THE FOUNDATION PIT

by Andrei Platonov
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
SOUL
by Andrei Platonov
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler et al

reviewed by Orlando Figes

In literary terms, perhaps the most precious divided from the collapse of the Soviet
system has been the discovery of previously censored or unknown manuscripts by the
great writer Andrei Platonov. Joseph Brodsky put him on a par with Joyce, Musil and
Kafka. Yet in his own lifetime in Russia he was published only intermittently, and
then usually to be subjected to the fiercest criticism by the literary authorities,
including Stalin, while many of his most important works, such as his long novel
Chevengur (1929) and his masterpiece The Foundation Pit (1930), remained
unpublished until the relaxation of censorship in the glasnost period of the late 1980s.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a steady flow of new
Platonov texts: the unfinished novel Happy Moscow came out in 1991; a complete
version of The Foundation Pit appeared in 1994 (earlier editions had been cut and
bowdlerized); the complete text of the long story 'Dzhan' ('Soul'), which had
published in a censored form in the 1960s, appeared only in 1999.i Letters, notebooks,
unfinished stories, texts that were written by Platonov 'for the drawer', continue to
appear in literary journals in Russia.
It is from these Russian publications that Robert Chandler and his wife
Elizabeth have produced their many translations, including these two latest
publications by the New York Review, in which they have brilliantly dealt with the
challenges of rendering into readable English the extraordinary language of Platonov's
prose. As Brodsky wrote, it is precisely Platonov's use of language that makes him

such a revolutionary writer, and one so dangerous to the Soviet regime, 'because he
attacks the very carrier of millenarian sensibility in Russian society: the language
itself.'ii
1
To get readers immediately acquainted with Platonov's unique style, this is how he
sounds in the opening lines of The Foundation Pit in the Chandlers' translation:
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. His dismissal notice stated that he was being removed from
production on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid
the general tempo of labor [FP 1].
The Foundation Pit is a dystopian work - a distorted mirror image of the Soviet
'production novel' of the 1920s and '30s - but it would be wrong to see Platonov as an
anti-Soviet writer or a satirist. Born in 1899, he came of age with the Revolution of
October 1917, and remained a true believer in the Soviet system, despite his many
doubts about Stalin's murderous policies.
Platonov was the pen-name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov. His father was a
metal worker for the railway in an industrial suburb of Voronezh, a place between the
city and the open countryside, and that tension between the old world of the peasant
village and the new world of Soviet industry features prominently in Platonov's work.
He loved machines, was able to describe them in great technical detail, and, like all
Marxists, he believed in them as the 'locomotives of history.' Platonov associated
Communism with movement. The train passing through a rural wilderness - the sound
of a radio in the engine room or the image of its newspaper-reading passengers
offering a glimpse of the future to some lonely peasant by the railway track - is a
recurring symbol in his prose.
During the Civil War (1918-21) Platonov worked on the railways, helping
supply the Red Army. He then served as a rifleman in a Special Detachment that was
probably engaged in the forced requisitioning of grain from the peasantry. As a result
of that requisitoning, over a million peasants in Voronezh and the Volga provinces

died from starvation and its attendant diseases when drought destroyed the harvest of
1921. Platonov was already writing by this stage - he was an active member of the
Union of Proletarian Writers - but he gave it up to work as an engineer, planning and
constructing hydroelectric and peat-fired power stations to help the peasants irrigate
their drought-stricken land. In his autobiographical story 'The Motherland of
Electricity' (1939), published in Soul, he reounts one such episode. The story reflects
Platonov's confidence in the transforming power of technology but also his awareness
of the fragility of the people whose lives it transforms.
For the next three years, Platonov worked as a land reclamation engineer in
Voronezh province. He supervised the digging of 763 ponds and 331 wells, as well as
the draining of 2,400 acres of swampland [FP 155-6]. After a brief spell in Tambov,
he gave up land reclamation work and returned to Moscow to become a full-time
writer, winning the approval of Maxim Gorky for his first collection of stories, The
Epifan Locks (1927). In these, and even more in Chevengur, we feel Platonov's
growing doubts about the ability of the great utopian projects of the Soviet system to
transform nature (including human nature) without first destroying it - doubts that
would lead to his intellectual break with the Stalinist regime in The Foundation Pit.
In The Epifan Locks, a timely allegory on Peter the Great's grandiose scheme
to link the Don and Oka rivers with a waterway, thousands of peasant labourers are
killed in building a canal that cannot be used because the supply of water in the
surrounding steppes is too meagre (the White Sea Canal, Stalin's great construction
project using Gulag labour, turned out to be similarly disastrous, with tens of
thousands killed to dig a waterway whose economic use was limited because it was
too shallow for all but small barges and passenger vessels).
In Chevengur, Sasha Dvanov, an orphan from a town struck by the famine,
goes in search of 'true socialism.' On his way he teams up with the quixotic
revolutionary Kopenkin, knight-errant of Rosa Luxemburg, who rides a horse called
'Proletarian Strength.' The two men end up in a remote town called Chevengur, where
they have been told that Communism has arrived. The town is in the hands of a group
of Bolsheviks who have set up their Soviet in a former church. No one knows what
'Communism' is: the collected works of Marx cannot tell them; propaganda posters
cannot picture it; yet everyone believes in it with the fervour of a new religion. The
Soviet leaders have a nave faith in the magical power of the word itself to change the
word. One thinks the planet will become brighter and more visible from the moon

