Sasha Dvanov embraces revolution. Seeking communism, he joins up with Stepan Kopionkin, a warrior for the cause whose steed is the cart horse Strength of the Proletariat. Together they cross the steppe, encountering counterrevolutionaries, desperados, and visionaries of all kinds.
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.
