The main tactic adopted by the Bolsheviks was the promotion of class struggle in the village. Peasants were classified as either poor peasants (bednyaki), who had no property of their own; middle peasants (serednyaki), who owned property but did not employ hired labor; and rich peasants or kulaks (kulaki), who not only owned property but also employed hired labor. Peasants opposed to collectivization but too poor to be called kulaks were categorized as subkulaks. The kulaks and subkulaks were deported en masse; the poor peasants, along with those middle peasants who managed to convince the authorities of their good faith, were allowed to join the collective farms. According to data from Soviet archives, more than 1,800,000 kulaks and family members were deported in 1930 and 1931; it is likely that about a quarter of these died before reaching the “special settlements” that were their destination. The historian Lynne Viola has written, “The liquidation of the kulak as a class—dekulakization for short . . . was Stalin’s first great purge. It was a purge of the countryside: an endeavor to remove undesirable elements and to decapitate traditional village leadership and authority structures in order to break down village cohesion, minimize peasant resistance to collectivization, and intimidate the mass of the peasantry into compliance.”fn1
Most Soviet writers of the time lived in the main cities, and few witnessed what was taking place in the villages. Mikhail Sholokhov knew what was happening and bravely protested to Stalin. A few writers—like Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak—sensed that something terrible was taking place and at least hinted at it in their work. Some writers—like Aleksandr Tvardovsky—came from peasant families and knew what had happened but chose, for the sake of self-preservation, to lie about it. Platonov and his friend Vasily Grossman were the only two members of their generation to write about Total Collectivization—and about the still more devastating Terror Famine—both truthfully and in depth. Grossman was probably largely dependent on what he heard from others (perhaps including Platonov himself ), but his evocation of these horrors in his short novel Everything Flows is both accurate and heartbreakingly vivid. Platonov’s account is firsthand; no Soviet writer of his generation had a better understanding of the life of the peasantry in the 1920s.
Platonov was brought up on the outskirts of Voronezh, the capital of the Black Earth region. Born in 1899, he came of age with the Revolution, which he supported passionately. During the years immediately after the Revolution he published a large number of articles on political, philosophical, and scientific themes, as well as a collection of poems, The Blue Depth. Shocked by the terrible drought and famine of 1921, however, he abandoned literature in order to work as a land-reclamation expert. His reasons would have been understood by Tolstoy; “being someone technically qualified,” Platonov wrote, “I was unable to continue to engage in contemplative work such as literature.”fn2 During the mid-1920s he supervised the digging of no less than 763 ponds and 331 wells, as well as the draining of 2,400 acres of swampland and the building of three small rural power stations.fn3 And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia.fn4 Other writers who visited collective farms did so as members of Writers’ Brigades—and they, of course, were shown only a few model collective farms. Platonov, however, was sent by the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, and he saw what was really happening.
In August 1931, for example, Platonov was asked to report on the progress of collectivization in the central Volga and northern Caucasus regions. The following entry from his notebooks is only one of many, all equally direct: “State Farm no. 22 ‘The Swineherd.’ Building work—25% of the plan has been carried out. There are no nails, iron, timber . . . milkmaids have been running away, men have been sent after them on horseback and the women have been forced to work. This has led to cases of suicide . . .. Loss of livestock—89–90%.”fn5 It is astonishing that Platonov dared to write such lines, even in a private notebook, at a time when the official press was reporting only ever greater success.
These journeys served as the inspiration for a whole cycle of works devoted to the themes of Collectivization and the Terror Famine. As well as The Foundation Pit, which is often seen as his masterpiece, Platonov wrote an unfinished draft of “A Technical Novel”fn6 and the short novels “For Future Use” and “Juvenile Sea.” He also wrote two film scriptsfn7 and two remarkable plays: a black comedy about collectivization titled The Hurdy-Gurdy and an evocation of the Terror Famine, The Fourteen Little Red Huts, which anticipates both Brecht and Beckett. None of these works was published in Platonov’s lifetime except “For Future Use”—which was immediately, and fiercely, criticized by Stalin himself.
