The Etymology of the Title of A.P. Platonov’s Novel Chevengur and its Reflection in the Ideological Content of the Work

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Introduction

The purpose of this study is to determine a possible new etymology of the title of A.P. Platonov’s novel Chevengur and to track the reflection in the text of the novel of possible translations of this title into Russian. The relevance of the research is determined by the fact that the philosophical novel Chevengur is the main work of A.P. Platonov and invariably attracts the attention of researchers in Russia and abroad, since it touches on eternal questions of existence, and its content does not become obsolete over time. Explanatory-etymological, comparative-linguistic and intertextual methods are used. Various opinions have been expressed about the etymology of the title of A.P. Platonov’s most famous novel. The name of the fantastic city of Chevengur is certainly an author’s toponym and does not exist on geographical maps. The version that it was created by analogy with such towns and villages of the Voronezh and Tambov provinces as Boguchar, Karachuri, Karachan, Chagory, Karachun and Karabut seems to be quite reasonable (Shubina, p. 150). It was also pointed out that the city of Boguchar and Bogucharsky district of the Voronezh province, where A.P. Platonov carried out land reclamation work, was the center of the sectarian movement of the Fedorovites, followers of the philosopher N.F. Fedorov, whose pseudo-materialistic utopian Philosophy of the Common Task, by which he understood the resurrection of the dead through science (if the project had come to fruition, the resurrected would not have fit on planet Earth, so Fedorov assumed that over time humanity would master the whole universe), was reflected in the novel Chevengur, as well as in many other Platonov’s works (Romanov, 2017, pp. 45–59). There are many etymologizations of the name ‘Chevengur’ (Yablokov, 2001, pp. 199–201). For exam­ple, S. Zalygin and N. Malygina believe that the name ‘Chevengur’ comes from the Russian dialect words ‘chewa’ – a piece, a slip of a bast shoe, and ‘gur’ – noise, roar, roar (Zalygin, Malygina, 2000, p. 556). There is also a version that the name ‘Chevengur’ is an abbreviation: Chevengur is an Extraordinary Military Invincible (Independent) The Heroic Fortified Area (Aleynikov, 1999, p. 182). D.N. Zamyatin points to the Turkic roots of ‘Chevengur’ (Zamyatin, 2005, p. 10). However, until now, resear­chers have not paid attention to another possible etymologization of the novel’s title, which, as it seems to us, best corresponds to Platonov’s plan.

Results and Discussion

Etymology of the name ‘Chevengur’

It seems to us that the word ‘chevengur’ turns out to be consonant with the Armenian word ‘chilingar’, from which the Armenian surnames Chilingar, Chilingaryan, Chilingarov and some others originate. However, the word ‘chilingar’ itself is not of Armenian, but of Turkic origin (çilingir). In Turkish, Azerbaijani and Uzbek ‘chilingir’, as well as in Armenian ‘chilingar’, means ‘locksmith’, as earlier times, ‘metalworker’, ‘the blacksmith-gunsmith’ (Maximov, 2013).

It is worth remembering here that Platonov was born and lived in Voronezh until 1926, that is, until the beginning of work on Chevengur, and his father, Platon Firsovich Klimentov, was a railway mechanic. Voronezh had one of the largest Armenian diasporas in Russia. Moreover, in 1913–1915 Platonov worked as an assistant machinist on a locomobile at the Ust’e estate of Colonel Yakov Grigoryevich Bek-Marmarchev (1854–1915) in the vicinity of Voronezh. Bek-Marmarchev (Marmarchev) was an Armenian by nationality and belonged to the Armenian-Gregorian Church. Platonov probably had to meet with other Armenians. For example, in The Story of Ilyich’s Extinguished Light Bulb (1926), Platonov mentions: “We conspired with an urban Armenian to sell him fruit, and we began to have money” (Platonov, 2011b, p. 92). It is characteristic that Doubtful Makar was written in the same year when work on Chevengur began.

Armenians are mentioned in the Chevengur itself: “Prokofy took the banner from Chepurny’s hands and read to himself a verse by Karl Marx on it.

– Wow, not the proletariat! – He said. – This is a first-class class for you, you just lead him forward, he won’t make a sound to you. These are international proletarians: you see, they are not Russians, not Armenians, not Tatars, but nobody! I’ve brought you a living international, and you’re pining...” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 286).

