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, one written in direct response to the staggering brutalities of Stalinist collectivization. It is also a literary masterpiece. Like Kafka—perhaps the only twentieth-century writer to whom he can be usefully compared—Platonov finds a new way of writing, a new approach to language that recasts the terrifying realities of modernity in a deeply disturbing, yet strangely spiritual light.
Robert Chandler’s new translation of The Foundation Pit is the first to reflect the recent definitive text of the work as established by Pushkin House in Moscow. For the first time, readers of English have full access to one of the major works of modern Russian literature.
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