once Communism has arrived. In the belief that it is only necessary to destroy the old
society for the utopia to appear, the Bolsheviks of Chevengur proceed to kill the
bourgeoisie, and then to wipe out the petty-bourgeosie to make sure the job is done,
though all this killing makes them no more certain of the meaning of their goal.
Believing they have reached their utopia, they declare the end of history, abolish
labour, and wait for Communism to provide for them. But it does not. A hungry
winter approaches, and the town is invaded by the Cossacks. Kopenkin is killed in the
battle, and Dvanov rides off to commits suicide.
2
The same bleak disillusionment structures The Foundation Pit. The novel starts with
another wanderer, the thirty-year-old Voshchev, who has been laid off by his factory
because he thinks too much. Voshchev (like Platonov) is a truth-seeker who lives on
the margins of society because he is unable to find a place in it or a meaning for his
existence. 'Stay here,' he tells a fallen leaf, 'and I'll find out what you lived and
perished for. Since no one needs you and you lie about amidst the whole world, then I
shall store and remember you.' As Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson point out in
their 'Afterword,' Voshchev, in effect, is giving Platonov's address to his own
characters, 'all of whom seem equally superfluous in the world' [FP 158].
Voshchev wanders to the edge of town and settles down in 'a warm pit for the
night' [9], only to be woken by a mower, who tells him it's a building site, the
foundation pit for a vast communal home in which all the workers of the town will
live. Voshchev joins the team of workers, and they dig, but no building is ever built.
For Prushevsky, the director of works, what they are building is the socialist dream:
After ten or twenty years, another enginer would construct a tower in the middle
of the world, and the laborers of the entire terrestrial globe would be settled
there for a happy eternity.
For Safronov, a Bolshevik ideologue who speaks in Soviet bureaucratese, the real
building site is the human soul:

And this is why we must throw everyone into the brine of socialism, so that the
hide of capitalism will peel away and the heart will attend to the heat of life
around the blazing bonfire of the class strruggle and enthusiasm will originate!
For Zhachev, a legless veteran of the Civil War, all that really matters is the 'class
struggle' involved in the digging of the pit - a hole in which to bury all the 'parasites'
of the old society.
One day, a peasant arrives at the site looking for coffins that had been stored
there to be given back to his village. Voshchev follows the peasant and his train of
coffins and finds a village that is being turned into a collective farm - a nationwide
process of forced collectivization that involved what Stalin termed the 'liquidation of
the kulaks as a class' and the expropriation of all their property in a murderous
campaign, a social holocaust, in which 10 million 'kulaks' (the so-called 'rich' or
'capitalist peasants') and their families were expelled from their homes and sent to
labour camps or remote Siberian penal settlements, where many of them died,
between 1929 and 1932. The rest of The Foundation Pit takes place in this cauldron
of class hatred and violence unleashed by the Bolsheviks against the peasantry.
Unlike other writers, who were shown model collective farms on trips
arranged by Stalin's political police, Platonov knew what was being done in the name
of collectivization. He was sent by the Commissariat of Agriculture to report on the
new collective farms. His notebooks leave no doubt that what he saw shook him to
the core. This is what he wrote on a journey to the Volga and northern Caucasus in
August 1931:
State Farm no. 22 'The Swineherd.' Building work - 25% of the plan has been
carried out. There are no nails, iron, timber.milkmaids have been running
away, men have been sent after them on horseback and the women have been
forced to work. This has led to cases of suicideLoss of livestock - 89-90%
[156].
The peasants slaughtered their own livestock to prevent them being confiscated by the
Soviet authorities for the collective farms.
These journeys served as the inspiration for a whole series of works by
Platonov devoted to the themes of collectiviation and the terror-famine of 1932-33.