These examples prove that the Armenian nationality was significant for Platonov during the period of work on Chevengur, including because of the Armenian origin of the novel’s title. In the quoted excerpt from Chevengur, next to the ethnonym ‘Armenians’ is the ethnonym ‘Tatars’, which may also hint at the Turkic (through the Armenian language) origin of Platonov’s toponym ‘Chevengur’.

Interestingly, the ethnonym ‘Armenians’ is not found in Platonov’s later works. But in Platonov’s last unfinished play, the comedy Noah’s Ark (Cain’s Spawn) (1949), the action takes place on Mount Ararat, in Turkish Western Armenia, and among the actors is “Simonian, chairman of the Ararat collective farm from the Armenian SSR” (Platonov, 2011c, p. 388). The Armenian motif here is based on the biblical plot, but it can also emphasize the connection of the comedy with Chevengur, which is also based on biblical allusions. Kornienko rightly emphasizes that in Noah’s Ark the dialogues of Churchill and Hamsun “about the new emperor of the globe ‘resurrect’ the plan of the Chevengur grand inquisitor Proshka Dvanov about the kingdom of international proletarians” (Platonov, 2011c, pp. 719–720).

In Voronezh and its surroundings, Platonov could meet Armenians with the surname Chilingaryan or Chilingarov. According to the data of the social networks VK and Odnoklassniki, the bearers of the surname Chilingaryan (Merry Chilingaryan, Vruir Chilingaryan) and Chilingarov (Eric Chilingarov) currently live in Voronezh. Their ancestors may well have been Platonov’s contemporaries.

It seems to us that Platonov turned the real word ‘chilingar’ into a consonant with it, but non-existent word ‘chevengur’ (it is probably formed according to the following scheme: chilingar – chivingar – chevengur), because the utopian city could not be named by a word that had a real meaning in any language. But those few readers who caught the consonance and knew the meaning of the word ‘chilingar’ got an association with one of the main ideas of the novel – the master and mastery.

The use of the words master, locksmith and blacksmith in the novel Chevengur

Let’s try to find out what are the features of the use of the words ‘master’, ‘locksmith’ and ‘blacksmith’, which convey the meaning of the Armenian word ‘chilin­gar’ in the novel Chevengur in Russian. The word ‘locksmith’ occurs here 10 times, and all the cases of use fall on that part of Chevengur, which is a ‘realistic’ exposition to the main, fantastic part of the novel, which begins when Sasha Dvanov comes to Chevengur. The ‘realistic’ part covers the stories The Origin of the Master and The Builders of the Country. The word ‘master’ is used in Chevengur 11 times, the word ‘artisan’ derived from ‘master’ is used 7 times, and the other derivative, ‘mastery’, and only in the ‘realistic’ part, is used 4 times. The word ‘blacksmith’ occurs 20 times in Chevengur, and the derivatives ‘forge’ and ‘blacksmith’ occur 21 times. Such attention to these words is no coincidence. The blacksmith and related words have become one of the symbols of the revolution. In particular, in 1920–1922, the magazine Forge of the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP) was published, and Platonov published in it (Borovsko, 2011).

The use of the words ‘locksmith’, ‘master’ and ‘blacksmith’ should be recognized as quite frequent. For comparison, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1929–1940), the word ‘master’ denoting the main character is used 106 times, and in Chevengur, the word ‘master’ and its derivatives, as well as the words ‘locksmith’ and ‘blacksmith’ synonymous with it in the context of the novel, and derivatives of they have been used a total of 73 times (Bulgakov, 2006). These words in Platonov’s novel, unlike the ‘master’ in Bulgakov’s novel, are not a substitute for the names of characters. In terms of volume, The Master and Margarita and Chevengur are almost equal to each other – 740 and 746 thousand characters with spaces, respectively.

It seems quite logical that the newer word ‘locksmith’ (from German Schlosser – through Polish ślusarz, master of locks), which entered the Russian language only in the XVIII century, is used only in the modern, ‘realistic’ part of Chevengur, whereas in the fantastic part of the novel only the much more ancient words ‘master’ and ‘blacksmith’ are used. The word “craftsmanship” and the epithets “precision craftsmanship” and “diligent craftsmanship” are used only in the “realistic” part of the novel to denote a feature inherent in both Sasha Dvanov’s adoptive father, locksmith Zakhar Pavlovich, and Sasha himself, but in a different way than his father’s – “He was attracted to cars and craftsmanship, but not in the same way as Zakhar Pavlovich”. His attraction was not curiosity, which ended with the disco­very of the secret of the machine. Sasha was interested in machines along with other real and living objects. He rather wanted to feel them, to experience their lives, than to know them” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 54). For Sasha, mastery is what gives birth to machines, and machines for him are the same living beings as humans and animals. In another case, craftsmanship acts as a kind of ‘driver’ of machines, li­kened to tired animals – “The further the revolution went, the more tired machines and products resisted it – they had already worked out all their deadlines and were supported by the same stimulating skill of locksmiths and machinists” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 177). In this case, the word ‘craftsmanship’ is combined with the word ‘locksmith’, and the mastery of the master is obtained. Platonov especially respected those workers who were metalworkers like his father. Here you can also see the further development of the Fedorov doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. After all, humans and animals are made up of molecules that can be reassembled for re­surrection someday after their death. Machines are made of molecules in the same way, and are similar to living beings, but they are brought back to life after a breakdown not by scientists of the future, but by the skill of locksmiths.

