Onwards and Downwards

"Now you've become like me. I'm nothing too." On Andrey Platonov's "The Foundation Pit"

Thanks to founding member ‘Hannibal Lecteur’ for asking me to read this one. You too can ask for reviews by becoming a paid subscriber!

The truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction, and yet the truth of life under a totalitarian regime is often read as surreality or allegory. Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, written in the early 1930s and released posthumously, has all the hallmarks of Bulgakov’s surreal symbolism in Master and Margarita or Orwell’s allegory of the USSR in Animal Farm, but it engages more in truth than anything else: what actually happened in Stalin’s Russia, and also a higher, transcendent artistic truth. While much of the book seems like a making literal of the doublespeak of the USSR – for instance, people being ‘liquidated’ by being pushed out on a raft to sea, or even the actual foundation pit at the center of the novel – just a little bit of context from the endnotes makes clear that these things actually did happen in some way, and Platonov is stacking and compressing the stark facts of Stalinist Soviet life into a short time frame as to heighten their simultaneous absurdity and harsh realness. But besides the accumulative force of these events, Platonov is also interested in suprahistorical truths and questions, on eternal questions that resound throughout literature (Russian or otherwise, though much of the book is in conversation with Dostoevsky), on images that beguile and linger rather than fit into the simple A=B schema of pure allegory.

The novel is split over two settings; the titular foundation pit, which a group of workers labor over to make larger and larger so that a huge housing tower can eventually be built for the local populace, and then the nearby village, where the town is being forcefully converted into a collective farm. Between these two bedrocks of everyday life – lodging and sustenance – Platonov displays the new utopian socialist world struggling mightily to be stillborn.