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NOUGHTOCRACY

Chevengur by Andrey Platonov

Harvill Secker, 2023

ISBN 978-1-843-43152-7

 reviewed by Howard Slater

“A fierce sun of arid knowledge had
  risen over their feelings” [1]

Perhaps it comes as no surprise, today, that we have come full circle; at least if the starting point is the rise of a unilinear scientific socialism as it cast its shadow over utopian yearning and as it coincided with what Jean-Pierre Voyer described as the “achieved opposition between the life of the individual and the life of the species.”[2] Now, the very idea of Revolution, in the West at least, is as utopian as the wild yet misunderstood imaginings of Fourier and any identification with the species-being has more than been severed. It is being actively necrophilised not just by artificial intelligence but by the historically planned and militarised ethnocide in Palestine and environs. So why return to the past to seek hope, theoretical succour and escapist pleasure in a novel from late 20s Soviet Union? Because the character’s in Platonov’s Chevengur have set out to find each other, find a new way of being-together, to find a form of communism at a time when it had already been internationally declared despite its ongoing assault on dissidents (Kronstadt Soviet, Makhnovists, Left Opposition etc.) and despite the reintroduction, from 1921, of brazen capitalist methods under the auspices of the New Economic Policy. No wonder, then, that Platonov, a land-engineer, solar power seer and inventor of a photo-electric-resonator-transformer (563), a more or less written-out writer during his lifetime, received, in the marginalia of one of his manuscripts, the epithet “bastard” from none other than Stalin.

Errancy

A Don Quixote or a Ulysses of the Revolution? This seems to be the common literary touchstone when coming to this novel. But we have here something of an anti-classic, a novel that eschews not only the cleanliness of authorised thought, but also a social realism that, while seeming to depict “objective conditions” only served to occlude what lies deeper than such a constructed reality: the materiality of feelings and imaginings, an affecting social imaginary that undermines naturalistic certainties and those as-the-crow-flies categories that act as modes of separation and give rise to rackets that each proffer up their own ideological justifications.[3] So, not only are Platonov’s characters wandering through the steppes (the character Kopionkin rides a horse called “strength of the proletariat”) and away from crowded settlements be they villages or cities, but their minds wander away from the givens of work and politics. They wander away from the orthodoxies of state capitalist communism as well as from bourgeois common sense with all its empirical interests and moral judgmentalism. This errancy of movement and thought in Chevengur seems at the same turn to embrace the Revolution and to denounce it, to greet it with full flushed fanfare as well as offer it a satirical eulogy. The creative life-blood of the revolution itself is what is sought after, or should we more accurately say, as Platonov critically implies, the characters are looking for a beyond of that communism that the Revolution has purportedly already brought about. Yet do the literary means, or should we say the sensibility articulated by Platonov in this novel, amount to what Tara Lane describes as “absurdist, grotesque and phantasmagorical?”[4] There is an element of these in Chevengur, but this may be to hide the novel behind a literary-philologic partition, rather than leading us to an appraisal of a work that, being much more than a novel, seeks to engage us in an ontology of communism.

 Messthetics

In the first chapter of her book Tara Lane draws attention to how Platonov was at odds to contemporaneously prevailing notions of proletarian art. Key, for her, is Platonov’s rejection of aesthetic beauty; even, we could say, the cruel beauty of an ideologically motivated or propagandist depiction of “objective conditions” whose remnants still exert a fascination today. In her scene-setting appraisal of Platonov she enters into a discussion of how he polemically embraced the ‘ugly’; but this is an ugly that for her, via the Russian word bezobraznyi, entails formlessness in that for Platonov, proletarian art, in being unforeseen and without an a priori image, fruitfully lacked a canonical model through which to appear. For Platonov, the proletarians he has in mind are seen, like his own self depiction, as “insignificant outsiders.” They are not the cultural workers of the Writers Union or LEF, but those who turn towards the making of objects and artefacts that bear no relation to art history. Maybe Platonov has in mind something erroneous, something akin to what came to be known as outsider art in that, as Lane suggests, such a practice, far from artistic expertise, entails “utter vulnerability”, the “abject” and the “abominable.”[5] We are perhaps, through these musings, in the realm of a kind of bricolage of the Levi-Strauss type: “A water-cooled machine gun, attached to a cast iron pot, became a system for the production of moonshine.” (131) These are artefacts, assemblages, that, as one character in the novel suggests, can “touch any heart and make a man better and kinder.” (11) Whilst this raises notions of the social purpose of productive labour and the decommodification of the art object, it also hints at the hidden sensual labour in any product; a communicated sensuality that could undermine the phantasmagoria of commodity objects. But, returning to Lane, such a messthetics, a unique and ‘ugly’ conjuncture of oddments, not only undermines the notion of the reproductability of moulds or models, it acts as a herald of an unseen and singularising proletarian art that finds its personification in the ‘doings’ of Platonov’s characters. They seek communism because, even in the Soviet Union, there is no satisfactory image of it that could (ever) appease their utopian longings. That is unless the mystery object that falls from the sky (“a long piece of trimmed stone”) offers an enigmatic satisfaction as it is gradually decided by the assembled and perplexed characters that the mystery object – a readymade transforming before their eyes? –  is in fact a manufactured barrel. (318)

