Чевенгур. Котлован

by Andrei Platonov, Андрей Платонов

Издание содержит роман "Котлован" и повесть "Чевенгур" Андрея Платонова.

Genres: Russia, Fiction, Classics

608 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2009

About the author

Andrei Platonov, August 28, 1899 – January 5, 1951, was the pen name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov, a Soviet author whose works anticipate existentialism. Although Platonov was a Communist, his works were banned in his own lifetime for their skeptical attitude toward collectivization and other Stalinist policies.

From 1918 through 1921, his most intensive period as a writer, he published dozens of poems (an anthology appeared in 1922), several stories, and hundreds of articles and essays, adopting in 1920 the Platonov pen-name by which he is best-known. With remarkably high energy and intellectual precocity he wrote confidently across a wide range of topics including literature, art, cultural life, science, philosophy, religion, education, politics, the civil war, foreign relations, economics, technology, famine, and land reclamation, amongst others.

His famous works include the novels The Foundation Pit and Chevengur.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is an old Russian revolutionary song titled Our Locomotive boasting a highly optimistic refrain: “Our locomotive, fly forward! At the commune is a station. We have no other way, In our hands is a rifle.” Andrei Platonov knew one thing for sure – there is no way to build the bright future holding a rifle…

There are fringes of decay around old provincial towns. People come here to live straight out of nature. One such man appeared, his piercing face exhausted to the point of melancholy. He was able to fix or equip any manner of thing, but himself lived life unequipped.

Both Chevengur and The Foundation Pit are moody dystopias portraying the futilely enthusiastic endeavours to build the bright future with the unwashed hands. And this process of construction strongly reminds of the exuberance of children building castles in the sand.

The starry dark night did not correspond to the difficult earth of the ravine or to the rhythmic breathing of the sleeping diggers. If one looked only along the ground, at the dry details of the soil and into the grass, which lived thickly and in poverty, then in life there was no hope; the common general universal ugliness, and also the uncultured weariness of people puzzled Safronov and caused to totter within him the ideological arrangement. He was even beginning to have doubts in future happiness, which he pictured in the aspect of a dark blue summer, lit by a motionless sun – all around here, day and night, it was too depressing and useless.

There is no way to become happy substituting a simple comfort of everyday life with the universal poverty.

[Grachev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Мой любиный писатель на русском.

[Irina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe it can't be translated into any other language, since the language and all he connotations are so language and country specific. It's a Russian/Soviet anti-utopian masterpiece

[Ivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Обязательное школьное чтение про дистопию военного коммунизма или то, что она представляла собой в действительности.