If humanity were to achieve the perfect society, would we actually be able to tolerate it? This is one of the imponderables of utopian thinking. Written between 1927 and 1929, Andrey Platonov’s debut novel, Chevengur, offers an ambivalent depiction of the Soviet Union in its early, utopian years. Platonov struggled to find a publisher for the novel and you wouldn’t need to be a Kremlin censor to grasp why. The story of Sasha Dvanov’s journey to the communist ‘idyll’ of Chevengur, a remote steppe town where nothing functions as it should, Platonov’s tale, encompassing the revolution’s salad days, paints an often unflattering picture. Beginning with the October Revolution, it takes in the Russian Civil War (1917–22) before showing us the period following the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, under which limited private enterprise was permitted to boost the economy. Through this, Lenin’s heyday is represented as a topsy-turvy limbo in which ‘history has ended’ but paradise remains in the post. 

From the outset, the world seems in disarray. ‘Old provincial towns have tumbledown outskirts,’ it begins, ‘and people come straight from nature to live there.’ The division between town and country appears to be collapsing, and it’s also unclear who is speaking. Soon, a third-person storyteller emerges, introducing our hero via an inverted folktale. Placed on the cusp of town and country, where the one blends into the other, the reader is already positioned on unsteady ground – and so it continues. Like Platonov himself, Dvanov was born at the turn of the century. He was essentially orphaned when his mother abandoned him and his father, a fisherman, ‘threw himself into’ a lake, hoping to discover ‘the secret of death’. In the end he gets his wish and drowns.

Throughout the first section, which is, like most of the novel, set in provincial Russia, life and death appear of a piece. Neglected by his foster family, Dvanov takes to ‘digging himself a grave’ in a cemetery before being adopted by the childless railway engineer Zakhar Pavlovich. The adolescent Dvanov