All these works appear at first glance—especially to a reader unversed in Soviet history—to be highly surreal. This impression, however, is misleading; they contain barely an incident or passage of dialogue that does not directly relate to some real event or publication from these years.fn8 Platonov’s focus is not on some private dream world but on political and historical reality—a reality so extraordinary as to be barely credible.
In the first paragraph of The Foundation Pit Platonov tells how Voshchev is dismissed from his job at a small factory “on the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life.” Platonov implicitly likens Voshchev both to Dante “in the middle of the road of this life” and to the thirty-year-old Christ at the beginning of his three years of service. He also likens Voshchev to himself; Platonov was thirty years old when he began work on The Foundation Pit and he originally intended to give the hero his own real surname, Klimentov; Platonov, the name he chose to publish under, is a shortened form of his patronymic—adopted, most likely, in homage to Plato.
The novel’s Russian title, Kotlovan, is cognate with kotyol, meaning “cauldron,” and the foundation pit is several times referred to as an “abyss”; the world Platonov evokes in The Foundation Pit is a hell where both language and labor have lost their meaning, where nearly every character is alienated from his own self, and where acts of violence are seen by both perpetrators and victims as the most normal thing in the world. The nearest relatives to Platonov’s characters are the faceless peasants who appear in the paintings and drawings produced around the same time by Malevich, figures whom the art historian Igor Golomstock has described as “transparent phantoms who have materialized out of the emptiness and acquired life.”
The Foundation Pit is a testimony to one of the darkest moments of Russian history. It can be read more generally, as a philosophical fable. It would be wrong, however, to see it merely as yet another of the twentieth century’s literary cries of despair. Platonov had good reason to feel despairing during the early 1930s—he was unable to publish anything for several years and he was clearly appalled at what was happening to the Revolution he loved—but he was a man of extraordinary tenacity. Like Voshchev, he seems to have been determined to discover meaning and truth; and like Voshchev, he seems to have been determined to save life—any form of life—from oblivion. Voshchev’s address to a “fallen” leaf in the second chapterfn9 is, in effect, Platonov’s address to his own characters, all of whom seem equally superfluous in the world: “Stay here—and I’ll find out what you lived and perished for. Since no one needs you and you lie about amidst the whole world, then I shall store and remember you.”
After his bleak works of the early 1930s, Platonov seems to have taken a conscious decision to write more simply, more clearly and with more hope. In The Foundation Pit it seems that there is very little that can be saved—perhaps only a few dried leaves and such “tokens of existence” as a tin earring or a bast sandal that had once belonged to “a laboring but dispossessed body.” In 1935, however, he writes of Nazar Chagataev, the hero of Soul, that “he was trying to think only what was necessary for a shared life of salvation”—and he could probably have said the same thing of himself. “The River Potudan” (1937), for all its profound melancholy, is equally positive; both the hero and his wife, Lyuba (short for Lyubov, the Russian
for “love”), survive their suicidal urges and eventually—in spite of Lyuba’s probably terminal illness—reaffirm, and finally consummate, their marriage. And “The Return” (1946)—perhaps Platonov’s greatest and wisest story—is about the salvation of an entire family. Awkwardly and with difficulty, a father who has just come back from the war, his wife (also named Lyuba), and their two young children rediscover their love for one another. At the end of the story the father gets on a train, intending to leave his wife for a younger woman, but a few minutes after leaving the station, slowly realizing that the two children he can see stumbling along a track towards the railway line are his own son and daughter, he steps off this train.
Reliable texts of many of Platonov’s works appeared only forty or fifty years after his death; the unfinished novel Happy Moscow was first published in 1991, the complete text of The Foundation Pit was first published in 1994, and the complete text of Soul, first published in 1999, is still barely available.fn10 The absence of reliable Russian texts, together with the rigidities of Cold War thinking, have delayed any true appreciation of the scope of Platonov’s writing. For many years the boldness of the political satire—especially in The Foundation Pit—diverted attention from other elements in his work.
