“1929–1930 were strange years in which to write a poem like ‘The Triumph of Agriculture.’… Collectivization . . . entailed mass arrests of the better-off peasants, arrests such as one praised in the fourth part of Zabolotsky’s poem. Its political naiveté places ‘The Triumph of Agriculture’ into a very uncomfortable relationship with evil, but the poem itself is so incredibly beautiful and moving and concerned with the good, that I for one do not know how to react to what I rationally judge to be its objective complicity in murder . . ..
“The 1933 publication of ‘The Triumph of Agriculture’ met with a storm of vitriol: Soviet critics could not believe that the poet wrote in earnest, that his piece was not an aggressive satire of the Soviet regime. Although Zabolotsky escaped arrest for the time being, his second book, then being readied for print, was never issued.” (“The Triumph of Agriculture,” in The Poetry Project Newsletter 197 [December 2003–January 2004], pp. 9–11.)
Platonov and Zabolotsky were influenced by the same philosophers, and they have much in common. There is, however, a crucial difference: by 1930 Platonov had reassessed the utopian beliefs of his youth; Zabolotsky, in contrast, was still clinging to them.
88. in order not to forget about the willow-bark campaign: “Campaigns” with regard to the collection of all kinds of “natural objects” were a common occurrence. In reality, these were often still more extraordinary than Platonov’s examples. In November 1929, for example, the Voronezh newspaper Kommuna repeatedly announced: “Slime from ponds and lakes—to our paper factories! The millions now sleeping in our ponds and lakes must be awoken!” (Platonov, Kotlovan, p. 160.) Just as it was taken for granted that people should be killed, en masse, for the greater good of society, so it was taken for granted that materials of all kind, however useless, should be treated as if they were of enormous value.
89. in order to achieve vengeance through the organization of eternal human meaning: Voshchev is not only acting in accord with the campaign to collect utility scrap; he is also, in accord with the ideas of Nikolay Fyodorov, doing all he can to re-member our dead ancestors. Fyodorov, a nineteenth-century philosopher admired by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Zabolotsky, and many other writers, was an important influence on Platonov. As a young man, Platonov hoped that the Revolution might realize some of Fyodorov’s utopian ideas. Many of these—Fyodorov’s dream of erasing the division between physical and intellectual work; his emphasis on the importance of remembering our dead forefathers; his extraordinary belief that humanity’s most important scientific endeavor is to gather together, molecule by molecule, the remains of all the dead and then resurrect them—remained important to Platonov throughout his life. Even if he ceased to believe in these ideas, he continued to accept them as metaphors—or, at the very least, to argue with them. The interdependence of the need for vengeance and the need to remember is a common motif throughout his work.
90. Don’t hammer so hard, you devil!: The French Slavist Annie Epelboin has written with regard to this scene, “The bear symbolizes a prehistoric future . . .. He casts doubt on the validity of the creation myth itself. As an ‘unknown proletarian,’ representing the people as a whole, and as a blacksmith, the bear is reminiscent of the ‘hammerer-bear’ of Siberian myth who, by inventing the forge, inaugurates cosmic and social order, presiding over the creation of the world. Platonov’s bear, however, does not so much create the world as annihilate it. He is, at least potentially, the agent of ultimate destruction. Wanting to force open the doors of the future, he threatens to return the world to primordial chaos. Wanting to force the pace, to accelerate time, he shows us that time is reversible.” (Annie Epelboin, “Metaphorical Animals and the Proletariat,” in Essays in Poetics 27 [Autumn 2002], p. 181.)
91. No one can disagree that such a comrade is a wrecker and saboteur of the Party: On March 2, 1930, Stalin published in Pravda an important article, “Dizziness from Success,” that marked a temporary retreat from the policy of Total Collectivization. It included the following: “Can it be said that this resolution of the Party has been put into practice without infringements and distortions? No—un fortunately, this cannot be said . . .. And they are already ‘socializing’ people’s dwellings, small animals, poultry—and this ‘socialization’ degenerates into mere decree mongering . . .. It has to be asked who needs this bungling ‘work’? . . . Who needs this rushing forward that is both stupid and damaging to the cause?” (Platonov, Kotlovan, p. 161.) Robert Conquest writes, “Many local Communist activists, shaken by the retreat, even called Stalin’s attitude incorrect—in fact occasionally even tried to suppress it. Apart from that they were reluctant to take the blame for ‘excesses’ which had been quite clearly approved from above. As a later Soviet historian puts it, ‘Stalin shifted all the responsibility for the mistakes onto local officials and sweepingly accused them of bungling. The content and the tone of the article were unexpected for the Party, and caused some disarray in Party cadres.’” (Conquest, p. 161.) Thousands of activists were removed from their positions, and some were shot. (V. P. Danilov, R. Manning, and L. Viola, eds., Tragedia sovetskoi derevni. Dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939, vol. 3 [Moscow: Rosspen, 1999–2006], pp. 329, 374, 393, and 479–81.)
