The Foundation Pit (New York Review Books Classics) [Andrey Platonov, Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Olga Meerson] on *FREE*. The Foundation Pit portrays a group of workmen and local bureaucrats engaged in digging the foundation pit for what is to become a grand ‘general’ building. Translated from the Russian by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson With notes and an afterword by Robert Chandler and Olga.
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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. 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 fooundation and only one to be based on the definitive edition published by Pushkin House in Moscow.
The Foundation Pit
It includes extensive notes and, in an appendix, several striking passages deleted by Platonov. The Foundation Pitwritten at the time of the brutal collectivization campaign of the late s, plays out an image of equally brutal directness—a construction site on which nothing ever gets built.
The effect on the reader is almost physically aandrey. His work stopped being published in the early s and only resurfaced 40 years after his death in … The Foundation Pit will stand out as his masterpiece. Platonov deserves to be published; he rewards being read.
His fiction, at its best, has the timeless quality of parable or folklore.
The Foundation Pit – Wikipedia
In this nihilistic allegory, completed in but not published in the Soviet Union untilworkers dig the foundation pit for an enormous dwelling to be called the All-Proletarian Home…a grim, readable Platonov whose most familiar neighbor, in apocalyptic sensibility, is Samuel Beckett. It is a Russian Waiting for Godot crossed with Lewis Carroll and Maxim Gorky tne there is even a bear working as an apprentice blacksmith, frantically making horseshoes as if there were no tomorrow.
In other words, like no other Russian writer before or after him Platonov was able to reveal a self destructive, eschatological element within the language itself.
The power of devastation they inflict upon their subject matter exceeds by far any demands of social criticism and should be measured in units that have very little to do with literature as such.
Also by Andrey Platonov. See all books by Andrey Platonov.
Andrey Platonov’s “Foundation Pit” – Words Without Borders
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