Even at the height of his youthful enthusiasm for the Revolution, Platonov retained a considerable respect for religion. In his early article “About Love,” for example, he wrote, “If we want to destroy religion and are conscious that this has to be done, since communism and religion are incompatible, then, in place of religion we must give the people not less than religion but more than religion. Many of us think that it is possible to take faith away without giving people anything better. The soul of contemporary man is organized in such a way that if faith is removed from it, it will be completely overturned.”fn11 It is likely that by 1930, when he was writing The Foundation Pit, Platonov felt still more respect for religion. Whether or not he remained an atheist, he had almost certainly come to feel that communism had failed in its promise, that it was giving the people “less than religion.”
Allusions to the Bible and Orthodox liturgy play a crucial role in The Foundation Pit. There are also a number of allusions to the twentieth-century Russian religious philosopher Pavel Florensky and to Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky had attacked the utopian thinking of Nikolay Chernyshevsky and other nineteenth-century radical thinkers, and this controversy had resurfaced in the 1910s and 1920s. Chernyshevsky was an important influence on many of the leading Bolsheviks; Platonov, however, seems to have sided with Dostoevsky. As Dostoevsky criticized the idealized Crystal Palace that appears in a dream to the heroine of Chernyshevsky’s novel, so Platonov criticizes the grandiose projects of his own time; like Dostoevsky, he compares them to the Tower of Babel.
The most important of The Foundation Pit’s subtexts relates to the biblical Elisha. In the Russian and church Slavonic Bibles, the prophet we know as Elisha is called Yelisey. Yelisey is also the name of one of Platonov’s peasants, and the parallel between him and the biblical Elisha is precise and sustained. Just as Elisha opposed the prophets of Baal, who demanded sacrifices in order to guarantee good harvests and increase in their flocks and herds, so Yelisey opposes the prophets of the Soviet regime, who demanded sacrifices for exactly the same reasons. The one difference is that the Bible allows no doubt about who is right and who is wrong, whereas Platonov, as always, invites his readers to see a conflict from both sides at once. In the end, however, this parallel becomes an explicit inversion. Elisha defeats the prophets of Baal and is able to carry out miracles; on one occasion he resurrects a dead boy simply by breathing on him. Yelisey, however, is as powerless before death as he is before the Soviet authorities, and, even though he breathes all night long on the dying Nastya—whose full name, ironically, means “the resurrected one”—he is unable to keep her alive. Nastya’s death and burial can be seen as a sacrifice to pagan gods; she is buried, like a human sacrifice, “in eternal stone,” deep in the ground below where the foundations of a great building were meant to be laid.
The scene of mutual forgiveness in the Organizational Yard is modeled on an important Orthodox rite, that of Forgiveness Sunday, the last Sunday before Lent. Platonov’s peasants see collectivization as the end of the world and so, before joining the collective farm, they embrace and forgive one another as if on the point of death, as if they had only “one more moment of time.” There is no need for them to say so much as a word of explanation to one another about what they are doing; they simply follow the church rite, each person present asking forgiveness of—and being asked for forgiveness by—every other person there. This liturgical and eschatological subtext explains the surprisingly harmonious atmosphere of scenes where one might expect to find only class hatred and struggle; if the peasants bear no grudges against their tormentors, it is because they see in them the hand of God—and how can one bear grudges against the hand of God? Nevertheless, for all the compassion with which Platonov presents this scene of mutual forgiveness, and for all the density of biblical allusion throughout the novel, the world of The Foundation Pit is a world without God. Even the priest says, “I no longer feel the charm of creation. I’ve been left without God, and God without Man . . .”
