemetery to say goodbye to his father. The adopted boy decided that he would fill a bag of bread, and then dig himself a dugout near his father’s grave and live in it, since he had no home.
Sasha becomes the son of Zakhar Pavlovich
Let us briefly outline the content of further events in the novel "Chevengur", the plot of which, as you can see, is quite interesting. After some time, Zakhar Pavlovich asks his son, Proshka, to find Sasha. He announces that he is taking the adopted son as his son.
Zakhar Pavlovich loves his adopted son with all the devotion of old age. Sasha is a student at the depot, studying to become a mechanic. He reads a lot in the evenings and then writes, because at the age of 17 he does not want to leave this world unnamed. However, Sasha feels emptiness inside her body. Life comes and goes through this emptiness without stopping. Watching his son, Zakhar Pavlovich advises him not to torment himself, since he is already weak.
Zakhar Pavlovich and Sashka become Bolsheviks
Further, in the work created by Andrei Platonov (“Chevengur”), it is said that after some time a war begins, and then a revolution. One night, gunfire is heard in the city. In the morning, Zakhar Pavlovich and Sashka go to the city to find the most serious party and sign up for it. All parties are housed in one building. Zakhar Pavlovich, choosing best option, walks around the offices. Behind the last door, located at the end of the corridor, only one person sits, since the others have left to rule. Zakhar Pavlovich asks him if everything will end soon. He replies that socialism will come in a year. Zakhar Pavlovich rejoices and asks to sign him and Sashka up for this game. Returning home, he explains to his adopted son how he understands Bolshevism. In his opinion, the Bolshevik empty heart, which is why everything can fit in it.
Sashka's departure
Six months pass. Sashka enrolls in railway courses, after which he studies at the polytechnic. However, soon his teaching ceased for a long time. The novel "Chevengur" (summary) continues with the fact that the party sends Alexander Dvanov to the front Civil War- to the city of Novokhopersk, located in the steppe. Zakhar Pavlovich sits at the station for days with his son, waiting for a passing train. They have already talked about everything, but not about love. When Alexander leaves, his father returns home and begins to read algebra in sections, not understanding anything. He gradually finds solace in this.
Dvanov in Novokhopersk joins the warring revolution. An order soon arrives from the province for the return of Alexander. Along the road, Dvanov drives the locomotive instead of the runaway driver. The train collides with the oncoming one. It is only by miracle that Sashka remains alive.
Alexander's return home, illness and meeting with Sonya
Dvanov, having done the difficult and long haul finally returns home. The hero immediately falls ill. He is cut off from life for 8 months due to typhus. Desperate, Zakhar Pavlovich makes a coffin for his son. However, Sashka recovers in the summer. In the evenings, their neighbor Sonya, an orphan, comes to see them. Zakhar Pavlovich decides to split the coffin into a firebox. He thinks that now it’s time to make a crib, since Sonya will soon grow up, and then he and Sasha may have children.
Meeting Kopenkin and Chepurny
Alexander, on instructions from the provincial committee, goes to “look for communism” in the province. He ends up with the anarchists, but a small detachment led by Stepan Kopenkin repels him. The reason for Stepan's participation in the revolution is his love for In the village where Dvanov and Kopenkin visit, they find Sonya. It turns out that she teaches children at a local school.
Wandering around the province, Kopenkin and Dvanov meet many people, and each of them represents new life and its construction. Alexander meets Chepurny, a man who serves as chairman of the revolutionary committee in the city of Chevengur. Dvanov likes the word "Chevengur". It reminds this hero of the enticing roar of an unknown country. Chepurny speaks of Chevengur as a place where the accuracy of truth, the goodness of life, and the sorrow of existence happen as needed, by themselves. Although Alexander dreams of returning home to continue his studies at the polytechnic, he is fascinated by stories about the socialism of Chevengur. He decides to go to this city, the description of which continues in the summary.