None was published in Platonov's lifetime except 'For Future Use' (1931) - a story
heavily criticized by Stalin as a 'kulak chronicle' [177]. Like The Foundation Pit, all
these stories have an unreal air, though according to Chandler and Meerson, referring
to the unpublished work of the Russian literary scholar, Natalya Duzhina, they
'contain barely an incident or passage of dialogue that does not directly relate to some
real event or publication from these years' [157].
Perhaps this surreal atmosphere was necessary to write about events so terrible
'as to be beyond the comprehension of anyone except a madman,' as Robert Chandler
has eloquently commented elsewhere.iii As Boris Pasternak recalls of his own visists
to the new collective farms to collect material for a book:
Words do not have the power to express what I saw. It was such an inhuman,
unimaginable calamity, such a terrible disaster that it became - if one can say
such a thing - abstract and beyond rational comprehension.iv
But Platonov's surrealism is also integral to his attack on the 'millenarian
sensibility' at the core of this violence. By infusing his prose and the discourse of his
characters with the linguistic deformations and abstractions of official Sovietspeak,
Platonov creates a fantastic world where words are alienated from reality, where
abstract slogans like 'the liquidation of the kulaks as a class' have a terrifying power to
summon all those Safronovs and Zhachevs who have taught themselves to think and
speak in these official terms to a war against 'kulaks'. The destructive power of these
slogans lies precisely in the fact that they are abstract: they do not talk of 'kulaks' as
'people' and thus relieve their executioners of the debilitating moral burden of
thinking of their victims as individual human beings. In the Soviet Union there were
millions of Safronovs and Zhachevs in real life.
Because of this complex interplay with the changing Russian language of the
early Soviet years, The Foundation Pit is a minefield for the translator. In his
Introduction to The Portable Platonov, a compilation of extracts from his works,
Robert Chandler writes:
The ideal translator of Platonov would be perfectly bilingual and have an
encylopedic knowledge of Stalin's Russia. He would be able to detect deeply
buried allusions not only to the classics of Russian and European literature, but

also to speeches by Stalin, to articles by such varied figures as Bertrand Russell

and Lunacharsky (the first Bolshevik commissar for Education), to copies of
Pravda from the thirties and to long-forgotten minor works of Socialist
Realism. He would be a gifted and subtle punster. Most important of all, his ear
for English speech-patterns would be so perfect that he could maintain the
illusion of a speaking voice, or voices, even while the narrator or the individual
characters are using extraordinary language or expressing extraordinary
thoughts.
The Chandlers do not pass on all these tests (no one could) and there are places
in their translations where the subtle intonations and rhythms of the Russian are
inevitably lost, but the complex allusions and borrowings are explained in the
scholarly footnotes, and overall it is hard to see how we could get a better English
version of Platonov's prose - nor one more likely to win him the readers he deserves.
This is what his complex prose sounds like in one of the most poetic and haunting
moments of The Foundation Pit, when the legless Zhachev, having witnessed the
expulsion of the 'kulaks', watches as they sail downriver in a raft towards the open
sea:
Liquidating the kulaks into the distance brought Zhachev no calm; he even felt
worse, though it was not clear why. For a long time he observed how the raft
floated systematically down the snowy flowing river and the evening wind
ruffled the dark dead water pouring, amid chilled farmlands, into its own remote
abyss - and in his heart it was getting melancholy and boring. Socialism, after
all, had no need for a stratum of sad freaks, and he too would soon be liquidated
into the distance silence.
The kulak class on the raft was all looking in one direction - at Zhachev; these
people wanted to take note of their birthplace forever, together with the last
happy man there.
By then the kulak river transport had begun to disappear around a bend, behind
the bushes on the bank, and Zhachev was losing the appearance of the class
enemy.
"Fa-are we-ell, parasites!" Zhachev shouted down the river.
"Far-are we-ell!" responded the kulaks sailing off to the sea [115-16].