Finding Chevengur

Perhaps the errant dreamers of Chevengur are wandering with more than just directionless hope. Maybe these characters are aware, or intuit, that communes like Chevengur are more widespread than was common knowledge at the time. Maybe, to reuse and redeploy Marx’s phrase, they were convinced that more than just one “localised microcosmos” was in existence. Richard Stites bears this out when he writes: “Commune signs bearing such designations as Brotherhood, Will, Hope, Paradise, Proletarian, Karl Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Hammer, Red Orphan, Paris Commune, Anthill, and Free World began to adorn a countryside that was unused-to signs or names.”[6] Maybe, with the fictional creation of Chevengur, Platonov is not just drawing on his own experiences as a jobbing land-engineer, but is re-raising the spectre of the Russian Populists (The Peoples Will), for whom the Rural Commune (Obshchina, Mir, Artel) could, with its basis in communal ownership and peasant assemblies, be a grounded paradigm for a coming communism. In the last decade of his life Marx thoroughly studied this possibility and in one of four drafts of a letter to Vera Zasulich he wrote: “It [the ‘Rural Commune’] may thus become the direct starting point of the economic system towards which modern society is tending; it may open a new chapter that does not begin with its own suicide.”[7] This ‘suicide’, or “harsh tribute” as Marx less emotively writes in an alternative draft, is the prevailing scientific socialist idea that a predominantly rural Russia had to pass through the rapacious and dispossessing capitalist mode of production (as a ‘developmental stage’) to achieve communism, when, as Populists like Chernychevsky offered, communism’s basis in the rural commune could lead, as Jacques Camatte phrases it, to a “leaping of the CMP.”[8] This leap, “passing over the intermediate logical moments,”[9] was widely debated amongst revolutionaries in the late 19^th Century. Rosa Luxemburg, whilst not adhering to this thesis, referred to it as a “scepticism regarding the possibilities of capitalist development in Russia...” [10] This is, in a sense, what Platonov is surrealistically circling in Chevengur. Moreover, he is, as we will soon see, inferring, through his fiction, what Camatte would write many years later: “[…] if classes had produced the state in the West, in Russia the state produced the classes.”[11]

 The Paradoxical Poor

“Summon the poor to Chevengur” declares a character. (307) Here, using layers of irony, Platonov, as is the unrealistic wont of fiction, passes over the intermediate logical moments and not only abandons the social realism of the official Soviet line, but reveals it as an ideological ruse. Having his characters believe they have brought about communism, as if by an unspoken and tacit declaration or in the shadow of a mutual delusion, Platonov brings to light the contentious point that, in a vastly rural country, the proletariat had to be brought into existence as a social force by the Bolshevik state.[12] The Chevengurians have instaurated communism without this proletariat, they have either responded-to or overcome the “objective conditions” as if by means of a religio-magic and now need to evangelise: the object needs to find its subject, the belief system needs its believers. However, there is a further irony in that going to ‘summon the poor’ implies that the form of communism established in Chevengur needs its content, and that the poor, rather than being seen as the subject of the Revolution are dramatized as its obtainable object! This, then, is a thinly veiled critique of the homogenising proletarian ideology of the Soviet State, which, as Guy Debord suggested, turns the worker into a hollow representation not a living representative. But there is a further twist. When the poor arrive in Chevengur they are accompanied by “the others.” (330) Not only is Platonov inferring that the proletariat is this ‘other,’ or that the proletariat is indistinguishable from the amorphous others, he is showing us how the albeit sincere Chevengurians of the RevCom are being confronted with the revelation of their own inculcated mythic delusion. In this way he engages his readers in an ontology of communism: their expectations dashed they nonetheless offer Chevengur to this motley ghost-like crew of fellow wanderers. Migrants. Nobodies. Barely bodied. Worn out. Spectres of economic abuse, a residual class, the “others,” whoever they are, are welcomed. This, in a sense, uncannily echoes Marx’s own views about the expansion and development of the Rural Commune away from “natural kinship” by means of “undergoing contact with strangers.”[13] Here Comes Anybody.

