Consuming Utopian Thought in an Anti-Utopian Age: The Reception of Andrej Platonovʼs Čevengur in Todayʼs Russia

The article discusses the reception of Andrei Platonovʼs novel Chevengur in todayʼs Russia. It focuses on Lev Dodinʼs 1999 production of Platonovʼs novel and juxtaposes it with the interpretations offered by Joseph Brodsky and Tatiana Tolstaia. The article demonstrates that the suggestion to include this novel into the list of compulsory reading recommended to all school leavers in Russia proposed by a group of Russian scholars in January 2012 is highly problematic. It argues that, in order to understand Platonovʼs utopian thought and symbolic language, the post-Soviet reader needs to have a solid knowledge of Russian intellectual trends of the 1920s.