The Foundation Pit

"Platonov’s novel concerns the destruction of a Russian village or town and the digging of a foundation pit for a vast communist housing-block that the reader slowly realises will be the size of, or just will be, the world. The men who dig this hole are myriad: from true communist believers to convicts. And sometimes the convicts are the truest believers. To be clear, many of Platonov’s characters believe in communism, but their belief comes through a misapprehension of communism. To many of them, communism has become, or originally was, a religion: something like an early Christianity, something like a pre-Christian Christianity of Edenic charity and provision. Platonov’s pit-diggers are convinced of the brotherhood of man. In their innocence, they are convinced and so convicted. Many of Platonov’s characters regard communism as this abstract moral principle—a principle of equality. But then each of them—from worker to engineer—defines this equality differently. This, of course, is where the conflict comes in. What is a perfect world? How many simultaneous perfect worlds can there be? In Platonov, this notion of the perfectible is related to, or emerges from, language. Because the perfectible can only exist in language: it can only ever be just a word. What Brodsky said was this: “Woe to the people into whose language Andrei Platonov can be translated”? It was Brodsky’s notion that any language that can bear Platonov’s meanings is already degraded—in other words, it has already been manipulated and used for purposes of political obfuscation."

"Platonov I first encountered when I spent a year in Voronezh in the early 70s. I was on an exchange scholarship there and I had never heard of Platonov but it happens to be the city where he was born and somebody brought me a Soviet published collection of his work. About half his work was published in Soviet times. So, this made an immediate impression on me and I recognised it was something unusual. Back at home I started reading all the works that hadn’t been published in the Soviet Union , the surreal satire and extraordinary wit, and the creativity with language. The language immediately captivated me. The Foundation Pit is the blackest of Platonov’s works. It’s very, very funny indeed but it is very black humour. It was written in the late 1920s, so the background is the collectivisation of agriculture and Stalin’s drive to industrialisation. The plot is a very simple little despairing parable of a group of workers who are digging what is supposed to be the foundation pit for a huge building that will provide a wonderful home for the whole of the local proletariat. Things keep going wrong and it’s decided that they should make the building two or four times bigger than had previously been planned, so they carry on digging a bigger and bigger hole, and this group of workers adopt a little orphaned girl as their mascot. She symbolises the bright new world they are creating. She is the kind of person for whom they are building this building. She actually dies. And she is buried in this pit and, of course, the building is never built. It is just a grave. At the level of plot it’s very black and might seem overly schematic, but there is fantastic wit in the language and dialogue. Yes, I brought back a Russian wife with me. She claims to be the person who first bought me a collection of Platonov’s work. We didn’t stay married very long but we are on good terms. She now lives in New York."