The reality of life in Stalin’s Russia will always remain hard to understand. No sources of information—no memoirs, no diaries, no reports by informers for the secret police—are entirely trustworthy. It is easier to be sure of the true beliefs of such distant figures as Chaucer and Dante than of the true beliefs of many of Platonov’s contemporaries. Even against this background, however, the degree of uncertainty around Platonov himself is extraordinary. There is hardly a single important work of Platonov’s, or important event in his life, that is not veiled in ambiguity. In November 1922, for example—even though he was, at the time, an avowed atheist—he christened his six-week-old son Platon; we can only speculate as to his reasons.fn12 Nor do we know what concerned him more at the time he was writing The Foundation Pit: the loss of God or the failure of socialism. A line from The Hurdy-Gurdy (written in late 1930)—“O Lord, Lord, if only you were!”—may be as intense an expression of religious feeling as is possible for a nonbeliever—if Platonov was a nonbeliever; but then the sense of loss he expresses in his postscript to The Foundation Pit, about the end of the socialist generation, is no less heartrending. All that can be said for sure is that Platonov devoted the rest of his life to the search for a way out of the abyss of The Foundation Pit, to a search for what the great Scottish poet Hamish Henderson once called “Words of whole love, words that can slowly gain the power to reconcile and heal.”
Henderson’s words are, in fact, applicable to The Foundation Pit itself—though this may not be immediately obvious. Platonov’s resistance to the nightmare he lived through is embodied not so much at the level of plot as in the texture of each individual sentence. His ability to present incompatible perspectives in the space of a single sentence can be seen as a literary equivalent of cubism—and, in the context of the murderous class warfare he describes, this ability is unexpectedly healing. A simple but memorable example can be found at the end of the passage describing the (almost literal) liquidation of the kulaks. Zhachev, a true believer, imagines that the departure of the kulaks on their raft is a guarantee of the bright future that is about to set in. As the kulaks float away, however, he loses this certainty:
By then the kulak river transport had begun to disappear around a bend, behind the bushes on the bank, and Zhachev was losing the appearance of the class enemy.
“Fa-are we-ell, parasites!” Zhachev shouted down the river.
“Fa-are we-ell!” responded the kulaks sailing off to the sea.
The ambiguity is poignant. The obvious meaning of “Zhachev was losing the appearance of the class enemy” is simply that the kulaks were disappearing from sight. But the sentence can also be understood to mean that the kulaks were ceasing to see Zhachev as an enemy, and that he was ceasing to see them as
enemies. The mutual farewell gains still deeper meaning from the fact that “farewell” and “forgive” are, in Russian, two different forms of the same verb—“Farewell!” means “Keep forgiving!” While there is still “a moment of time,” Zhachev and the kulaks recognize one another’s humanity. As the kulaks are being liquidated, Zhachev joins in the ritual they have just performed and in which, no doubt, he would never admit to believing. The scene is suffused with Platonov’s characteristic blend of delicate irony and deep tenderness. Even as he shows us one of the hells that mankind has created, Platonov reveals his capacity to cherish the individual human soul.
There are a number of images that appear and reappear throughout the novel, slowly revealing their meaning with a logic that is often dreamlike. One such image is that of a coffin. The first mention of a coffin comes in the ninth chapter, in the at least relatively straightforward sentence, “Various dreams come to a laboring man at night—some express a fulfilled hope, while others foresense a personal coffin in a clay grave.” The next two chapters both include passages about the dead Julia, who is lying underground in a strange room—“a room that had been forgotten or not entered into the plan”—that can be understood as a huge coffin or tomb. Soon after this, we encounter our first real coffins. Yelisey, as if asking for the most normal thing in the world, demands that his fellow-villagers’ coffins be returned to them: “Our coffins are what keep us all going. Yes, they’re all we’ve got left—a coffin’s an entire livelihood to us.” This is an allusion to a famous line from Pushkin’s story “The Undertaker”: “A living man can do without boots, but a dead man can’t live without a coffin”; Platonov is suggesting that there is a difference between Pushkin’s time, when a dead man couldn’t live without a coffin, and his own time, when even a living man can’t live without a coffin. Platonov may also be thinking of historical accounts of groups of Old Believers (Russian Orthodox Christians who refused to accept the reform of church rituals instigated in the 1650s by Patriarch Nikon) preparing their coffins in expectation of the Last Judgment, dressing themselves in white, and then lying down in them.
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