PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In the center of our attention is the postapocalyptic situation in Andrei Platonov's novel Chevengur, which is characterized by the absence of labor. This fact does not give evidence of the paradise for which the chiliasts strove but turns out to be one of the main reasons of its self-destruction. The author's argumentation is built on the confrontation of the beginning and the end of the novel. In both cases, labor is represented in an unusually strange way. But in fact, there is a principal difference between these two representations of labor. In the first case, we are dealing with the rising line of the transition from peasant's craft to proletarian labor, whereas the development of the "economy" of Chevengur is shown as a process of decline.