The word ‘locksmith’ is most vividly characterized in the following episode: “<...> Zakhar Pavlovich observed in steam locomotives the same fervent, agitated human force that is silent in a working man without any outcome. Usually, a locksmith talks well when he gets drunk, but in a steam locomotive a person always feels big and scary.

<...> He was told that there was no such bolt, although everyone had such bolts. But the fact is that at the locksmith’s job they were bored and entertained by the mutual complication of work worries. Zakhar Pavlovich did not yet know the cunning hidden fun that exists in any workshop. This quiet mockery allowed the rest of the craftsmen to overcome the length of the working day and the longing of repeated labor” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 44). In this case, the locksmiths act as a kind of ‘artisan aristocracy’ in relation to the rest of the craftsmen in the workshop and even seem to mock the rest of the workers. But in fact, they only make their hard work easier with a joke. A steam locomotive, as a living being, is likened to a locksmith who is eloquent only when drunk.

Sasha Dvanov also gets his name from the wife of a young locksmith, whom he looks after during her illness (Platonov, 2011c, pp. 51–52). And Sasha himself is studying to become a locksmith, because “he was interested in machines along with other active and living objects. He rather wanted to feel them, to experience their lives, than to know them” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 54). And here the word ‘locksmith’ turns out to be connected with the theme of machines as living beings.

Two more mentions of the word ‘locksmith’ in Chevengur are related to measurements. Zakhar Pavlovich tells about Fed’ka Bespalov, a locksmith who has already died: “Sometimes they would send him to measure something, he would go, put his fingers and walk with his arms outstretched. By the time he gets his hands on it, he can make a yard out of a yard. ‘What are you, your son of a bitch?’ they scold him. And he said, ‘Yes, I need a lot, they won’t send me away for it anyway” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 66). The measured distance is tripled due to the fact that the locksmith spreads his arms as wide as possible while walking. We are still looking at the same kind of locksmith joke, the entertainment of “mutual complication of work worries”. And already at the end of the ‘realistic’ part of the novel, “locksmith Gopner held his palm towards the air and told Comrade Fufaev that there were two pressure atmospheres here.

– If the whole party were gathered in this room, Gopner reasoned, we could safely start an electric power plant – in one party breath, I’ll be damned!” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 177). This time, human breathing is likened to the energy of machines.

The word ‘blacksmith’ is defined in the novel as “an iron master – he is also the overseer of dead inventory and construction property (it must be a blacksmith, carpenter, etc. – in the same person)” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 133). And the ‘iron master’ makes the eternity of time and the infinity of space out of iron rods (Platonov, 2011a, p. 137). Thus, the words ‘blacksmith’ and ‘master’ turn out to be synonyms. The blacksmith Sotykh opposes both the revolution and the communists, as well as Fedorov’s theory of the resurrection of the dead: “You say bread for the revolution! You fool, the people are dying, so who’s going to keep your revolution? And they say the war is over...” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 158).

Master Zakhar Pavlovich has a negative attitude towards the February Revolution, because “the smartest people are on duty in power again, there will be no good”, but he accepts the October Revolution, despite the devastation it caused, “fools take power there, maybe life will get smarter” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 62). This echoes the idea of the blacksmith Sotykh that the revolution will end when “all the cranks will leave for power, and the people will heal on their own – both sides enjoy it...” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 159). Thus, the happiness of the people is thought of as a kind of anarchy, when the government is on its own, and the people are on their own, and they do not interfere in each other’s affairs.

