The Foundation Pit

The utopian project of farm collectivization—and the brutal reality behind its trumpeted slogans—forms the basis for Andrey Platonov's stunning novel, The Foundation Pit, written in late '20s Stalinist Russia but never published in Platonov's lifetime. Told in a style at once poetic and alien, Foundation begins with Voschev, a true innocent, after he's fired from his factory job for being "thoughtful" rather than productive. Voschev soon finds himself at a work site where an enormous foundation is being dug for a future dwelling place for the proletariat. He joins the crew working there but, being perhaps the only character who fully grasps the futility of a life lived under totalitarianism, he remains fundamentally apart from the rest while trying to find a sense of purpose for himself. For the other characters, when their backbreaking work isn't driving them, death is the dream they all look forward to since it represents a kind of political refinement, an erasure of individual identity and the final step toward the realization of a true collective. As the pit reveals its ultimate grim purpose, Platonov's own disillusionment with five-year plans and political programs that treat people like expendable material reaches its fullest expression. In a prose style that shatters and recombines language to startling effect, this new, painstakingly translated edition of The Foundation Pit marks the reemergence of a distinctive, necessary voice in Russian literature.