 Who Are the Others?  

The poor are summoned to Chevengur by means of a declaration which a character writes out on a piece of linen using a coal from a nearby stove. The Declaration reads: “COMRADES THE POOR. YOU HAVE MADE EVERY COMFORT AND THING IN THE WORLD. NOW YOU HAVE DESTROYED THEM AND WANT SOMETHING BETTER – ONE ANOTHER. TO THIS END, WE HERE IN CHEVENGUR SEEK TO ACQUIRE COMRADES FROM THE PASSING ROADS.” (312) In appealing to the poor as comrades the Chevengurians (and by extension Platonov) are muddying the water of the official ideology for whom the poor are seen as exclusively proletarian and, less and less over the 1920s, as a peasantry that came to be increasingly characterised as a “sign of backwardness and stagnation, a reactionary mass.” By using the word ‘poor’ Platonov seems to be suggesting that we go back to a time before the poor became classified as either proletarians or peasants and in this way the poor are the “others” and the others are the “nameless grassroots people” (320) who, perhaps, have become a form of ‘bare life’, a tabula rasa voided of ideology or mutated by ideologies that see them not as heterogeneous “sensuous beings,” but as an abstract content to fill an ideological form not of their own making. In this way Platonov touches upon another aspect of the ontology of communism that seeks to resuscitate a spirituality that does not take on a religious form but summons forth a psyche: “Was the soul a pitiful heart, or a mind inside a man’s head?” (141) asks one character and as Platonov has written elsewhere “the Bolsheviks had wanted to replace the heart with the head” (534) and this crude dualism, this acceptance of mutually reified meanings, left even the “ethereal world” (of the social imaginary?) “empty and hopeless – even to the point of suicide.”[14] What form could this spirituality take? There are many instances in Chevengur when the very self-interrogation of the characters summons their psychical dynamism, their own ‘othering’ as a form that spirituality can take after the death of God. As another character offers: “The heart’s a landless peasant.” (357)

 Anti-Oedipus

These ‘others’, then, as “unknown designations” (336), fill the ever-vigilant Chevengurians with an open-hearted inquisitiveness. They do not see their guests as threatening Cossacks or marauding stragglers from the White Army, but as uncategorisable people, as, perhaps, ‘species-beings’ or, in the parlance of the Bordigist Left, a potential “party-community.” A lack of judgementalism enables them to seek points of affective contact with the ‘others.’ There is a warding-off of domination. As Platonov has Dvanov say: “[…] he had no convictions so certain as to allow him to feel superior.” (440) Also, at play here is that the ‘others’ are quickly related to as default orphans: “These others had been born with no possibility of any gift […] Their parents had conceived them not through surplus of body by through night time anguish […] Each mother had disappeared […] so as not to see her child and inadvertently start to love it forever.” (334) None of the Chevengurians speak of their families or are depicted as belonging to distant families and so the family-form seems not to exist in Chevengur. Except for the relationship between Dvanov and his step-father (albeit not a blood-tie) families are depicted as sites of conflict and abuse that inestimably damage the ‘vital force’ of children. So, there is a pronounced warding-off of the family-form: “Once you start families here, you’ll soon be breeding petty-bourgeois.” (380) An inference can be read here as one that, whilst seeking to free children from parental domination, sees the family as being isomorphic with domineering and guilt-inducing institutional power as a whole.[15] From this it follows that, in order for the orphans of Chevengur to make themselves into “future person[s]”[16] (334) adequate to communism and its beyond, rules of kinship and consanguinity need to be abandoned to form a communism in which the oxymoronic greeting “comrade other” (343) can take on a totemic efficacy. As Deleuze and Guattari have suggested the Oedipus complex, projected into the family-form as its psycho-sexual disciplinary mechanism, is wielded in the West as a “repressing-representation” of desire; a desire that could outstrip the impulse control disorder of ego-centricity and become diffuse as “class affection.” (309)

