Andrei Platonov is one of the giants of Russian literature, a writer from the revolutionary period who passionately believed in communist ideals but was critical of party leadership, and whose work was suppressed. Between 1918 to 1921 as a young man from the city of Voronezh in Central Russia he published poetry and essays in venues like Red Countryside and Smithy, a union magazine for metal-workers. (Amazing publication titles, from the modern perspective.) He achieved much local success and was a director of the Voronezh Union of Proletarian Writers in 1920. However, after living through the famine of 1921, in which the political disturbances of early Bolshevik Russia combined with a severe drought killed six million people, Platonov said that he “could no longer be occupied with a contemplative activity like literature,” and applied his technical abilities to infrastructure, spending the next several years on building dams, draining ponds and building a hydroelectric plant.
Kotlovan, or The Foundation Pit was published only in part in 1931 and is Platonov’s story of the de-kulakization of 1929, when Stalin ordered millions of prosperous peasants to be murdered or exiled to facilitate the formation of collective farms. According to the Afterword of my NYRB edition of The Foundation Pit, Platonov and Vassily Grossman were the only two contemporary writers to write about the purge, and “Platonov’s account is firsthand. No other Soviet writer of his generation had a better understanding of the life of the peasantry in the 1920s.”
The Foundation Pit‘s characters represent the different types playing their part in the de-kulakization of a village near a generic small town, where workers are building a utopian housing project. There’s Chiklin, a strong, hard-working proletarian man who represents the communist ideal; Prushevsky, a technocrat with no enthusiasm for how things are turning out; Kozlov, a weak, spiteful man using the new order to cause trouble; Zhachev, who believes in the new government’s ideals at the same time as he exploits them for personal gain; Nastya, a little girl who is the dream of the communist future; and finally Voshchev, a thoughtful worker-drifter trying to understand the meaning of what he sees around him, who probably represents the author.
A “foundation pit” could be the beginning of a great new structure or it could be a journey down into hell, a movement in exactly the wrong direction, and it’s fairly clear from the beginning that the latter is the meaning Platonov wishes to emphasize. The ecstatic, strange, wonderful part for the contemporary reader is that he chooses to do that primarily through the manipulation of language. His Russian is half-technical, half-broken, as if it’s being spoken by an alien, or as if it’s deliberately hiding meaning in the crevasses of syntax, where the censors could not follow.
Here’s the first paragraph:
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.
Platnov could say On his thirtieth birthday which is what “the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life” means. He could use worked for “obtained the means for his own existence.” There’s no need to say that the strength is “in him”. A person being fired for “thoughtfulness,” a quality that’s supposed to be good, is odd and is put forth in a slightly mixed construction with “tempo.” Can a person even be thoughtful “amid” a tempo? The paragraph is bewildering, carefully planned, and brilliantly introduces Platonov’s main theme of progress or movement (that tempo of labor) that is senseless or cancelled out.
At first I thought the book was satire. Voshchev, drinking in a depressing bar after his dismissal, goes over to the window “to take note of the beginning of night,” hears a brass band “pining; getting nowhere” and then sits:
“…down by the window, in order to observe the tender darkness of night, listen to various sad sounds, and feel the torment of a heart surrounded by hard and stony bones.”
That bit about the heart is purplish… until you know that themes of hearts surrounded by bones—i.e., life already gripped by death—run throughout the book. A clenched heart jumps into a man’s “cramped” throat before he dies. A man is hit in the heart and dies with a cracking of bones. The language seems like it might be purple until you remember that Platonov was writing from a front-row seat at a mass-murder.
And then all claim to satire falls away. Here’s a character sleeping:
Kozlov was barefoot and sleeping with his mouth open; his throat was gurgling as if the air of breath were passing through dark heavy blood; and out of his half-open, pale eyes were emerging occasional tears—from a dream or some unknown yearning.
It’s creepy, terrible, dehumanized, and not at all funny.
Here’s another one, for my collection of disturbing passages about horses:
“Are you alive, dear breadwinner?”
The horse was dozing in her stall, having lowered her sensitive head forever; one of her eyes was feebly closed, but she did not have enough strength for the other and so it was left looking into the dark. The shed had grown cold without equine breath and snow had begun to fall inside, settling on the mare’s head and not melting. Her master blew out his match, embraced the horse’s neck, and stood there in his orphanhood, smelling in memory the mare’s sweat as when they were ploughing.
“So you’ve died have you? Well don’t worry—soon I’ll croak too. It’ll be quiet for us.”
Not seeing the man, a dog came into the shed and sniffed at the horse’s hind leg. It then growled and sank its teeth into her flesh, and tore itself out some beef. The horse’s two eyes shone white in the darkness—she was now looking through them both—and she moved her legs a step forward, not yet forgetting to live because of the pain.
“Maybe you’ll enter the collective farm? Go ahead then, but I’ll wait,” said the master of the yard.
This is a great passage for its gothic horror, and also a relevant one to the collectivization process, since the peasants en masse killed and ate their animals rather than let them be collectivized. In this case, the horse seems to have died on its own, but even that natural process has been disturbed—disturbance of natural processes is another major theme of the work, along with displacement of ideas and qualities into nature. The horse comes to life again, if only to feel pain.
The foundation pit gets deeper. Construction does not progress. The kulaks are put onto a raft in the winter and sent to their deaths. Eventually the poor souls who were taken onto the collective farm go to the foundation pit and dig as if they are digging their own grave, a reading which the odd, wonderful syntax equally allows for:
The collective farm was following him and, without stopping, was digging the earth; all the poor and middle peasants [i.e. those not killed as kulaks] were working with such zeal of life as if they were seeking to save themselves forever in the abyss of the foundation pit.
“Save themselves forever” could mean salvation, or it could mean storage for a corpse. I think Platonov means the latter.
On a last weird note, there’s a Platonov festival in Voronezh in the summers that looks kind of cool.
An Anthology of Clouds 
This book sounds so intense and interesting! I got chills just reading your review. I always think I should read more Russian literature – thank you for sharing!
This book sounds both difficult to read both for the emotions conveyed and the sentence structure. Your first quote that you analyzed would have driven me insane. Based on your last review, I’m starting to think that Russian authors have a way of writing that is not meant to be easy.
Also, I keep puzzling over the author bio you provided. He quit writing because it was too much in head space and not enough in doing to help others. I know many folks who would argue that writing IS doing something for others…but then my brain immediately connects that idea to the current protests that Americans do something about guns, not just pray, because praying is not doing. It’s an interesting thing to think about! I’ll toss it around in my head more tonight during my swim class.
Trurly