Time in "Chevengur"

Abstract

THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume82, Number4 October 2004 Tinme in Chevengur ANGELALIVINGSTONE ONE writeron thesubjectof timerelateshowSamuilMarshak, being in London with imperfect English and no watch, went up to someone in the street and asked: 'What is time?' -to which the surprised stranger explained that he was no philosopher.' The anecdote may remindus of how AndreiPlatonov'sfictionalworkis fullof people who, lacking equipment and unskilled in language, ask a great many helplesslyprofoundand unanswerablequestions,among them 'Whatis time?' (but never'What is the time?'). The question is central to the novel Chevengur2 where, unable to endure the mysteryof time, a group of men set about puttinga stop to it. This article will look at influences upon Platonov's thinking about time, examine images and ideas of time presented in Chevengur, and seekto account forthe unusualtemporalityof the fictionalworldof this novel. First,some introductoryremarks. I Much of what Platonov wrote is based upon a conviction that the conditions of our existence are fundamentallyimperfect. Time, which Angela Livingstone is Research Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. This article was originally presented as a paper at the international conference, 'Russia in Time Time in Russia', organized by the Centre for Russian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London in July 2002. All translations from the Russian are by the author. I G. J. Whitrow, Whatis Time?2, London, 1972 (hereafter, Whitrow), p. 7. 2 Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, written 1928, first published in full in i 988. Page references in this article are to the Moscow 'Khudozhestvennaia literatura' edition of I988. The only English translation of this novel is Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, translated by Anthony Olcott, Ann Arbor, MI, 1978; three chapters from it have been published in the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (with Nadya Bourova, Angela Livingstone, David Macphail and Eric Naiman) in 7The Portable Platonov,20, Moscow, I 999. 802 TIME IN CHEVENGUR bringsdeath,accountsfor a largepartof the imperfection. Whereas Rilke considered that we are 'not [... ] at home in the interpreted world',3Platonov felt that we are not at home on earth at all, not even in the world of nature: 'there has not been real life on earth, nor will there soon be' ('Nastoiashcheizhizni na zemle ne bylo, i ne skoroona budet').4 That the whole world ought to be radically altered to accommodate human beings and fulfiltheir needs is an idea explored in some of his 1920S stories, perhaps most vividly in Potomki solntsa ('Descendants of the Sun'):5here a scientistwhose intellect has grown infinitelypowerfulre-directsrivers,knocksdown mountains, harnesses the energy of light, speeds up time and finallyinvents a machine which will in a flash annihilate the entire cosmos before replacing it with a new and infinitelybetterone. In Chevengur (I 928), Platonov looks at anotherkind of attempt at the annihilationof 'everything'andpreparationfora new universe.Eleven not very clever Bolsheviksin charge of a small provincial steppe town clearthe groundfortheirversionof Communism and believe theyhave brought it about. Communism entails, for them, the ending of time. Their attempt is narratedin the last thirdof the novel. The author did not divide the book into parts,nor even distinctlyinto chapters,but the twenty-seven sections suggested by gaps in the manuscript text could be grouped as follows: a firstpart, set in the early twentieth century, which concerns the growing up of the main hero, AleksandrDvanov, and describes a number of people who sufferand seek a better life; a second part, set in the years of revolutionand civilwar,which narrates the wanderings of Dvanov and his quixotic friend Kopenkin over the steppelands in search of that better life, now named 'Communism'; and a thirdpartabout the introductionof Communism, and with it the ending of time, in a strangelyisolatedtown, Chevengur. What, then, istime, so confidentlybroughtto an end in that town?It is strikingthat, althoughthe book continuallytouches on philosophical questions, there is no philosophical discussion in it as such, either by the author-narrator(who very rarely comes out with anything of his own) or by the characters.Similarly,while theirthoughtsand speeches repeatedly raise questions of definition ('What is Communism?' or 'Whatis Socialism?'is askedmany times),they never open them up for rational consideration...