The Foundation Pit. Cet article n’est pas disponible.The Foundation Pit

Platonov's brilliant nightmarish novel describes the lives of a group of industrial workers who, in digging out the foundation pit for a huge commercial apartment block, really believe they are laying the foundations for the radiant future. Then some of them are ordered to kickstart 'collectivisation' (collective ownership of farming land) in a village of reluctant peasants, and what had begun in optimism quickly turns to hallucination and murder. Platonov shows his understanding of the dehumanising effects of Soviet jargon, shows how collectivisation led to the starvation of whole villages and the exile of whole populations and he succeeds in taking back control of language to serve vital purposes of communication and freedom.

Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1899-1951), the son of a railway worker, was born near Voronezh. He fought in the Red Army during the Civil War, and then became an electrical engineer and land-reclamation specialist. From 1918 he published articles, verse and essays, passing from the optimism of the pamphlet Electrification (1921), through a science-fiction trilogy, to the stories that began to appear from 1916 onwards in the Moscow journals. His talent was recognised early on by Maxim Gorky, but after initial success his stories were strongly criticised - Stalin is reputed to have written 'scum' in the margin of the story 'For Future Use' (1931). During the Great Patriotic War (1941-5) Platonov worked as a war correspondent and once more began to recieve official recognition. However, like Anna Akhmatova, he came under attack again after the war. He died of consumption caught from his teenage son whom he had nursed on his return from the Gulag in 1946. Platonov's major novels The Foundation Pit and Chevengur remained unpublished in Russia until the late 1980s. When the KGB's 'literary archive' was partially opened in the early 1990s the draft of a previously unknown Platonov work, The Technical Novel, was discoverd in his file.