Chevengur
The city wakes up late, as its inhabitants take a break from centuries-long oppression. The revolution conquered Chevengur's dreams and made the soul the main profession in the city. Kopenkin, having locked Proletarian Strength (that’s his horse’s name) in a barn, walks through the city. He meets people who are alien in appearance, pale in appearance. Kopenkin asks Chepurny what these people are doing during the day. He replies that the main profession is the human soul, and its product is camaraderie and friendship. Kopenkin offers to organize a little grief so that things in Chevengur are not very good. He believes that for good taste Communism should be caustic.
The heroes appoint a special commission tasked with compiling lists of the bourgeoisie who survived the revolution. These bourgeois are shot by security officers. After the execution, Chepurny rejoices that there is now peace.
After the massacre, Kopenkin still does not feel the communism that Chevengur is so proud of. The summary of the chapters continues with the fact that the security officers begin to identify the semi-bourgeois from whom life should be freed. They are gathered into a crowd and then driven out into the steppe. The proletarians who remained in the city, as well as those who arrived at the call of the communists, soon eat up the remnants of food that belonged to the bourgeoisie. They destroy all the chickens in Chevengur, after which they feed on plant food in the steppe. Chepurny expects that final happiness will develop by itself, since the happiness of life is a necessity and a fact. Only Kopenkin walks around the city in sadness. He is waiting for Alexander's arrival and his assessment of the communism built in Chevengur.
Useless inventions
Next, you should talk about two inventions, describing a brief summary. “Chevengur” continues with Dvanov arriving, but he does not see new life outside: probably communism has hidden itself in people. Alexander guesses why the Chevengurian Bolsheviks so desire this system: communism is the end of time, the end of history. Only in nature time goes by, but there is melancholy in a person. Alexander invents a special device with which you can turn sunlight into electricity. To do this, mirrors are removed from all frames in the city, and all glass is collected. However, this device does not work. They build a tower and light a fire on it so that it will show the way to those wandering in the steppe. However, no one comes to the light of the beacon.
Check, arrival of women
Comrade Serbinov comes from Moscow to check the activities of the Chevengurians. He notes that their works are useless. In justification, Chepurny says that they work for each other, and not for benefit. Serbinov writes in his report that there are many happy things in the city, but at the same time useless.
Women are brought to Chevengur to continue their lives. Young residents of the city only warm themselves with them, as if with their mothers, since autumn has already arrived and the air is completely cold.
News about the fate of Sophia
Serbinov tells Alexander how he met Sofia Alexandrovna in Moscow. This is the same Sonya that Dvanov remembered before Chevengur. The girl now lives in Moscow, works in a factory. Serbinov reports that Sophia remembers Alexander as an idea. Serbinov himself does not say that he loves this girl.
Cossacks occupy the city, Dvanov's departure
A man comes running into the city and says that Cossacks on horseback are heading to Chevengur. A battle begins, in which Serbinov dies, thinking about Sofya Alexandrovna. Chepurny also dies, like other Bolsheviks. The Cossacks occupy the city.
Alexander remains in the steppe near Kopenkin, who is dying. When he dies, Alexander boards the Proletarian Power and rides away from the city, into the open steppe. Dvanov travels for a long time. He passes the village where he was once born. The hero arrives at the lake where his father once died. He notices a fishing rod that he had forgotten on the shore as a child. Dvanov forces the horse to go chest-deep into the water, after which he gets off the saddle in search of the road along which his father once walked.
Final
Zakhar Pavlovich arrives in Chevengur. He is looking for Alexander. There are no people in the city, only a crying Proshka sits near a brick house. Zakhar Pavlovich asks him to bring him Sashka for money, but Prokofy promises to do it for nothing and goes to look for Dvanov.
This concludes the summary. "Chevengur" is a work first published in the USSR only in 1988. Today, finally, we have the opportunity to get acquainted with the work of the wonderful writer Andrei Platonovich Platonov. One of his best works is the novel "Chevengur". Reading the summary is not as interesting as reading the original of this novel. Of course, Andrei Platonov is an outstanding artist of words.