Organic Intellectuals

If this were a social realist novel then the meetings of the RevCom and the Marx Reading Circle are where one would expect to hear the party line and the idealisms of disembodied materialism, but in Chevengur these meetings, whilst earnestly aspiring to what Lenin or some faceless super-ego expects, veer often into farce and parody, a farce and parody that nevertheless expresses a serious commitment to communism; but, it seems, a communism as set out for the Chevengurians in the classic texts, posters and edicts from the Provincial Capital. Despite their will to learn from such texts, it is this abstracted communism that most of the characters, except for Prokofy who acts as their translator, struggle to articulate amongst themselves; a struggle due to the obstacle of their being organic auto-theorisers who are suspicious of a monopolising intellectual class.[17] For one character communism in its rhetorical form seems like “dead signs” (214) and “mere words” (273), for another the term “objective conditions” is reiterated obsessively as if it is more a sonorous spell or a tongue-twister than a fragment of revolutionary theory. In the Marx Reading Circle, Chepurny offers: “The man wrote and wrote […] but we’ve done everything first and read about it afterward. He might as well not have written.” (289) Platonov, in narrator mode, goes heretically further: “Karl Marx looked down from the walls like an alien Sabaoth, and his terrifying books were unable to lead a man to any reassuring imagination of communism.” (293) It is perhaps this imaginative edge, this almost Fourierist poetic licence, that marks out the organic intellectuals of Chevengur. Whilst Platonov, a practical man himself, is sympathetic to the Chevengurian’s embracing of praxis, he also maintains a utopian edge: “The Revolution had been hauled along by departments and institutions, as if the apparatus of the State were a machine for the construction of socialism.” (209) This avowed anti-statism is, in the context in which he was writing and until this day, a utopian yearning and, as such, requires that, in defiance the of the intellectual caste, we “unlearn letters” (164) or use words “to turn current feelings into thoughts.” All Power to the social imaginary? All power to a mixed-semiotic?

Signs and Names

Perhaps, when Richard Stites suggests that the rural communities were not used to seeing “signs and names” he is perhaps referring to a situation of illiteracy amidst the peasant classes.  One could infer from his comment that the majority of communes were led by an exodus from the urban centres. His own book refutes this inference in that as he writes: “The dream of most peasants had always been and still remained in the 1920s to be left alone by the state, with all the land managed and rotated in their own tradition of the mir-obshchina.”[18] Whilst this state of affairs was brutally put down in the 1930s[19] we have to remember that Platonov has not set his depiction of an experimental community in an urban setting, but on the rural steppe. For Marx this divide between city and countryside was a presupposition of modern capitalism and this in turn made the Revolution urban-centric. Platonov’s Chevengur, then, seems to synthesise these separate spheres and embrace the (utopian?) potential of “social recipocrity in differentiation,”[20] that mutual interaction and inherence with ‘strangers’ could give rise to.[21] So, in Chevengur we do not so much encounter philosophers as ponderers and brooders (auto-theorists), we do not so much encounter writers as reminiscers, we don’t hear dialectical reasoning but the unresolved provocations of troubling dilemmas and, rather than peons to “luxurious Moscow art,” (xi) we encounter plaintive and romantic depictions of nature. Crucial here in terms of those “signs and names” that may be a marker of class divisions, is Platonov’s description of an Esperanto-like or concrete poetry graphic that Dvanov draws in response to a request to come up with a symbol for a monument: “The recumbent figure eight denotes the eternity of time, which the upright double-ended arrow denotes the infinity of space.” (160) This need for a symbol and its depiction may well be intended by Platonov as a stimulating parody of the Hammer and Sickle flag which came into existence in 1922. Digging in the nether regions of Marx we can’t help suggesting that the symbol that Dvonov draws could well be taken as the moniker of the ‘historic party.’[22]

