The Foundation Pit
코틀로반
A short novel by Andrei Platonov (1930). Workers dig the foundations of a giant "general proletarian house" for all, while the orphan girl who embodies their hope falls ill, dies and is buried in the pit. Set during the First Five-Year Plan and collectivization, it went unpublished in his lifetime and appeared in the USSR only in 1987.
In depth
What is the story?
Thirty-year-old Voshchev is sacked for pathological "pensiveness". He takes up a spade in a neighbouring town with the crew digging the foundations of a "general proletarian house" that will one day hold the whole city's proletariat. He wants to know the meaning of life, and these people seem to know it. They exist "without any surplus of life". The engineer Prushevsky dreams of death, the activist Safronov suspects truth itself of being a class enemy, Kozlov informs on his workmates, and the legless veteran Zhachev lives off them.
They take in an orphan girl, Nastya, who promised her dying bourgeois mother to hide her origins and talks in slogans. The men dote on her, and Chiklin gives her a coffin requisitioned from the next village as a toy chest. She becomes the future for which all this is done.
When winter stops work, Safronov and Kozlov go to a village for "class struggle against the rural stumps of capitalism" and are murdered. Then collectivization begins. In the "General Line" collective farm livestock is pooled, and individual peasants either join or are floated away down the river on a raft. A blacksmith bear, once beaten at a kulak's mill, sniffs out kulaks. Once they are driven off, the poor dance to the radio.
A directive from above brands the local activist a "right opportunist running ahead into the leftist swamp". Crushed, he says he does not care whether Nastya dies, and the strongman Chiklin kills him. Nastya falls ill and dies, and Chiklin buries her in the pit. The peasants who have left the farm are "enrolled in the proletariat" and come to dig. There the story ends, with no house yet.
Why does it read so strangely?
Because of Platonov's prose. His characters speak their hearts in the language of officialdom: they "liquidate" love, "annul" sorrow and go "to the authorities". Joseph Brodsky called him "the first serious surrealist" for this reason, since surrealism here is no aesthetic category but "a form of philosophical frenzy, a product of the psychology of the dead end".
The book is frightening because its author believed in the revolution. Platonov was no emigre but lived in the USSR, and thought socialism would protect the world from fascism. He was among the first Russian thinkers to attack collectivization as inhuman, but out of love. A short note attached to it says as much: "Will our Soviet socialist republic perish like Nastya, or grow into a whole person, a new historical society? Perhaps the author erred... but this error arose only from excessive anxiety for something beloved."
How did it survive?
Unpublished in Platonov's life, it circulated in samizdat, and those who kept copies faced repression. It first appeared in 1969 in Grani (Frankfurt) and Student (London); the 1973 Ardis edition carried Brodsky's preface. In the USSR it appeared in Novy Mir no. 6, 1987, at the height of perestroika.