Customer Reviews

The Foundation Pit (New York Review Books Classics)

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Amazon have an annoying way of jumbling together reviews of different translations. This is intended as a review of the NYRB CLassics edition of THE FOUNDATION PIT. I myself have translated this book twice - in 1994 for The Harvill Press, and in 2009, in collaboration with my wife Elizabeth and the American scholar Olga Meerson, for NYRB Classics. I wanted to retranslate 'The Foundation Pit' for two reasons. First, the original text was never published in Platonov's lifetime, and the first posthumous publications - on which our Harvill translation was based - are now known to have been severely bowdlerized. Our NYRB version is the only English translation of Platonov's definitive text. Second, Platonov is very hard to translate. In the early 1990s I was working in the dark. During the last 15 years, however, I have been regularly attending Platonov seminars and conferences in Moscow and Petersburg. One indication of how deeply many Russian writers and critics admire Platonov is the extent of their generosity to his translators; I now have a large list of people I can turn to for help. Above all, I have the good fortune to have as my closest collaborators - my wife, who shares my love of Platonov - and the brilliant American scholar, Olga Meerson. Olga was brought up in the Soviet Union, she was once a fine violinist, she has a profound knowledge of Russian Orthodoxy, and she has written an excellent book about Platonov. She has deepened my understanding of almost every sentence of 'Soul' and 'The Foundation Pit'. Platonov, by the way, is a wonderful writer. No other work of literature means so much to me that I have wanted to translate it TWICE!

Andrey Platonov is a strange Soviet writer who belonged to no literary school and wrote books and stories, some unpublished during his lifetime, that are unclassifiable and unlike anything else I have ever read. The Foundation Pit is perhaps his masterpiece and deals with very real and very terrible things in the Soviet Union of the late 1920s-1930s, including collectivization and the "elimination of the kulaks (`rich peasants') as a class." The title alludes to the digging of the foundation for a building that will serve as a gigantic Proletarian Home--although by the end the pit has served only as a grave. But what is really striking about this novel is the language in which it is written--a language which sometimes seems to be wrestled up from deep within the narrator or the main characters, especially Voshchev, whom we encounter on the first page:
"On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life, Voshchev was made redundant from the small machine factory where he obtained the means for his own existence."
Add to this the mashing-up (humorous and/or horrific) of Soviet clichés, and yet other strangenesses of style and device: it's as dense as poetry.
Platonov deserves to be better known, and this edition will help. The Chandlers and Meerson have provided an afterword and notes to help orient the reader and tease out the allusions (from Biblical and liturgical subtexts to Soviet speak). And the translation itself has to be one of the most daring attempts to convey an almost intractable text from one language into another.
NYRB has also published Platonov's Soul: And Other Stories--and these are now the editions of choice. Highly recommended.

Russians write the best novels. This strange book is a continuation of that superiority.

It's a novel of ideas, yet the ideas are inextricable from the movement of the story. And its movement is effortless. Shifting points of view, locations, discourses--satire, irony, outrage--: all without, to this beginner's eye, a formal misstep. The author has opened a space for himself that allows him to do whatever he'd like. His authorial credibility is boundless. Two-thirds of the way through the book a bear appears as its now-central character. The reader--this reader!--does not blink.

And the book's ideas are astonishing.

This is one of the most poetic and philosophically compelling evocations of despair that I've ever read. Emphatically recommended. Essential.

This short novel was written in 1930 in response to the collectivization movement. The main character loses his job and wanders to a neighboring town where he joins a crew that is digging a foundation pit for a massive building for the proletariat to live in. Surrounded by an odd group of hapless characters, he soon realizes that the project will never be finished. They are joined by a young girl who spouts revolutionary slogans and reports on counter-revolutionaries.

Half way through the book, he and several other diggers move to a village which still contains peasants who own their own land and even peasants who have servants of their own. They participate in the removal of these owners and the collectivization of the farms in the area. Once the have succeeded in their quest they go back to the pit where the novel ends.

Foundation Pit describes an era that was hidden from those outside the Soviet Union, hidden from many inside that country and remains hidden to most today. It describes the blind and stupid dogmatism of Stalin's efforts, the violence of the reforms that were instituted and the dehumanization that resulted. The world described in this book seems surrealistic, but that is because of the strange language of propaganda that Platonov uses to narrate the tale. Actually, once you finish you realize this is not surrealism, but frightening realism. Platonov worked as an engineer in rural Russia and Ukraine and witnessed much of what he describes. It was much worse that we imagined.