 Never Work Ever

Communism in its state-ideological form glorified the worker. To work was seen as the meaning of life and to this end we are all familiar with the statues of heroic workers and how this representation seemed hollow to the workers at large. In Chevengur something very much counterpoised to this occurs: “Only one thing was unclear: was labour still necessary under socialism – or would nature, left to follow its own course, provide enough nourishment anyway?” (332) Such discussions between characters abound in Chevengur to the degree that the book reads at times like an anti-work manifesto, and at others like a depiction of heaven on earth. At times it seems as if this novel could have been called the ‘sun worshippers’ as there are many paeons to the cosmic power of the sun. The sun is the “power base” (372), it is a “wordless friend” (86), the “universal proletarian” (253). At one point, Chepurny, in responding to the need for theses to be sent to the Provincial Capital so as temporarily absolve Chevengur from suspicion, offers a treatise on something approaching primitive communism: “The sun’s your first theses, water’s your second and the soil’s the third.” (260) It is as if Platonov has had access to those of Marx’s writings on the Rural Commune and the transition from feudalism that only became available ten years after Paltonov had finished writing this novel: “Appropriation of the natural condition of labour, of the earth as the original instrument of labour, both laboratory and repository of its raw materials; however, appropriation not by means of labour, but as the preliminary condition of labour.”[23] In light of this it is as if the Chevengurians, as not so much hunters but gatherers, are not compelled to work by “objective conditions,” but are immersed in the “earth as a natural condition of production,”[24] as the “self-seeding of nature.” (174) Chepurny fantasises about an “International of Cereal and Flowers” that could nourish the poor “without the interference of labour and exploitation” (325), without the encumbrance of production quotas. In Chevengur is it that the boundlessness of the steppe, in giving room to their querulous desires, has shifted the existential pressure of self-preservation into an elsewhere, a place of new amalgamated passions, where there is no need to work?

 Subject Objectively Offered

This is not to suggest that there is neither activity nor praxis in Chevengur. Yes, there are neither factories nor mechanised agriculture in its environs, and likewise there is neither wage-labour nor money. So, what is the nature of the ‘doing’ in Chevengur?  One could say what is practiced here is Platonov’s idea of a proletarian art that makes neither sculptures, nor paintings, but which makes labour and its ‘products’ itself a creative endeavour in an almost Fourierist sense in that, by and large, as a kind of ‘living labour’, it coincides with the fulfilment of passions towards others and the community at large. This re-rendering of labour often as care-work and conscientiousness towards others comes to take on the hue of what, many decades later, may be called ‘affective labour’ or, in Marx’s sense, a labour that is satisfying in that, no longer reliant on property-relations it ceases to be an alienated labour and becomes one that is carried out as a “free expression” between members of a species.[25] This is seen throughout Chevengur. Under the “objective conditions” of Chevengur, labour becomes the epitome of a selflessness that brings not self-loss but self-presence by means of the species-being of another: “I thought you were chopping for yourselves – but if it’s for someone else, that’s another matter. It’s not labour, it’s the gift of help.” (404) Whereas in the Rural Commune Marx could speak of production for use rather than production for exchange, in Chevengur there is no concept of use-value: “But we’re not working for use. We’re working for one another […] It was the bourgeoisie wanted labour to be of use […]” (441) What could be more useless than working on messthetic objects? This is another activity that takes-off in Chevengur: “The artist had sculpted this monument to his chosen dear comrade with an inspired tenderness and the roughness of unskilled labour.” (459-60) This is another aspect in this makeshift ontology of communism: the subject objectively offers herself by means of the now revealed sensuous labour of an object that, in not existing for sale, becomes, as Serbinov comments “without falsehood and without exploitation.” (460) Serbinov is a character who has come to carry out an ‘audit’ on Chevengur and if ever gets round to writing his report he may have suggested that exchange-value has similarly ceased: exchange in Chevengur is closer to a gift-giving and potlatch – “labour at the manufacture of gifts” (465) – and thus transforms value from its economic sense as abstract labour into something more akin to the communist values of social recipocrity.

