The Foundation Pit (New York Review Books Classics)

This short novel was written in 1930 in response to the collectivization movement. The main character loses his job and wanders to a neighboring town where he joins a crew that is digging a foundation pit for a massive building for the proletariat to live in. Surrounded by an odd group of hapless characters, he soon realizes that the project will never be finished. They are joined by a young girl who spouts revolutionary slogans and reports on counter-revolutionaries.Half way through the book, he and several other diggers move to a village which still contains peasants who own their own land and even peasants who have servants of their own. They participate in the removal of these owners and the collectivization of the farms in the area. Once the have succeeded in their quest they go back to the pit where the novel ends.Foundation Pit describes an era that was hidden from those outside the Soviet Union, hidden from many inside that country and remains hidden to most today. It describes the blind and stupid dogmatism of Stalin's efforts, the violence of the reforms that were instituted and the dehumanization that resulted. The world described in this book seems surrealistic, but that is because of the strange language of propaganda that Platonov uses to narrate the tale. Actually, once you finish you realize this is not surrealism, but frightening realism. Platonov worked as an engineer in rural Russia and Ukraine and witnessed much of what he describes. It was much worse that we imagined.This is a great book, only recently rediscovered. Thanks to NYRB for making it available!

There is nothing I can add to the earlier reviews except to forewarn you that there is no hint of endnotes in the text itself. You have to search in the back of the text for the endnotes, which are listed by page number. I was more than halfway through the book before I found them. The endnotes are very important to understanding the many implications of the Platonov's unique use of the Russian language and use of Communist cliches. The Afterward is also very important. I've read some of it, and it increased my appreciation of what I've read so far.I have decided to add to my comment because this is the most brilliant book I've ever read, and I read it three times in three weeks. I don't think I'll ever tire of reading it. It's the only example of verbal experimentalism from the era we call "modern" that makes sense to me. Platonov didn't so much write his book but sculpted it to show the horror of Total Collectivization and the liquidation of the kulak, that is the class of peasants who both owned property and hired labor, that is they were "rich" and therefore "parasites." He makes the author of "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" appear to have been playing self-indulgent games. I highly recommend this book. You will never forget it.

For anyone new to world literature or to Platonov, I suggest first reading _Soul and Other Stories_, also published in the NYRB Classics series. _The Foundation Pit_ is more complex, and it can also be depressing; in other words, in my own reading past I have started but not finished novels which were too hard to read. More specifically, what I mean is that this period in Russian or Soviet history, 1929 to the late `30s--during the consolidation of farm property and industrialization of farm work--was a violent time, and violence against farmers is hard for the (American) reader to understand who doesn't know the events which Andrey Platonov was writing about. The translators make it easier to understand _The Foundation Pit_ with their comprehensive "Afterward", "Further Reading", and "Appendix" at the end of Platonov's novel. I thought I knew what a "kulak" was--a kind of wealthy farmer--but Chandler and Meerson clarify the various types of poor, landless peasants, and poor or rich farmers. But still, don't be surprised if this novel has you heading for an encyclopedia. (After all, even Jane Austen has to be researched to be fully enjoyed.)In brief, regarding the background history of the novel, the wealthy farmers might have exploited their workers in a master-slave relationship, and Stalin's government believed that property had to be divided as equally as possible, but even backers of the revolution were disgusted by the process of killing farmers just to divide up their land. (While reading this novel, I couldn't help thinking of how what became Canada and the U.S. went from 100 percent Native American ownership to 1 percent. That process of property reallocation can't be done without some systematic government policy including violence--but, perhaps, that's another story.)Regarding Platonov's style (and the translators'), nearly every sentence is an astonishing combination of absurdist-lyrical or mechanical-lyrical words. I noticed that the key to making a noun absurd is the adjective attached to it: "various inevitable institutions," ". . . we lived cruelly," ". . . issued an oral directive." A "city sweet" seems to be candy. Even "foundation pit" becomes absurd. And, it's almost as though everyone is in a day-camp where they must act the same, and they've been ordered to speak with only certain words: "Get organized! Be enthusiastic!"From time to time, I felt like this was Samuel Beckett before "Beckett." And yes, the Irish Times called this novel an "absurdist parable." But, Beckett was writing absurdist drama at a time when Europe was basically a stable society (working for a corporation, though, is a kind of collectivization, both rational and absurd). But, for Platonov, without a stable society and with no hope, absurdity is realism.In the midst of this hopelessly absurd world, Platonov gives us two characters who keep the novel grounded in some future. One is Voshchev. I knew I was going to like this novel when Voshchev was punished for thinking: "Administration says that you stood and thought in the midst of production. What were you thinking about comrade, Voshchev?" (3). And, my favorite character (if that were not an absurdity in this novel) is the construction engineer, Prushevsky. He is able to feel delight, wistfulness, and a lyrical sense of the human soul--all considered bourgeois excesses of individuality. What saves Prushevsky--and anyone in this situation--is the memory of a young woman's face from a chance meeting; "Eternal matter [his engineering work], needing neither movement, nor life, nor extinction, had come to take the place, for Prushevsky, of something forgotten and necessary, like the being of a lost sweetheart" (27).I highly recommend investigating Russian history; much of it is a harsh reminder of American periods of over-the-top manias, like the HUAC witch hunts and McCarthyism and domestic spying on Americans. I suggest two books reviewed in the February 8, 2008, Times Literary Supplement, _The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia_ by Orlando Figes, and _Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin_ by Jochen Hellbeck.

