The first and greatest novel by the Russian writer Andrey Platonov ... Platonov is not just a voice of his generation but a sage to our own, warning us that the flaws of human idealism are condemned to overshadow its realized visions.
Strange ... Displays the way that Platonov’s fiction pulls in different directions at once. The earnestness with which the characters take revolutionary slogans at face value can quickly send their aspirations for earthly bliss sliding toward sarcasm ... The bumptious and harrowing music of the novel’s first two sections is already enough to make Chevengur one of the more amazing works of twentieth-century fiction. In the third and final part, however, the work becomes less an ordinary novel, of whatever extraordinary kind, than a different genre of writing entirely.
While it’s a commonplace to say a writer has a style all his own, no one quite resembles Platonov ... Without a conventional plot or character development, he leaves readers with vivid memories.
[Platonov's] meticulous eye for detail could all too easily spot the ironies, absurdities and contradictions of Soviet reality ... Chevengur masterfully weaves together the dreams and desolations of the starving and dispossessed rural communities living through the savage early years of Bolshevik rule ... Overflowing with Platonov’s often perilous honesty, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s moving translation captures all the dazzling horror of this Soviet utopia.
It is hard to believe that readers have had to wait so long for this outstanding new translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler ... A swan song to the Soviet avant-garde that perished under Stalin, Andrey Platonov’s "lyrico-satirical" novel takes us to the heart of what it might mean to believe.
Platonov’s prose in the opening chapters of Chevengur inherits the gloriously weird intimacy that is so central to the Russian novel, an intimacy the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler occasionally muffles ... Platonov’s superpower as a writer is his ability to help us see beyond such easy truisms into the human tragedy that lies beneath.
While Platonov loves to patch together a sentence by creating odd phrases... he follows these challenging moments with flowing elegance. Translators Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have carefully brought Platonov’s playful cadence and curious choices of phrase into this English translation ... With flashes of romance and much of the open steppe, the novel promises both the seasoned Russophile and the curious newcomer something unique on every page.
Ambitious and thoughtful ... Platonov’s depictions of the long-suffering peasantry can veer toward the absurd... but he draws them in great detail, lending them gravity and humanity through measured prose and a bend toward realism.