3
From the middle of the 1930s there was a change in Platonov's prose. There were no
more great, experimental works in the mould of Chevengur or The Foundation Pit.
Under pressure from the literary authorities, Platonov began to write in a more
conventional style, securing for himself a place on the fringes of the Socialist Realist
mainstream, where he might get his work published. Many of his stories in this
period, beginning with 'Soul' in 1935, have a lyrical and sometimes even sentimental
quality. There are beautiful descriptions of nature, landscapes, plants and animals, and
stories based on family and romantic relationships.
It would be misleading to represent this return to the classical tradition as an
artistic compromise, though no doubt Platonov wanted sincerely to become accepted
as a 'Soviet writer' and even wrote to Gorky in 1933 to ask how he could overcome
the ban on the publication of his work after Stalin's criticisms of 'For Future Use.'
Platonov's change of theme, his decision to write more simply, in more human terms
and with more hope, was rather his attempt to find a way out of the abyss of The
Foundation Pit. The recurring theme in all these later stories is the capacity of human
beings to save themselves through love and comradeship.
'Soul' (Dzhan) has its origins in a trip Platonov made with a brigade of writers
to Central Asia in 1934. The visit was arranged by Gorky with the aim of publishing a
collective work to celebrate ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan. Platonov had applied to
join the notorious Writers' Brigade established by Gorky and sent by the political
police to report on the building of the White Sea Canal in 1933, but his application
was turned down, so his inclusion on this trip was a turning point for him.
The plot of 'Soul' fits into the mould of the Socialist Realist literature of the
Stalinist era: an economist called Nazar Chagataev is sent from Moscow to his
birthplace in the Amu-Darya basin to save his people - a lost nomadic tribe in the
desert. But the real subject of the story is the fragility of this people's ancient way of
life - a culture that was destined to be left behind by the 'locomotive of history.'
Towards the end of the story, when the tribe has broken up to work in Russian towns
and 'wherever there was money to be earned,' Chagataev leaves for Moscow with a
little girl, whom he plans to educate. On their way, they stop in the foothills of the
Ust-Yurt mountains, where he asks an old Turkmen which tribe he is from:

"We're Dzhan", replied the old man, and it emerged from his words that every
little tribe, every family and chance group of gradually dying people living in
the empty places of the desert, the Amu-Darya and the Ust-Yurt, called
themselves by the same name: Dzhan. It was their shared name, given to them
long ago by the rich beys, because dzhan means soul and these poor, dying men
had nothing they could call their own but their souls, that is the ability to feel
and suffer [141].
Platonov's stories speak for the forgotten poor, railway workers, peasants,
uprooted soldiers, nearly all of them weak or broken people with nothing but their
soul and perhaps a family to call their own, and all living on the edge of Stalinist
society.
In 1938, Platonov's fifteen-year-old son was arrested on trumped-up charges of
belonging to a student terrorist organization and sent to the Gulag. He returned in
1942, already dying from tuberculosis, from which he died in January 1943.
Platonov's grief is felt on every page of these stories, nowhere more so than in 'The
Cow' (1938 or 1939), where the dumb animal stands for every grieving mother in the
Soviet Union, a country where people did not speak about the missing and the dead:
The cow was not eating anything now; she was breathing slowly and silently,
and a heavy, difficult grief languished inside her, one that could have no end
and could only grow because, unlike a human being, she was unable to allay
this grief inside her with words, consciousness, a friend or any other
distractionshe only needed one thing - her son, the calf - and nothing could
replace him: neither a human being, nor grass, nor the sun [255].
In one of his last and finest stories, 'The Return' (1946), Platonov leaves us
with a moving reminder that the love of children can heal anything. A soldier called
Ivanov returns from the war to find that life has moved on without him. He feels
excluded from his own family, betrayed by his wife, and supplanted by his boy, who
has taken on the responsibility for the running of the household and the caring of his
small sister. The soldier leaves, intending to find a girl he had met and flirted with on

his way home. But as his train pulls away from the station, he sees two children
running after it, and recognizes that they are his own.
Ivanov threw his kit bag out of the carriage onto the ground, and then climbed
down to the bottom of the step and got off the train, onto the sandy path along
which the children were running after him [308].
'The Return' was fiercely criticized. It lacked the optimistic tone that was
obligatory in all art forms following the Soviet victory of 1945. Platonov was unable
to publish any more work during his lifetime. He spent his final years in poverty,
living with his wife and five dependents in a two-room flat belonging to the Writers'
Union in Moscow, allowed only occasional ghost-written work, such as editing fairy
tales for children. The tuberculosis he had contracted from his son would not let him
work much in any case. He died from it in 1951.

Andrei Platonov, Proza (Moscow: Slovo, 1999).

Joseph Brodsky, 'Catastrophes in the Air,' in Less Than One: Selected Essays
(London: Viking, 1986), p. 283.
iii
Robert Chandler, 'Introduction,' in Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit,
translated by Robert Chandler and Geoffrey Smith (London: Harvill, 1996), p. xi.
iv
Cited in Chandler, 'Introduction.'
ii