The Foundation Fit Is One of These “Underground'' Manu

1833889 Platonov Foundation pit POCKET REMOVE FROM NOT DO CAROS LIBRARY ALLEN MO. -=ORT WAYNE AND / ALLEh PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 00641 6728 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/foundationpitOOplat Much as Herman Melville’s greatness was discovered long after his death, Andrey Platonov's reputation has been growing since the posthumous publication of a small collection of his stories in 1958. Despite the Soviet authorities' refusal to publish his more experimental and critical works, the extensive underground circulation of his manuscripts has established his right to be considered one of the foremost writers in Russian of this century. The Foundation Fit is one of these “underground'' manuscripts. Set in a small town in early post- Revolutionary Russia, it describes a group of workmen and low-level bu- reaucrats engaged in digging the foundation pit for what is to become a grand, central structure to house all the town's inhabitants. But, asks Voschev, the dreamer, “Don't people decrease in their sense of life when buildings in- crease? Man will make a building and unmake himself. W ho will live in it then?” Mirra Ginsburg writes in the Intro- duction: “(He) creates a surrealist landscape— a landscape of myth or nightmare. Every man becomes Everyman, . and the novel assumes a larger than life, almost legendary quality.” And Professor Victor Erlich of Yale comments: “Platonov is an impor- tant and a remarkable writer. His brand of humanism is unique and moving. His prose is deliberately and effectively in- congruous. It takes a translator of Mirra Ginsburg's skill to render this quality into equally effective English.” By Audrey Platonov The Fierce and Beautiful World The Foundation Pit The Foundation Pit Andreu Platonov Translated by Mirra Ginsburg E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC. NEW YORK 1975 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Platonov, Andrei Platonovich, 1899-1951. The foundation pit. Translation of Kotlovan. I. Title. PZ3.P6953F06 [PG3476.P543] 891.7'3'42 73-122788 Copyright © 1968 by Alex Flegon English translation Copyright © 1975 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast. Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, Toronto and Vancouver ISBN: 0-525-10775-4 Designed by Dorothea von Elbe 183388 Translator’s Introduction “Beauty,” wrote Platonov, “does not exist separately, by itself. It is the property of all . beauty is all days, and all things.” He also wrote, “We grow out of the earth, out of all its impurities, and everything that is on earth is also in us.” Andrey Platonov, a unique and extraordinary writer, came into Russian literature in the 1920s, at a time when it abounded in unique and extraordinary talents. Like the others in that brilliant array—Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Babel, Pilnyak, Olesha, Zoshchenko, all of them silenced or de- stroyed at the height of their powers—he became a victim of his time, one more example of the vicissitudes of literature under dictatorship. Yet his fate, like his talent and his origins, followed a pattern of its own. Less spectacular than the others, less flashing, more muted, he was also less European, less worldly, more Rus- sian. His origins were not in a cosmopolitan and intellec- tual middle-class milieu, but in a world of urban working people, of artisans just recently emerged from the peas- antry. The locale of most of his stories was his native province of Voronezh, in the black earth belt some two hundred miles south of Moscow, where he was born in 1899, the eldest son of a railway mechanic. At the age of fifteen, Platonov went to work to help his father support what was by then a family of ten. He worked in many places at many trades. Nevertheless, after the revolution and service in the Red Army, he continued his schooling and graduated in 1924 from the Voronezh Polytechnical Institute with a de- gree in electrical engineering. From 1923 to 1926 he worked in the field of electrification and land reclamation in various provinces in central Russia. Here he became thoroughly familiar with the devastated postrevolutionary village and the peasants—their life, their attitudes, their speech. Throughout these years he contributed poems, stories, and articles to a number of local newspapers. In 1927 he went to Moscow and devoted himself entirely to literary work. A late arrival, he missed much of the brilliant and varied flowering of early Soviet literature. He came in time to witness the beginning of its ruthless extermina- tion. The RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writ- ers) and its notorious leader Leopold Averbakh were just about to be entrusted with the destruction of everything original and alive, and very soon Platonov himself became their target. For a short time, Platonov joined the Pereval group, which consisted of peasant and working class writers, as well as fellow travelers, and advocated service to the revolution while preserving the earlier cultural and literary values and creative freedom. On the whole, however, he never became “acculturated” in the literary world of the capital, but remained a solitary figure, going his own way —in his subject matter, his characters, his language, his style, his own brand of irony, his own humor, and his own sadness. His work did not fit into any “mainstream.” And, al- though he was a Communist, his communism was closer to early Christianity than to the brutal state religion that was being forcibly imposed on Russia. Under attack almost from the very first, he was accused of a bevy of sins: pessimism, anarchism, nihilism, anti- vi realism, symbolism, petty-bourgeois and kulak psychology, failure to understand the larger purposes of Communist construction which justified the sacrifice of the individual, hostile mockery of the revolution, and even Trotskyist deviations. Barred from book publication for long periods, he was reduced to virtual non-being as a writer through most of his lifetime, earning a bare living as a book reviewer writing under several pen names. The stretches of enforced silence as an artist were punctuated by the occasional appearance of a story in a magazine or a slender collection, usually followed by renewed outbursts from party critics. Between 1929 and 1943, only one small collection appeared. Indeed, except for the periods when he was subject to in- tense vilification, his name and his work were almost un- known to Russian readers. Despite the hostile atmosphere, Platonov continued writing in his own manner, which obstinately refused to fit into the requisite forms and requisite moods. He remained a Communist, but he held up his early Communist vision —the vision expressed in the simplest terms by many of his characters—to the realities of the time, and clearly found them wanting. The satirical vein in his writing manifested itself most strongly in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the story “Doubting Makar,” published in 1929 in the magazine Oktyabr Platonov’s hero falls asleep, “and his , suffering passed into a dream: in the dream he saw a mountain or some elevation, and on the mountain stood a man of science . the man stood silently, without seeing the grieving Makar and thinking only about the general scale of things, not about the private Makar. The face of that most learned man was lit by the glow of faraway mass life spreading in the distance beneath him, and his eyes were terrible and dead from being on such a height and looking too far.” The story provoked a vitriolic reply by Averbakh, re- plete with charges of antisocial individualism, anti-collec- Vll — tivism, pseudo-humanism, nihilism, kulak deviations and anarchic hostility to the Soviet state. After the publication of another satire, “Vprok,” in Kras- naya Nov in 1931, Platonov was arrested and expelled for a time from Moscow. In 1934, the Literary Encyclopedia wrote that Platonov showed “the Soviet state apparatus not as a form of the participation of workers and peasants in governing the country, but as a mechanical apparatus of coercion, of the leveling down of the individual. Objectively, Platonov’s story [“Doubting Makar’’ tr.] reinforced the Trotskyist attack on the party and on proletarian dictatorship.’’ The appearance of a small collection, The Potudan River , in 1937, was met with the usual criticism, this time for Platonov’s “obsession with suffering’’ when the country needed “positive and optimistic works.’’ Miraculously, Platonov escaped prosecution during the purges of the 1930s, but in 1938 his only son, a boy of fifteen, was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. All efforts to obtain the boy’s release were unavailing. In 1940 he came home, dying of tuberculosis. Platonov nursed him through his final illness, contracting the disease himself. During World War II, he volunteered to serve as a war correspondent. He reported from various fronts and published a number of stories, dealing chiefly with the war and later issued in two collections. Postwar publication of the warm and tender story “Homecoming” in Novy Mir (1946), which was, incredibly, attacked for “maligning” the Soviet soldier, marked the virtual end of Platonov as a writer.

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