 Affines of the World Unite

One character who ends ignominiously and breaks the affinal bond is Prokofy. It is he, the go-to intellectual, who begins to make up an inventory of the ‘property’ in Chevengur and hopes to appropriate it and trade it in somehow. Prior to this, and as part of the reader’s introduction to Chevengur, one of the pastimes on the only allotted work day (Saturday), is to move the houses and structures around so that they never occupy the same space. In a foreshadowing of, amongst other blueprints, Constant’s New Babylon project, the very town is errant and property never becomes static enough to be owned. For early Marx property-relations mark a growing occlusion of human-relations, a means of establishing individualising social differentiation by instilling private needs that, becoming an accumulative urge, led to the dissolution of, for instance, the Rural Commune. As a character in Chevegnur offers: “When property lies between people, they calmly expend their powers on concerns about that property, but when there is nothing between people, then they choose not to part from one another.” (329) The values reiterated across the novel is that communism is, in part, the enshrining of non-familial but affinal social relations that, in becoming a human need over and above property, veer very close to Fourier’s notion of the celadonic: “The mere existence of another necessary person […] is enough to make them into a source of heartfelt peace and endurance, the other’s highest substance and the wealth of his indigence.” (433) Such an attentive tenderness towards others, such a “general mutuality [bringing] comfort to any unexpected soul” (323) may be what Platonov means by ‘more than religion’ in that rather than the Chevengurians wilfully alienating themselves to a ‘higher power’ they have, in establishing a “Noughtocracy” (115) – with all its suggestive connotations of zero-profit and thus of lives lived beyond (re) numeration and the extraction of surplus value –  brought about a version of primitive communism that Camatte defined as a social form in which the “motion of value is yet to begin […] and the individual is not yet a worker.” [26]

Feel-Communism

We have suggested that the Chevengurians are ‘organic intellectuals’, those that practice an auto-theorisation in which lived experience and a sense of personal history interact with concepts and ideas, but, just as rising social differentiation came to instaurate power-relations in the Rural Commune, something troubles thought that maybe prevents it from turning into a form of knowledge that can too easily become a means of intellectual domination. In Freudian terms the primary process of the unconscious, with its transmission-belt to feelings and affects that outstrip language, is that which interrupts the enshrining of conscious thought. The Chevengurians grapple with this throughout the book. One character talks of a “rising lake of feeling,” (178) another describes thinking “without clear thoughts,” (51) yet another disputes any notion of a thought that could accumulate into knowledge: “many of his feelings remained unspoken and were transformed into mute yearning.” (232) In this light the Chevengurians are each struggling, albeit apart, with an existential discomfort, an “appetitive process” (as Lacan once termed desire), that the institutions of state communism cannot abate. Chepurny intuits this and as he puts it after Kirey asserts that communism is the brain child of clever people: “But why, I ask you now, do you keep needing to know? You need to feel communism […]” (324) This seemingly most unintellectual of urgings may very well be another ontological aspect of communism if we settle on a seemingly simple phrase of Marx’s: “sensuous consciousness.” [27] Here, in few syllables, Marx seems to collide thought and feeling together, but what is paramount is that such a sensuous thought is articulatable not in a treatise, but as the social-conscience that the Chevengurians feel for any “citizen at all.” (222) Does this not alter what it means to ‘think’? Does this not create a singularisation of thought by means of the commune as a whole? Platonov: “What Sasha meant by thinking was not the consideration of ideas but the constant imagination of beloved objects – and his main beloved objects were now the people of Chevengur.” (406) Here we have something akin to Camatte’s take on the Gemeinwesen: an internal social life. Or. Communism as a substantial feeling.

 Affective Soviet

If Marx once offered communism as “the positive suppression of private property as human self-estrangement,” [28] then, bearing in mind the capitalist presupposition of the separation of the public from the private, we would be advised to extend this notion of property to that of the psyche. Such an ontological exploration of communism infers that the psyche as a form of ‘personal property’ be critiqued. Just as any commodity includes the hidden dimension of labour, the albeit reified ‘property’ of the individual psyche contains an occluded social dynamism (a work of auto-theorisation) that often goes unsaid. Often this potential psychical exchange, as an abolition of ‘private property,’ remains unspoken because it is the very webwork of ‘self-estrangement’ (an uncensored primary process) that lies there. This is the stuff of mental ill-health and just as many of Platonov’s characters could be described as melancholics, for whom sadness is a substance, there is also an inchoate sense in which the characters urge an overcoming of this split between private and public. Lane offers that utopias often fall short because they do not take into account this “common inner world” [29] and make an abreactive space for it. Platonov’s characters seem to be in a restless search for such a making-common of psychical materials. One character says that the troubles of life should be shared out equally, (292) another that “we must set about the deliberate organisation of grief.” (259) It is telling that Platonov has this character immediately defer his own suggestion to the next day for this is an immense and almost unthinkable task that lies at the horizon of communism.[30] It would have been very intriguing in the novel if different characters felt this absence of ‘psychical exchange’ without sharing it between themselves. As it is, it falls to Chepurny: “Their inner beings […] still lived separately and were helplessly afflicted by suffering. People, then, could not be truly united – and this was why Gopner and Kopionkin could not detect the presence of communism; it had not yet become an intermediary substance between the inner beings of the proletarians.” (400) This intermediary substance, this secular ectoplasm, is opaque affect.[31]

 Do You Believe in ESP?

