The Foundation Pit

The Foundation Pit

Summary

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT AND ELIZABETH CHANDLER AND OLGA MEERSON

Platonov's dystopian novel describes the lives of a group of Soviet workers who believe they are laying the foundations for a radiant future. As they work harder and dig deeper, their optimism turns to violence and it becomes clear that what is being dug is not a foundation pit but an immense grave.

This new translation, by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, is based on the definitive edition recently published by Pushkin House in Leningrad. All previous translations were done from a seriously bowdlerized text. Robert Chandler is also the translator of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. The American scholar Olga Meerson has written extensively on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Platonov and many other Russian authors.

Reviews

  • Andrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union. Born in 1899, one of a railway worker's 10 children, he was an engineer, a party member and a model proletarian writer before doubts about Communism, and his literary imagination, landed him in trouble with Stalin. His work stopped being published in the early 1930s and only resurfaced 40 years after his death in 1951...The Foundation Pit will stand out as his masterpiece
    Independent

About the author

Andrey Platonov

Andrey Platonovich Platonov (1899-1951) began publishing poems and articles in 1918, while studying engineering. Between 1927 and 1932 he wrote his most politically controversial works, some of them first published in Russian only in the 1990s. After reading his story 'For Future Use', Stalin referred to Platonov as 'an agent of our enemies'. From September 1942, after being recommended to the chief editor of Red Star by his friend Vasily Grossman, Platonov worked as a war correspondent. He died in 1951, of tuberculosis caught from his son, who had spent three years in the Gulag. Happy Moscow, one of his finest novels, was first published in Russia only in 1991; letters, notebook entries and unfinished stories continue to appear.
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