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Translated from the Russian by Robert & 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.
In April 1929, at the 16th Party Congress, the governing elite of the Soviet Union rubber-stamped the details of one of the most dramatic economic reform initiatives undertaken in the 20th century. The Five-Year Plan -- deemed, in a fit of dubious strutting, to have been completed ahead of schedule, at the close of 1932 -- mutated the USSR. from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Under the auspices of the plan, Total Collectivization was actualized, and once-privately held farms were seized by the state. Written during this period, which heralded the arrival of full-blown Stalinism, Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit critiques the forces that were set in motion to billow patriotic sentiment and corrode the nation's moral center.
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| $99.99 | Digital |
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Steve Vaught
reviewed Foundation Pit on June 15, 2011
Foundation Pit
This might be the one book, fact or fiction, I'd recommend about life in the early days of the Soviet Union.
A group of builders are digging out the foundations for a building. The symbolism is clear. What the building will be, is not ever made clear and may not even be important. The men are struggling, down in the foundations, with the implications of the new regime, which is under construction and which therefore has turned the way of life, the way of thinking and all relationships upside down. The future is deeply uncertain, the new world is under construction. That unknown, unvisualised future is not a source of hope or optimism but rather an ominous, looming presence over the novel.
A stray young girl, a survivor from a bourgeois family, is taken-in and fed by the men. Because she, unlike the working men who reached adulthood under the old regime, is literate she becomes incredibly important as a mouthpiece for the new political values that dominate the press.
An amazingly raw and bleak novel beautiful even in its own way. Highly recommended. Beware though reading it is like grating your own heart with a food grater. The most amazing thing is the language, just as Soviet foreign minister Molotov, while not drinking his cocktail, observed that peace is indivisible, change and struggle are also indivisible - everything is political so the choice of words, the use of language itself is deeply political and like Orwell's New Speak seeks to render certain ideas impossible and others inevitable. Of course it is all allegorical and I understand that certain people don't like allegory, but that's their loss.
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