Another blacksmith, Yakov Titych, wants to isolate himself from the Chevengurians: “The people can’t cook buckwheat porridge for themselves, there’s no cereal anywhere... And I was a blacksmith – I want to move the forge away on the sheds, I’ll work on the road, maybe I’ll earn some grain”, because “it will be more capable to work like a blacksmith” (Platonov, 2011a, pp. 321, 322) than to eat only the gifts of nature, how the Chevengurians do it. And he, like Sotykh, does not believe in resurrection and dreams that “the dead body would remain whole, there would be something to hold and remember, otherwise the winds blow, the water flows, and everything disappears and parts into dust. It’s a torment, not a life. And whoever died died for nothing, and now you will not find anyone who lived when, they all are only loss” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 322). And the abandoned forge, in which burdock sprouted and where even the spiders died, becomes a symbol of the desolation of Chevenour. Here, too, one can see Fedorov’s teaching about the possibility of raising the dead.

According to an interesting hypothesis by N.N. Borovko, both blacksmiths in the novel, Sotykh and Yakov Titych, have Maxim Gorky as their prototype, and Sotykh reflects the figure of Gorky in the 1920s, when he sharply criticized the Bolsheviks for excessive violence in Untimely Thoughts, and Yakov Titych is the figure of the late Gorky, who returned from exile and generally accepted the Bolshevik program (Borovko, 2011). If this hypothesis is correct, then the criticism of the Fedorov doctrine by both blacksmiths becomes understandable. Gorky generally did not accept Fedorov’s teachings, although he acknowledged that “among his many original speculations and aphorisms is this: Freedom without power over nature is the same as the liberation of peasants without land. This, in my opinion, is indisputable” (Gorky, 1953, p. 454). Gorky wrote about Fedorov’s teaching in his letters: “I’ve read his books, of course. They did not like it”. It is also correct to point out that Fedorov “makes me feel sick, like after chloroform” (Suxix, 2007, pp. 59–60).

Zakhar Pavlovich thinks that it would be good to give a person “an ant or mosquito mind – at once it would be possible to establish a comfortable life: this little thing is the great masters of a friendly life; a man is far from a skilled worker an ant” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 20). This reflects Fedorov’s idea that “according to zoological theory, society is an anthill, because man is only a social animal” (Fedorov, 1995, p. 328). Ants attracted Fedorov (and probably Platonov) by burying their dead outside the anthills, in which they “are like <...> not savages, but townspeople, especially Americans and even only in the future, when the remains of the deceased will be left to the sewage disposal society”. This example was used by biologists to prove the biological (animal) nature of man, with which Fedorov categorically disagreed, believing that man is morally different from even highly organized animals, like ants, in that he fulfills a filial duty, what buries the dead with the maximum possibility of resurrection: “Therefore, to ‘bury’ animals (as well as future townspeople and current naturalists, to whom the above words belong and who are morally no higher than the ants they study). It has nothing to do with the burial of humans, i.e. the sons of men: ‘to bury’ the latter means to revive or resurrect in proportion to knowledge and skill. Hidden, i.e. the body of the deceased, buried in the ground or burned out of physical necessity, is immediately restored out of moral necessity, out of filial duty: stone ‘menhirs’ (fathers), funeral urns storing the ashes of the burned and gradually assuming a more human-like form, testify to this duty” (Fedorov, 1995, pp. 460–461). Platonov, in this case, is arguing with Fedorov, arguing that people have a lot to learn from ants. The writer emphasized the role of skill in distinguishing humans from animals and plants. For Zakhar Pavlovich and his friend, the machinist-mentor, “the beast and the tree did not arouse <...> the sympathy of their lives, because no one took part in their manufacture – they did not have a single conscious blow and precision of craftsmanship”. In this respect, products are closer to humans, especially metal ones, which “existed alive” and “in their structure and strength” were “more interesting and mysterious than humans” (Platonov, 2011a, pp. 43–44). And the solid (metallic) substances that artisans deal with all their lives help them anticipate the approach of death, as they “secretly teach them the immutability of a universal fatal fate” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 53). In contrast to Fedorov, Platonov’s son does not take care of his father’s burial, but his father takes care of his adopted son’s burial, and long before Sasha’s suicide, he made him a coffin – “the last gift to his son from the master father” in order to keep Alexander in such a coffin – if not alive, then whole for memory and love; every ten years, Zakhar Pavlovich was going to dig his son out of the grave in order to see him and feel with him” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 79). He feels that he will outlive Sasha for a long time.

