The Foundation Pit

by Andrey Platonov

  After speaking to Prushevsky and Chiklin, Yelisey then sets off back to his village, pulling a train of no less than ninety-eight coffins across “the dry ups and downs of life’s everyday sea.” The rope that binds these coffins together is the chain of cause and effect; just as one coffin pulls another coffin behind it, so—in the course of the novel—one death leads to another.

  In the following chapter Kozlov breaks off his relationship with “a certain middling lady” by sending her a postcard on which he has written two slightly distorted lines from Gavrila Derzhavin, Russia’s greatest eighteenth-century poet:

  Once the table groaned with fare,

  Now there’s just a coffin there.

  At first this seems no more than an instance of Kozlov’s pretentious silliness, but by “disclaiming the responsibility of love,” Kozlov has signed his own death warrant. Only a few pages later we learn from an indignant Nastya that her own two coffins—the one where she keeps her toys, and the one where she will sleep “in future time”—are being given to Kozlov and Safronov, who “have died in a hut.” Kozlov’s two lines of verse can now be seen to have foreshadowed his own death. In a similar way, the novel’s first coffin, the “personal coffin in a clay grave,” foreshadows the death of Nastya—the death of “the socialist generation.”

  The breadth and depth of meaning with which Platonov can imbue a single image is equally well illustrated by the image of the bonfire. The novel’s first bonfire is called up by Safronov in one of his flights of rhetoric:

  And this is why we must throw everyone into the brine of socialism, so that the hide of capitalism will peel away and the heart will attend to the heat of life around the blazing bonfire of the class struggle and enthusiasm will originate!

  Safronov’s abstractions are so nonsensical as to seem almost engaging, but his second rhetorical bonfire is clearly—and dangerously—located in the context of collectivization and the class struggle in the villages:

  “It’s time we put an end to those prosperous parasites once and for all!” Safronov spoke his mind. “We no longer feel the heat from the bonfire of the class struggle, but there has to be a blaze—where else are activizing personnel to warm themselves?”

  Like so many passages in The Foundation Pit, this contains a reference to the political controversies of the day. During the Party plenum of April, 1929, Stalin had described his one remaining opponent, Nikolay Bukharin, as believing that the class struggle “must fade away.” Stalin himself, in contrast, was still insisting on the need for the class struggle to be intensified. Safronov’s speech is thus a parodic exaggeration of Stalin’s own rhetoric. And, like the coffin of Kozlov’s poem, so Safronov’s imaginary bonfire also soon becomes real. After the middle peasants have joined the collective farm, Chiklin “lit a bonfire from some fencing, and everyone began to warm themselves from the flames.” The fences with which the peasants had once fenced off their individual holdings have now—literally—become fuel for the “bonfire of the class struggle.”

  The third and last bonfire is lit in the barrack itself: “After placing Zhachev down on the ground, Chiklin set about laying a bonfire for the warming of Nastya.” These words are profoundly ominous; it is not for nothing that Platonov avoided a simpler and more obvious phrase such as “to keep Nastya warm.” According to an article published in 1909, the rite of “the warming of the dead” by means of a bonfire was still being practiced at that time in the province of Voronezh.fn13 The “bonfire of the class struggle” has become a bonfire for “warming the dead”; the class struggle has brought about Nastya’s death—the “end of the socialist generation.”

  Just as Platonov develops the meaning of particular images in the course of the novel, so he develops the meaning of particular words. Often his words seem to have a life of their own; it is as if they escape from their contexts and then appear unexpectedly in contexts where they do not belong. In the final chapter, Platonov tells us that “past the barrack walked many people, but no one came to call on the sick Nastya, because each had bowed his head and was thinking incessantly about total collectivization.” Platonov appears to forget to tell us whether their thoughts are enthusiastic or despairing, but this sentence has at least the appearance of a direct statement. Elsewhere, however, Platonov finds more immediate ways to convey the totality of Total Collectivization, allowing the words to take over his text just as they take over the minds of his protagonists. The account of the night before the liquidation of the kulaks, for example, begins with the words, “The Organizational Yard was covered with total people.” Fifteen lines later the activist gives the boy a “totally stone sweetie,” and the shocked boy responds with “It’s a total collectivization—not much joy for us!” And, after another few pages, Platonov writes, “the sounds of the middle-peasant mood prevented a total onset of silence.” Platonov does not simply tell us that there is no escape from collectivization; he makes us experience this.

  Another group of words with a life of their own are “move,” “movement,” “motionless,” and “without movement.” The first two pages of the book contains two instances of what, in Russian, is almost the same word; at the beginning of the second paragraph Voshchev walks past some “motionless trees,” and at the end of this paragraph we are told that “he spent this evening time of his without moving.” Many readers might fail to notice this near-repetition; some might look on it as slightly clumsy. A phrase a few pages later is distinctly odder: “the dust up above the buildings due to movement of the population.” This conjures the possibility of mass deportations—though the reader is likely to feel uncertain as to whether or not this meaning is intended. The chapter’s penultimate sentence is odder still: “The Pioneers’ band rested and then, in the distance, struck up a march of movement.” This seems to beg for the editor’s pencil. Why does Platonov feel it necessary to tell us that a march does not encourage people to stand still?

