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| The Foundation Pit (European Classics) | 
| Author: Andrey Platonov
Creator: Mirra Ginsburg
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 527469
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 141
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.5
ISBN: 0810111454
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.7342
EAN: 9780810111455
ASIN: 0810111454
Publication Date: June 8, 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
A grim and jagged dystopian novel of the early Soviet Union, The Foundation Pit is a scathing indictment of the brutal and anti-intellectual soviet apparatchiki, their policy of forced collectivization, and the mindlessness of "New Soviet Man" rhetoric.
Product Description
The Foundation Pit portrays a group of workmen and local bureaucrats engaged in digging the foundation pit for what is to become a grand 'general' building where all the town's inhabitants will live happily and 'in silence.'
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 The Beckett of Communist Russia April 18, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Platonov writes with a minimalist style in a stark Russian landscape in the midst of the absolute absurdity of a mindless Communist bureaucracy killing its people to dig a vast foundation pit in the middle of nowhere. The net effect, like the writing of Samuel Beckett, is vulnerable characters searching without hope for meaning, which is absent or unfathomable or beyond their reach. This novel is a moving foray into the theatre of the absurd as the characters deal with the heartbreak and death and the utter absence of opportunity of their everyday lives as peasants. They are merely worked to death by a dehumanizing government machine intent upon killing them with meaningless labor and driven by petty party leaders who demand loyalty despite the overwhelming poverty they perpetuate. The hero, Voschev, is a thinking man who could easily play the role of Vladimir or Estragon in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. "It seems to me all the time that there is something special in the distance, or some splendid unattainable object, and I live in sadness." He lives like the stranger of Camus, without hope, and yet he navigates as best he can. Voschev becomes a collector of rags, the lost remnants of dead souls. "All the poor and middle peasants worked with such zest of life as though they wanted to find salvation for themselves forever in the abyss of the foundation pit." Platonov is a man who knows well the abyss having spent a lifetime futilely trying to publish under a repressive Marxist regime. His heroic efforts to earning his living as a writer, despite censorship and cruel repression, are an inspiration to unread writers of serious literature who suffer the same fate of anonymity as a result of the rampant commercialism of American publishing. Our national culture is diminished because serious writers refusing to pander to the dictates of writing for commercial profit go unread. Those who embrace commercial writing produce work astonishing in its vast, vapid mediocrity. We'll look back on our vast catalogues of best sellers and be compelled to ask ourselves, "As a great nation, was this really the best that we could do for our national literature?" This novel takes its readers to the abyss of the foundation pit and yet somehow, decades after his death, Platonov finds that he has managed to climb out of the pit by virtue of the staunch and dogged and staggering will to write serious literaure, which his own generation suffered never to read. As millions inside and outside Russia have discovered, Platonov is a real writer: he is a writer's writer. I urge you to discover him, too.
A myth, not a satire! February 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The thing that makes this book so astonishing to read and unique in the range of the Russian and world literature of the 20-th Century is that it's not a comic book as many people mention. Platonov used to be a devoted communist and tried to make up a kind of a soviet mythology similar to Bible mythology but with a different moral approach that would be convinient in the country where there were no poor or rich people, everyone was similar. So it would be right to see this book as a struggle to find this mythology, to change the origin of a man as a species and as a soul, the farther Platonov writes the more desperate he becomes, nature breaks down the artificial law of the Soviet ideology and that's where these bleak, hopeless endings of The Foundation Pit and Chevengur come from. If there is anybody comparable to Platonov in his approach it would be Franz Kafka, they both create incredibly funny scenes in their works with no intent to, it comes from the absurdity of the world around them as they see it, their imagination is overwhelming and they can't help it. Platonov is by no means a satire writer as, for example, Bulgakov or Chekhov but that's what makes him an outstanding writer.
Eerie grandeur...the end will kick the breath out of you November 4, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 A scathing classic from Stalinist times April 9, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Andrey Platonov (real name: A.P. Klimentov) is one of the least well-known of the "silver era" of Russian/Soviet writers. This generation, active in roughly the period 1917-1937, is particularly famous for its dystopian, satirical and magical realist criticisms, with such writers as Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Ilf, Paustovsky, etc. etc. However, with this novel, Platonov definitely deserves to take his place beside them, despite never having received the respect due during his life.
"The Foundation Pit" is an extremely cynical novel describing the hollow, opportunistic, brainless and hopeless lives of a group of workers creating the living space of the future, that is, a super-highrise in which all the proletariat will be housed. This project is already obviously impossible and never-ending, but things are only worsened by the fact that none of the people involved have any idea what they are doing or living for.
Written in an very simple and effective style (as one reviewer disappointedly mentioned, do not expect any flights of high-level prose here), Platonov demonstrates the futility of the grand projects of the Stalinist period, as well as the complete impossibility for regular people to make any sense out of the government ideology and propaganda. The book is extremely grim and cynical, and the pointless despair is detailed without any softening or moderation. This may at times make it hard to keep reading, especially when Platonov describes a small nearby farming town's collectivization of agriculture, which really consists of a series of completely arbitrary lethal disasters. Nevertheless, if you like and can handle harsh books, this is a certain must read. Knowing a bit about the background of the period it describes will certainly help with the enjoyment though, as then the blunt tone of the author will come into its own.
Soviet=USA... Bush is the New Saddam...etc read on... April 5, 2007
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
I love reading about the dystopian worlds from the writers of once 'terror-ridden' countries. They all remind me of modern day America. Of course today, in America, it is the best example of a dystopian society and if you read this book (and others like it) with a view to Bush's regime, you see alarming similarities ... of course you need to be politically and socially informed as to the great evil that exists in this country, from Bush's environment and energy policies, to his corporate, clerical fascism; whereby the role of the state is to maintain the corporate hegemony over all aspects of the culture. Genetically modified food in the hands of biotechnology companies is the great evil of the future... keep alert for it... check out doco "The Future of Food."
"Progress is a terrible thing when it is lead by Philistines." Herman Broch
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