The Foundation Pit

Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1899-1951) was the son of a railway worker. The eldest of eleven children, he began work at the age of thirteen, first in an office, then in a factory, and finally as an engine driver's assistant. He began publishing poems and articles in 1918, while studying engineering. Throughout much of the 1920s he worked as a land reclamation expert. Between 1927 and 1932 he wrote his most politically controversial works, some of them first published in the Soviet Union only in the late 1980s. Other stories were published but subjected to vicious criticism. Stalin is reputed to have written "scum" in the margin of the story "For Future Use," and to have said to Aleksandr Fadeev (later secretary of the Writers' Union), "Give him a good belting—for future use." During the 1930s Platonov made several public confessions of error, but went on writing stories only marginally more acceptable to the authorities. His son was sent to the Gulag in 1938, aged fifteen; he was released three years later, only to die of the tuberculosis he had contracted there. During the war Platonov worked as a war correspondent and published several volumes of stories; after the war, however, he was again almost unable to publish. He died in 1951, of tuberculosis caught from his son. Happy Moscow, one of his finest short novels, was first published in 1991; a complete text of "Soul" was first published only in 1999; letters, notebook entries, and unfinished stories continue to appear. »

Robert Chandler has edited and translated numerous Russian titles, including the complete works of Platonov. He is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.

Elizabeth Chandler is a co-translator of several volumes of Platonov and of Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter.

Olga Meerson teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of Dostoevsky's Taboos (in English) and Platonov's Poetic of Re-Familiarization (in Russian). She is a co-translator of Platonov's Soul and Other Stories, which, in 2004, was awarded the AATSEEL prize for "best translation from a Slavonic language". »

By Andrey Platonov
Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson

With notes and an afterword by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson

In Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit, a team of workers has been given the job of digging the foundation of an immense edifice, a palatial home for the perfect future that, they are convinced, is at hand. But the harder the team works, the deeper they dig, the more things go wrong, and it becomes clear that what is being dug is not a foundation but an immense grave.

The Foundation Pit is Platonov’s most overtly political book, written in direct response to the staggering brutalities of Stalin’s collectivization of Russian agriculture. It is also a literary masterpiece. Seeking to evoke unspeakable realities, Platonov deforms and transforms language in pages that echo both with the alienating doublespeak of power and the stark simplicity of prayer.

This English translation is the first and only one to be based on the definitive edition published by Pushkin House in Moscow. It includes extensive notes and, in an appendix, several striking passages deleted by Platonov. Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson’s afterword discusses the historical context and style of Platonov’s most haunted and troubling work.

Reviews

Andrey Platonov's absurdist parable The Foundation Pit is extraordinary: strange, almost abrupt, a hallucinatory, nightmarish parable of hysterical laughter and terrifying silences.
— The Irish Times

Andrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union. ...The Foundation Pit will stand out as his masterpiece.
— The Independent (London)

Platonov's writing can retain enormous power in English...The foreign reader can also now begin to get an idea of the shape of Platonov's development as a writer. The Foundation Pit, written at the time of the brutal collectivization campaign of the late 1920s, plays out an image of equally brutal directness—a construction site on which nothing ever gets built. The pit just gets wider and deeper until it comes to represent a grave - of Stalinism's Promethean ambitions, and of the author's political idealism. The effect on the reader is almost physically winding.
— The Moscow Times

He has been described as the greatest Russian writer of the 20th century, but some of his most controversial works, written between 1927 and 1932, were not published in the Soviet Union until the 1980s. Platonov's The Foundation Pit is a satirical response to Stalin's programme of crash industrialisation and collectivisation.
— The Guardian

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.96 (20% off)

Apr 21, 2009
208 pages
ISBN: 1590173058
9781590173053
NYRB Classics
Literature in Russian

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