The machinist-mentor also believes that a real master should not work for money, and the end of the world will come when “labor from an unaccountable free nature will become one monetary need”, and “after the death of the last master, the last bastards will come to life to devour the plants of the sun and spoil the products of the masters” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 51). In this case, Platonov points to one of the dangerous consequences of the implementation of the Fedorov project – because along with good people, villains and criminals will rise up, and we need to make sure that there are no fewer real masters in the history of mankind than bastards. On the other hand, the novel emphasizes that there are objects “for which the craftsman needs to distract from everything low and unclean in his body” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 353).

There is a fundamental difference between Zakhar Pavlovich and Sasha Dvanov in their attraction to machines and craftsmanship. The father’s is rational, and the son’s is intuitive. Sasha “rather wanted to feel them, to experience their lives, than to get to know them”, and there fore sometimes imagined himself to be a steam locomotive (Platonov, 2011a, p. 54). And there is also a difference between craftsmen who put their soul into the machines they produce, and craftsmen who are indifferent to the locomotives that “they repaired and refueled” (Platonov, 2011a, pp. 54–55).

A master in Chevengur can be not only a locksmith or a blacksmith, but also a warrior. It is no coincidence that the red warrior Kopenkin, a knight errant of the revolution, “with a free movement of the master knocked the sawn-off shotgun out of the hands of the guard without wounding him at all”, and his skill is determined by the fact that he “had the gift of the revolution in himself” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 153). Thus, mastery not only does not contradict the revolution, but can also be inspired by it. Piyusya, the chekist, is also a romantic executioner, whose activities of exterminating and evicting ‘bourgeois’ and ‘semi-bourgeois’ left only 11 com­munal residents in Chevengur. When evicting the ‘semi-bourgeois’, he “grabbed across the pining people with the indifference of a master who rejects humanity, and silently put them in knots, as on the islands of the last refuge” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 251). At the same time, Piusya is by no means a negative hero for Platonov. After all, the author of Chevengur himself wrote in the Zadonsky newspaper Svobodny Plowman in 1922: “For the realization of communism, the complete, total extermination of the living base of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, as the sum of living personalities, is necessary. They will say that this is extreme, bloodthirsty, blind rage, and not the path to communism. No, this is an honest conclusion of an accurate analysis of the transitional era and the history of capitalism and the proletariat. The heart and feeling have always prevented a person from experiencing life. We have never understood the earth properly. Our head is still too weak to fully comprehend the whole difficult process of the movement of things, all the ruthlessness, all the whirl, explosions of matter flowing towards its goal. We have not yet learned from nature its ruthlessness” (Platonov, 2007). Here Platonov rather professes not the Fedorov doctrine, but social Darwinism, which he later combined with the Philosophy of the Common Task (see above is the reasoning of the machinist-mentor about the ‘last bastards’). But mastery is alien to the ‘decaying’ ‘party intellectual’ (Borovko, 2001) Simon Serbinov, the antipode of Sasha Dvanov, whom he calls not a master, but only a “qualified craftsman” (Platonov, 2011a, p. 382).

Conclusion

Thus, we were convinced that our hypothesis that the title of the novel Chevengur comes from the Armenian-Turkic word ‘chilingar’, which could have been known to Platonov due to Platonov’s proven contacts with representatives of the Armenian diaspora of Voronezh even before starting work on the novel, found additional confirmation in the text of the Chevengur, since all the words by which the word ‘chilingar’ can be translated into Russian are ‘master’, ‘locksmith’, ‘blacksmith’ and their derivatives, which play an important role. They turn out to be connected with the reflection in Platonov’s novel Philosophy of Common Task by N.F. Fedorov, where this teaching is combined with social Darwinism and with one of the main themes of the novel about the master and mastery. Social Darwinism was also reflected in A.P. Platonov’s article Communism and the Heart. This circumstance increases the probability of our hypothesis about the Armenian-Turkic origin of the novel’s title Chevengur. It also seems likely that N.N. Borovko’s hypothesis about A.M. Gorky as the prototype of the blacksmiths in Chevengur, Sotykh and Yakov Titych, and their connection with the Philosophy of Common Cause, a kind of polemic with the ideas of N.F. Fedorov from the standpoint of social Darwinism. The ideas of social Darwinism were embodied in the episodes of the extermination of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the expulsion of the ‘semi-bourgeoisie’, leaving only the ‘chosen’ communards alive.

About the authors

Boris V. Sokolov

Author for correspondence.
Email: bvsokolov@yandex.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-8147-4918
SPIN-code: 9754-1134

Grand PhD in Philology, PhD in History, Scientific Consultant of Editorin-Chief

References

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