This is a great book, only recently rediscovered. Thanks to NYRB for making it available!

I never expected this book to be so great! The notes and the afterword do a great job of explaining the history in which Andrey Platonov writes. Platonov uses a surrealist writing style to convey the horrors of Stalins collectivization with alot of satire and double meaning throughout. With such great imagery and conveying characters this is a great read especially for those interested in Stalins Russia.

For anyone new to world literature or to Platonov, I suggest first reading _Soul and Other Stories_, also published in the NYRB Classics series. _The Foundation Pit_ is more complex, and it can also be depressing; in other words, in my own reading past I have started but not finished novels which were too hard to read. More specifically, what I mean is that this period in Russian or Soviet history, 1929 to the late `30s--during the consolidation of farm property and industrialization of farm work--was a violent time, and violence against farmers is hard for the (American) reader to understand who doesn't know the events which Andrey Platonov was writing about. The translators make it easier to understand _The Foundation Pit_ with their comprehensive "Afterward", "Further Reading", and "Appendix" at the end of Platonov's novel. I thought I knew what a "kulak" was--a kind of wealthy farmer--but Chandler and Meerson clarify the various types of poor, landless peasants, and poor or rich farmers. But still, don't be surprised if this novel has you heading for an encyclopedia. (After all, even Jane Austen has to be researched to be fully enjoyed.)

In brief, regarding the background history of the novel, the wealthy farmers might have exploited their workers in a master-slave relationship, and Stalin's government believed that property had to be divided as equally as possible, but even backers of the revolution were disgusted by the process of killing farmers just to divide up their land. (While reading this novel, I couldn't help thinking of how what became Canada and the U.S. went from 100 percent Native American ownership to 1 percent. That process of property reallocation can't be done without some systematic government policy including violence--but, perhaps, that's another story.)

Regarding Platonov's style (and the translators'), nearly every sentence is an astonishing combination of absurdist-lyrical or mechanical-lyrical words. I noticed that the key to making a noun absurd is the adjective attached to it: "various inevitable institutions," ". . . we lived cruelly," ". . . issued an oral directive." A "city sweet" seems to be candy. Even "foundation pit" becomes absurd. And, it's almost as though everyone is in a day-camp where they must act the same, and they've been ordered to speak with only certain words: "Get organized! Be enthusiastic!"

From time to time, I felt like this was Samuel Beckett before "Beckett." And yes, the Irish Times called this novel an "absurdist parable." But, Beckett was writing absurdist drama at a time when Europe was basically a stable society (working for a corporation, though, is a kind of collectivization, both rational and absurd). But, for Platonov, without a stable society and with no hope, absurdity is realism.

In the midst of this hopelessly absurd world, Platonov gives us two characters who keep the novel grounded in some future. One is Voshchev. I knew I was going to like this novel when Voshchev was punished for thinking: "Administration says that you stood and thought in the midst of production. What were you thinking about comrade, Voshchev?" (3). And, my favorite character (if that were not an absurdity in this novel) is the construction engineer, Prushevsky. He is able to feel delight, wistfulness, and a lyrical sense of the human soul--all considered bourgeois excesses of individuality. What saves Prushevsky--and anyone in this situation--is the memory of a young woman's face from a chance meeting; "Eternal matter [his engineering work], needing neither movement, nor life, nor extinction, had come to take the place, for Prushevsky, of something forgotten and necessary, like the being of a lost sweetheart" (27).

I highly recommend investigating Russian history; much of it is a harsh reminder of American periods of over-the-top manias, like the HUAC witch hunts and McCarthyism and domestic spying on Americans. I suggest two books reviewed in the February 8, 2008, Times Literary Supplement, _The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia_ by Orlando Figes, and _Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin_ by Jochen Hellbeck.

There is nothing I can add to the earlier reviews except to forewarn you that there is no hint of endnotes in the text itself. You have to search in the back of the text for the endnotes, which are listed by page number. I was more than halfway through the book before I found them. The endnotes are very important to understanding the many implications of the Platonov's unique use of the Russian language and use of Communist cliches. The Afterward is also very important. I've read some of it, and it increased my appreciation of what I've read so far.

An enjoyable read enhanced nicely by the numerous footnotes and other historic perspectives. Gives one a true feel for the times.

I got the product in GREAT shape, just like the description implied. I received it in a good amount of time. SUPER happy with it ;D