Foundation Pit

Translated from the Russian by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson With notes and an afterword by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson

In Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, a team of workers has been given the job of digging the foundation of an immense edifice, a palatial home for the perfect future that, they are convinced, is at hand. But the harder the team works, the deeper they dig, the more things go wrong, and it becomes clear that what is being dug is not a foundation but an immense grave.

The Foundation Pit is Platonov’s most overtly political book, written in direct response to the staggering brutalities of Stalin’s collectivization of Russian agriculture. It is also a literary masterpiece. Seeking to evoke unspeakable realities, Platonov deforms and transforms language in pages that echo both with the alienating doublespeak of power and the stark simplicity of prayer.

This English translation is the first and only one to be based on the definitive edition published by Pushkin House in Moscow. It includes extensive notes and, in an appendix, several striking passages deleted by Platonov. Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson’s afterword discusses the historical context and style of Platonov’s most haunted and troubling work.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In April 1929, at the 16th Party Congress, the governing elite of the Soviet Union rubber-stamped the details of one of the most dramatic economic reform initiatives undertaken in the 20th century. The Five-Year Plan -- deemed, in a fit of dubious strutting, to have been completed ahead of schedule, at the close of 1932 -- mutated the USSR. from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Under the auspices of the plan, Total Collectivization was actualized, and once-privately held farms were seized by the state. Written during this period, which heralded the arrival of full-blown Stalinism, Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit critiques the forces that were set in motion to billow patriotic sentiment and corrode the nation's moral center.

Andrey Platonov (1899—1951) was born in a village near the Russian town of Voronezh. He began to publish poems and stories in the 1920s and worked as a land reclamation expert in central Russia, where he was a witness to the ravages of the Great Famine. In the 1930s Platonov fell into disfavor with the Soviet government and his writing disappeared from sight. NYRB Classics published a new translation of Soul and Other Stories in 2007.

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Robert Chandler has translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire and is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida. His translations from Russian include Pushkin's Dubrovsky and The Captain’s Daughter, Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes in the UK and the US. His Alexander Pushkin is published by Hesperus in their series of ‘Brief Lives’. He teaches part time at Queen Mary, University of London.

Elizabeth Chandler is a co-translator of several volumes of Platonov and of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter.

Olga Meerson teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of Dostoevsky’s Taboos (in English) and Platonov's Poetic of Re-Familiarization (in Russian). She is a co-translator of Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, which, in 2004, was awarded the AATSEEL prize for "best translation from a Slavonic language".