  Having established the importance of this theme, Platonov begins to develop it a few chapters later with the words, “the entire movement of the dispossessed into future happiness.” It is now clear that the word “movement” is being used in two senses: as in movement towards a place, and as in such phrases as “the revolutionary movement.” Later, when the activist declares that “movement is the due of the proletariat,” we again feel disoriented; the activist seems to see “movement” as something desirable, yet it is only too clear that neither the activist nor anyone else is giving any thought as to what the proletariat itself might desire.

  Towards the end of the book, the activist reproaches himself with the words: “You could have cleansed the whole district into collectivization—and here you are grieving on a single farm! It’s time the population was being packed off to socialism in whole trainloads—and you still attempt on a petty scale!” The general irony of this is clear enough, but the political reference is more precise than is immediately apparent. In late 1929 Stalin claimed that peasants were now “entering the collective farms not in separate groups, as was previously the case, but in whole villages, settlements, districts and even regions”fn14 While reproducing some aspects of Stalin’s grammar, Platonov has replaced “joining” by “being sent” and the words “in whole villages, settlements, districts and even regions” by “in whole trainloads” (tselymi eshelonami). During the 1930s the word eshelony, which we have translated as “trainloads,” was used primarily of trains transporting kulaks to their “settlements” or prisoners to labor camps. Platonov has unpicked Stalin’s lie, allowing his unfortunate activist to blurt out the truth: that hundreds of thousands of peasants, rather than entering collective farms of their own free will, are being packed off on cattle wagons to “special settlements”—that is, to areas of northern forest where kulaks were dumped, in midwinter, without shelter and with very little in the way of food or tools.

  For all the talk of movement, there is no progress. The “single home for the proletariat” will never be built, and collectivization se
ems to mean nothing but animals being slaughtered and kulaks being sent off on a raft—“downriver into the sea, and so farther and so on,” that is, to their deaths. Platonov emphasizes the lack of real, purposeful movement not only through such absurd locutions as the above but also through insistent repetition of the words “motionless” and “without movement,” often in a context that makes the words stand out. At one point, for example, Chiklin overhears Voshchev address an unknown object, perhaps a scrap of old clothing or footwear, with the words, “I hadn’t even been born and you were already lying here, you poor thing without movement!” In the final chapter, these two opposites—motion and lack of motion—are brought together in a demand made by Zhachev: “Let him put a stove in here—otherwise we’ll never get to socialism in this clapped-out old barrack-train!”fn15 These words are poignant—the presence of a stove would hardly, at this stage, be enough to keep Nastya alive, let alone to enable anyone to reach socialism—and they expose more clearly than ever the pointlessness of all the “to-ing and fro-ing” we have witnessed. Pioneers march about, kulaks are sent off to the sea, “some distant masses or other” are seen “moving along the horizon to some unknown inter-settlement meeting”—but nothing really changes, and the word “movement” sounds a bitter, if muted, note when it recurs one last time in the novel’s final sentence: “only the hammerer, sensing movement, awoke, and Chiklin allowed him to reach out and touch Nastya farewell.”

  Karl Marx famously wrote that “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”fn16 Trains feature, often prominently, in a great many works by Platonov. In 1922, in a letter to his wife, Platonov described an experience from the time of the Civil War: “Even though I had not yet completed technical school, I was hurriedly put on a locomotive to help the driver. The sentence about the revolution being the locomotive of history was transformed inside me into a feeling that was strange and good: remembering it, I worked very diligently on the locomotive . . .”fn17 By 1930, however, little remains of this “strange and good” feeling; the only trains in The Foundation Pit are either stationary barrack-trains or the cattle wagons evoked by the activist.

  There are key words associated with nearly all of the novel’s main characters. “Thoughtful” and “lost in thought” are used mainly with regard to Voshchev. The word “gait” is used predominantly of Safronov, who is the character most conscious of how he appears to others. Kozlov has a little collection of set phrases, such as “Well and good, well and splendid!,” which Chiklin inherits from him after Kozlov’s death. For the main part, these key words are at least relatively easy to translate. Zhachev’s speech, however, is more difficult. Somehow Platonov contrives to make him sound extraordinarily threatening, even though much of his vocabulary seems, on the face of it, to be oddly neutral. The two verbs he uses most often in his threats are “earn” and “receive.” During his first exchange with Voshchev, for example, he says, “Do you want to receive from me?!”; and towards the end of the “triumph of the collective farm” he says to the dancing peasants, “Want to earn something from me, do you? Prepare to receive!”

