It is this utopian line, rather than the mainstream "critical re-

A brief summary of Chevengur's plot, however, lends it more coherence than the reader encounters on its pages. The novel actually consists of loosely conjoined episodes suggestive of the picaresque novel with interwoven elements of the epic (or mock-epic) and the Bildungsroman. Its ideas draw significantly on the eccentric utopian philosophy of the 19th-century thinker Nikolai Fedorov and such successors of his as Aleksandr Bogdanov (author of a science-fiction utopian work entitled Krasnaia zvezda [1922; Red Star]). Its ideology hovers between a parody of revolutionary fervor and a lament at its passing. In summation, Chevengur may be thought of as a complex meditation on utopian thought in the early Soviet context.