The story is as timely as it was then.

Without the wonderful translation of Chandler and the wealth of vital annotations that contextualise seemingly innocuous comments as being based on key moments and movements in Soviet History, this book of poetic beauty would have rendered much lost to the unfamiliar reader of Soviet History.This is a brittle and stark brave new world that we find our principle characters embroiled in the creations of a foundation for a huge building in deepest Siberia to house future generations of good Communists.The Characters by degrees bully one another with a casual violence that is presented to the reader in stilted prose. They torment and kill villagers with a casualness that is framed in such understated terms that as a reader you are forced time and again to reread what you have witnessed. Indeed much of the reading is in the form of Witness to events, that otherwise in the desolate dreary landscape of Siberia, would have been utterly ignominiously forgotten. Platonov captures the callously mechanical nature of the system he writes of with an absolute adherence to language and metaphor that constantly dehumanises, and drains all colour or joy from life from the characters and their environment.Platonov repeatedly describes the landscape as boring. People are referred to as having feelings and movements that are precise. Nowhere is there reign to the joy of life and vitality of movement.Death visits several characters who simply lie down and die with barely a flicker of recognition or emotion. The whole environment in every living breathing sense has been poisoned, sterilised and is occupied and engorged with an overwhelming resignation to death barely boundaried off from life itself.Little wonder that Stalin, a voracious reader and autodidact and self appointed literary critic marked furiously in his red crayon by the margin of one of Platonov's novels 'scum!'Chandler has given wonderful food for thought in his appendices about the language and imagery, the sense and significance of these characters. More powerfully than many historical references this novel in a short space, brings to life, in its language in particular, the abasement of ideals that ring hollow in the husks of men.

Andrey Platonov is without question the greatest writer of the twentieth century, and this is his finest work. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson have produced a truly magnificent translation, capturing with subtlety and grace the dense and complex distortions of Soviet speech which permeate the novel. Robert Chandler is probably the finest active translator of Russian literature into English, and Olga Meerson is an outstanding scholar in that field. Together, they have produced wonderfully illuminating notes and a substantial afterword to this sublime masterwork. Careful discussion of the novel's historical and theoretical context is included, with particular strength in the treatment of Dostoevskian overtones and Orthodox allusions (Meerson has also written an excellent article on these themes and the translation in the journal Ulbandus, the Slavic Review of Columbia University, available on JSTOR). A marvellous appendix contains stunningly powerful passages deleted by Platonov at a late stage. I can commend no volume of modern fiction more highly.

Stunning marvelous book! And even after reading it twice it is still uncategorizable.