Socialism as anti-depressant: this is indeed how socialism is preasented in Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, the 1927 novel about peasant life in the Russian steppe in the years leading up to and following the October revolution. While the notion of socialism as salve for depression may in the present day context of Prozac and capitalist triumphalism seem at best counter-intuitive, for the reader of Chevengur, the realization by the self-named «Dostoevsky» about halfway through the novel that he had been depressed for lack of socialism does not come as a surprise.