What of this intermediary substance? Are we talking of the affect attunement of the parent-child relationship? Of communicative capacities that proceed outside of language? As Platonov ruefully writes: “[Kopionkin] had been riding beside Sasha Dvanov. When he began to feel sad, Sasha had felt sad too – and their sadness had reached out to each other, met, and stopped halfway.” (360) Whilst this resonates with Chepurny’s feel for the lack of ‘psychical exchange’ in their practice of communism, we are nonetheless witness as to how the Rural Commune that is Chevengur seems to be functioning well enough for the Chevengurians to declare the RevCom as unnecessary. As well as this, and as is also demonstrated in Platonov’s The Foundation Pit whose navvies build a collective farm, there seems to be a gradual coming together around a unified purpose without this purpose being declared. This is seen in the outbreak of co-operative and unalienated labour, a tacit sense of unity that spreads throughout Chevengur not by means of decree but through gestural example: “Each other was working not for himself, but for someone else; each had seen Gopner mend the roof above Yakov Titych.” (410) Outside the edicts and planning of the RevCom, the Chevengurians (most tellingly: the ideology-resistant others) seem to be putting into action the “anti-commandments” (168) of the anarchist Pashintsev who lives “without the least leadership” (171) and whom Dvanov encounters on his travels and from whom he takes the advice to “look for communism amid the spontaneous initiative of the population.” (95) Such spontaneity, much maligned by the Bolshevik authorities, may well be less unthinking than is presumed as it perhaps belies the almost mystical notion of an extra sensory perception that, as with the incursions of music that Paltonov depicts as coming as if from nowhere, acts to form a sense of the group as perceptually responsive on a different perhaps more poetic level. The old Bolshevik, Vekofy offers: “It was as if his senses were located some way in front of him, allowing him to understand any phenomenon even without close proximity to it.” (318) We may very well be wandering into a spiritual zone, an egregorian quarter,[32] but one that is replete with that “feeling-thinking”[33] often commonly understood as maternal intuition.

 The Community of Men

 If, after being capitalised, humans no longer feel they belong to a species then men, after the prelithic naturalisation of patriarchy, have only rarely believed they are gendered. And so, women are a glaring absence as self-conscious material actors in this community of men called Chevengur. This is borne out by Kopionkin’s idolisation of Rosa Luxemburg, a distant dead love whom he never met but idealises in a way that bespeaks of his yearning to return to the womb of pure communism, as well as by the fact that there is only one female member of the RevCom, Klavdiusha. Chepurny is described as having respect for her “because of the comradely comfort she offered to all the lonely communists of Chevengur” (291) and, just as she is depicted as frivolous, she also figures as the source of a muted jealousy between several of the Chevengurians. Whether this is an indicator of ‘free love’ or prostitution or an imminent outbreak of male competitiveness remains unresolved as Klavudisha, as a living property that is not abolished, drifts out of the narrative. She returns en masse in the latter stages of the book when, in a plot development that echoes that of going to seek the poor, the Chevengurians, become the recipients of a “delivery” of women. Chepurny pontificates before this frightened and cowering and group of potential wives: “And why have we reached out and beckoned women to us? Because we respect nature for food and women for love.” (449) Chepurny’s speech, as well as establishing exclusory dualisms, simultaneously glorifies and subjugates the assembled women, which, as Lea Melandri notes in a different context, only serves to be self-defeating and undermining of that ‘psychical exchange’ that is being intuited as a key factor in the ontology of communism: “Through the image that men have forged of the other sex, they have erected an internal conflict between […] embodiment and thought, feeling and reason.”[34] Many years later, in discussing what she and others called the practice of the unconscious, Melandri offered that such a psycho-social praxis could – in addressing the public-private split as a communist presupposition – be a “safeguard against ideological temptations, free us from unitary illusions, from solidarist sentimentalism and organisational dreams.”[35] These latter are all knowingly, heretically and provokingly present in Chevengur and yet Platonov’s consistent aim in this novel, it seems, is to restore to his readers an empathic sensitivity to others that he captures in his coruscating description of one of the press-ganged wives: “An alien world […] began just above the outermost layer of her skin.” (451)

 Howard Slater

November-December 2024