The Foundation Pit
Ratings7
Average rating3.6
15
Ratings7
Average rating3.6
Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.
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Platonov was a utopian communist until he was expelled from the party in 1926. His literature reflects his growing doubts of the human cost of the communist experiment. But also Russian history generally - the epifan locks (about the tremendous human cost of Peter the Great's canal building projects in St Petersburg) Chevenguer, and The Foundation Pit, a nightmare vision of collectivisation , where the “foundation pit” of a huge communal home turns out to be a monumental grave for all of humanity.