  Our different renderings of Zhachev’s speech constitute one of the more obvious differences between the earlier version of The Foundation Pit, translated for Harvill by Robert Chandler and Geoffrey Smith, and this present version. Our overriding concern when we were working on the earlier version was to prevent Zhachev’s speech from sounding stiff. Some of the phrases we thought up were not so much translations as improvisations on a theme. “Do you want to receive from me?!,” for example, metamorphosed into “Fancy a fist in the face, eh?!” This freedom can be justified on the grounds that the Russian sentence is more idiomatic than its literal English equivalent. Nevertheless, our departure from literal meaning brought with it a considerable loss.fn18

  The function of Zhachev’s two favorite verbs is to show us how Zhachev sees himself. Outcast and mutilated as he is, he wants to be part of the Soviet economy and Soviet society. He wants to receive “his own share of life” from Pashkin and to distribute to others, often by means of a blow with his “long arm,” whatever “share of life” they themselves have earned. He sees himself not as a violent and wildly individualistic psychopath but as an impersonal agent of justice, and he makes this clear in the very last of the many threats that he utters: “Or do you fancy earning from the whole of the proletariat? Come over here then! You’ll receive as if from the class!” It is, incidentally, one of the novel’s many delicate symmetries that both Zhachev’s first threat and this last threat are directed at the same person: Voshchev. Platonov may be suggesting that Soviet brutality is directed, above all, against thought fulness.

  This understanding of Zhachev as an agent of class justice lends support to an interesting suggestion first made by the Russian scholar Aleksandr Kharitonov that there is something in Zhachev of Leon Trotsky.fn19 Both are outcasts—Trotsky had been expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1929. Both are true believers, enemies of bureaucracy, revolutionary romantics. Both are probably more intelligent than anyone around them—Platonov refers, with regard to Zhachev, to “the brutality of dominant mind.” Both—for all their belief in class solidarity—find it hard to cooperate with others. And like Trotsky, Zhachev seems to believe in some kind of “permanent revolution”; shortly before the activist’s death, Zhachev says to him, “Soon we’ll activate each and every one—and we’ll send you lot packing! Just wait till the masses are worn down enough, till the children have grown enough!”

  One day, no doubt, someone will publish a commentary listing the abnormalities in each sentence of The Foundation Pit and the expressive power of each of them. Platonov used language more creatively than even the greatest of the great Russian poets who were his contemporaries, and there is no simple answer to the question of why he wrote as he did. Sometimes, as we have seen, he deviates from the norm in order to summon up a biblical, cultural, or political allusion. Sometimes he orders the most common of words in an uncommon way so as to bring out in full the meaning of a word that we normally take for granted. This sentence from the end of the second chapter, for example, tells us that Voshchev feels unable to take even his own life for granted: “Voshchev continued pining and went into this town to live.” Sometimes an unexpected emphasis shows us how little a character can take even parts of his own body for granted: “He felt the cold on his eyelids and used them to close his warm eyes.”fn20 Sometimes Platonov puts something in an unusual way in order to bring out how trapped his characters are in a crushingly materialist view of the world. Chiklin, for example, seems to imagine life as a matter of movement towards some unidentified place, and thoughts as a kind of physical substance: “There’s nowhere for life to go, so you think thoughts into your head!” At other times, however, this materialism shifts into an equally extreme idealism; the workers at the barrack, for example, eat “without greed, not recognizing that nourishment was of value, as if a man’s strength originates from consciousness alone.”fn21

  Often Platonov’s language derives its extraordinary weight and density from its instability. Words hover between different meanings, and we are not sure which way to understand something or to whom a particular thought belongs. Here, for example, it is unclear whether the masses are hurling themselves forward with hope, or whether it is the activist who is hoping that this is what they will do: “The activist was . . . observing with silent sorrow the movement of the vital masses on the damp evening earth; he speechlessly loved the poor-peasant class which . . . was hopefully hurling itself forward into the invisible future.”fn22 Nor, of course, is it clear whether the future is invisible simply because it cannot yet be seen or because it will never be seen. Taken together, these various meanings arouse the suspicion that, although the activist pretends to himself that he loves the masses, what he secretly wants is to be rid of them.

  Just as individual words hover between different meanings, so the narrative as a whole hovers between the realistic and the religious or myth
ical. During the night before the liquidation of the kulaks, the activist makes “signs on his papers”: “He had a multicolored pencil; sometimes he would apply the blue, and sometimes the red, and sometimes he would simply sigh and think, placing no mark until his judgment.” The red and the blue indicate that the activist is imitating Stalin, who usually ticked or made notes on documents with a blue or red pencil. At the same time, however, the activist is imitating Christ himself, who will separate the sinners and the righteous at the Last Judgment. Often Platonov achieves a similar effect more subtly, by introducing one or two unexpected words into an otherwise normal sentence. After Zhachev’s farewell to the kulaks, for example, Platonov tells us that Zhachev observed for a long time “how the raft floated systematically down the snowy flowing river and the evening wind ruffled the dark dead water pouring, amid chilled farmlands, into its own remote abyss.” Here there are several words that stand out. A raft cannot float “systematically”; the word is so absolutely inappropriate that it begs to be read as an ironic comment on the terrible randomness of the process through which the activist separated the “sinners” and the “righteous.” The word “abyss” both refers us to the foundation pit itself and carries us, at least for a moment, into the abyss of Dante’s hell; an ordinary Russian river has become the Styx. The word “amid” is also a little strange, if only because we have already met “amid” and “amidst” so very many times. Amid these “chilled farmlands” even the river of death seems lonely, lost, and forgotten—not unlike the fallen leaf in the second chapter.