Andrei Platonov, Chevengur

Philip Ross Bullock (University of Oxford)

Ed. by Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 2.2.2.00: Post-1917 Writing and Culture in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, 1917-present.
Vol. editors: Neil Cornwell (University of Bristol), Roman Koropeckyj (University of California, Los Angeles), Andrei Rogatchevski (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1951

Places

Russia (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel
- Bildungsroman
Utopian / Dystopian

Resources

In Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur (written 1926-29), Aleksandr Dvanov, the work’s main hero, explains the significance of the symbol of the revolution that he has invented: “the recumbent figure eight represents the eternity of time, and the upright arrow with two ends, the infinity of space.” Dvanov’s insistence on the centrality of time and space uncannily anticipates Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous definition of the literary chronotope (from his “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, 1937), which might have been written to describe Chevengur:

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one …

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2622 words

Citation: Bullock, Philip Ross. "Chevengur". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 April 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14448, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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