The Foundation Pit

A dreamy young man--a "starets" of sorts--who was fired for "thinking" on the job, stumbles into a bleak steppe town and gets new work building a foundation pit for a communal housing complex. The jobsite is peopled with men literally pounded down to sinew and reflex--each man mirroring a trait/reflexive reaction to oppression. Two of these men loved the same woman in a distant, poignant past, and she had a child--a girl--whom the men take in. This is the scene--the frozen pit, the girl parroting revolutionary insults, the men drifting through a Beckett-like existance. But it's so much more. Andrei Platonov's masterpiece is nothing less than a trial of a Soviet system found wanting not for lack of direction, but for its inevitable direction: down into the pit along with human dignity, emotion--even purpose. Platonov's tale is laden with symbolism and imagery, as befits what can only be called a Magical Realist style. His language leaps off the page, even in translation. The end will tear you apart. You'll reread to try to better follow the thread which, either purposefully or through Russian censorship, often seems disjointed. And you'll reconfirm Patonov's love of truth. He wrote elsewhere, "The highest expression of the people's drama is their battle with the foe for existence." The Child in "The Foundation Pit"--canny, feral, victim and victimizer yet still a wide-eyed innocent representing the "people" the Soviet leadership claimed to love--is the finest image created by a Soviet dissident writer, and one of the most haunting battlers for existence in literature. I wish more people here in America would read Platonov. He was a genius.

If you believe that Mr Heller's CATCH 22 is the great American novel of WW2 in which the US military is depicted inter alia as another US enterprise and where the war itself is a black comedy of stumblings, errors, blunders, lies, and human folly writ large, then you will be similarly entranced by Andrey Platonov's FOUNDATION PIT. The latter manages to find comedy in possibly the bleakest circumstances of any political system in the 20th century - a considerable feat but which gives the book a power that exceeds that of say Solzehnitzin's more elaborate, more realistic efforts. Platonov writes - people had no wish to stay inside their huts - where they were at the mercy of their thoughts and feelings - so they walked about wherever there was some open space, trying never to lose sight of one another; at the same time they listened intently for some distant sound to ring out through the damp air and bring them comfort in the difficult spot they were in-page 92. Such writing makes one ponder not just existence under Stalin, but one's existence period, and before we in the first world feel too smug, we might consider the proliferation of medication to the very young to counter their anxiety, the almost insatiable lust to consume products, the laughable search for happiness amongst plenty etc etc. as THE FOUNDATION PIT has a universal reference, not just to the former Soviet system. We might ponder that it is the case that there are now two million prisoners in the land of the free and home of the brave, more prisoners than have ever been held at one time in any country in history. In THE FOUNDATION PIT, a bear serves as a most efficient and effective hammerer for a blacksmith and a little girl offers hope but doesn't survive. It is a comic novel, but it is black, black comedy indeed, one that the gods might have conceived.

Words fail me in praising this. Simply put, it is one of the most over-looked, classic texts of the 20th C. Platonov writes in a style that combines a dreamy, surreal sensibility of the world with a hard, trenchant, unflinching look at the characters who inhabit it. My copy of this is dog-eared, full of notes and underlines- aspiring writers take note- Platonov is a writer who is to be studied, as much for his subtlety and lyrical elegance as his tough-skinned presentation of ruined lives; people trying to craft some order and peace from a world, and largely doomed to fail. I'm being a bit too romantic, too hyperbolic. I probably shouldn't have attempted this. But I want to put my two cents in as concerns this work, because I love it. It is a marvelous book.

This is one of those novels you will return to, repeatedly, like a cure. I can't think of any other work that so profoundly illuminates man's alienation- from self, from others, from nature, from meaning. Every thinking, waking person should own this.

Soviet Russia during the 30's. Bloody Stalin's attrocities. To some people the period represented the joy of order, triumph of collective spirit and the blossom of ideas of Communism. To others it was the time of sleeples nights, spent in overwhelming fear for one's wellbeing, horrors of torture chambers, labor camps and death. Platonov's Foundation Pit is a book about building Communism, as an ennormous sacral machine that feeds on its own creators and demands bloody sacrifices daily. F.P. is definitely an abstract, utopian representation of the period, but the essense (and horror) of it is that the events described, no matter how grotesque and unlikely, very well might have taken place. Is the Foundation Pit the ultimate base for the future paradise on Earth where the children of the Soviet State will thrive for the Party ideals or is it the vast grave for the humanity as we know it? Descend at your own risk, and decide for yourself