92. Let him be warm now!: The first of two allusions in the novel to the pagan rite of “warming the dead.”
93. only the body itself had vanished and the moisture had all dried up: Orthodox tradition sees the quick destruction of the flesh, along with preservation of the bones, as a sign of saintliness.
94. I’ve brought them along for utility scrap: It was widely felt at the time that peasants and workers were being treated simply as raw material from which to build communism; Nikita Khrushchev speaks in his memoirs of Stalin treating the peasantry as if they were mere waste products. At the November 1929 Conference of Agrarian Marxists, Stalin had promised that industrialization would erase the distinction between town and country, between the proletariat and the peasantry. Voshchev’s initiative is helping to bring about a bleak fulfillment of Stalin’s promise: workers and peasants alike are “nothing.” Platonov may have been inspired by a surprising passage from Stalin’s article “Answer to Our Comrades the Collective Farmers” (Otvet tovarishcham kolkhoznikam): “Those who depart from the collective farms are, for the main part, the so-called dead souls. It is not even a departure, but a display of emptiness. Do we need dead souls? Of course not.” (Duzhina, p. 112.)
95. so that the vast weight of the grave’s dust should not press down on the little girl: Nastya is the diminutive of Anastasya, a name derived from the classical Greek anastasis, meaning “resurrection.” One of Platonov’s notebooks contains the sentence “The corpses in the foundation pit are the seed of the future in the orifice of the earth.” Platonov has erased all trace of this hope from his final version of The Foundation Pit, though at one stage in the evolution of the manuscript, the words “so that the vast weight of all the grave’s dust should not press down on the little girl” were followed by: “And into this reliable aperture of the earth Nastya was carefully lowered, so that even the dead seed of the future should be preserved forever.” (Platonov, Kotlovan, pp. 139 and 308.)
96. only the hammerer, sensing movement, awoke: Annie Epelboin writes, “Platonov’s animals can also be bringers of reassurance. How can we remain insensitive to . . . the tenderness with which the bear howls, burying his muzzle in the ground, when Nastya is about to die? It is not for nothing that Chiklin allows the bear, in the final scene, to give a parting touch to the little girl he himself is about to bury. Carriers of humanity as well as of inhumanity, Platonov’s animals are charged with all the ambivalence of Platonov’s poetics . . .. Platonov’s animals express the full complexity of the image of the proletariat, embodying the proletariat’s aspiration to collective health as well as its capacity to annihilate. And they offer us a vision of what we may prefer not to see, of humanity destroying what is human.” (Epelboin, pp. 181–82.)
97. Will our
soviet socialist republic perish like Nastya: Both in the manuscript and in all versions of the typescript, the words “touch Nastya farewell” were originally followed simply by a gap and the words “The End.” In the final (Pushkinsky Dom) version of the typescript, however, Platonov deleted “The End” and added these lines on a separate sheet of paper. (Platonov, Kotlovan, p. 125.) Natalya Duzhina has written with regard to Nastya’s life and death, “This is exactly how Platonov saw the Soviet Russia of his time—as a young orphan of non-proletarian origin [in the articles he wrote as a young man Platonov more than once insisted that the proletariat was “born of the bourgeoisie”—R.C.] who had never known her father and who had renounced her mother but who remembered her and longed for her . . .. All the details of Nastya’s biography allegorically portray the hopelessness of the tragic turns of Russia’s history, as Platonov understood them.” (Duzhina, p. 103.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go, above all, to Geoffrey Smith, who collaborated with me on an earlier English version of The Foundation Pit, published by Harvill in 1996. Many passages from that version may seem to have changed almost beyond recognition, but there are other passages that we have incorporated verbatim. I am also deeply grateful to Ilona Chavasse, Katia Grigoruk, Mark Miller, Eric Naiman, and Thomas Seifrid, and to the many others who have helped me with regard to specific questions. These include Lily Alexander, Michele Berdy, Natalya Bragina, Nancy Condee, Ben Dhooge, Musya Dmitrovskaya, Maria Dmytrieva, Natalya Duzhina, Gasan Gusejnov, Elena Kolesnikova, Natalya Kornienko, Nina Malygina, Anna Muza, Eugene Ostashevsky, Anna Pilkington, Natalya Poltavtseva, David Powelstock, Olia Prokopenko, Tim Sergay, Valery Vyugin, Yevgeny Yablokov, and many others.
—R.C.
APPENDIX
The Foundation Pit and Its Various Texts
FOR THIS translation we have used the edition of the Russian text of Kotlovan published by Nauka (the publisher linked to the Russian Academy of Sciences) in St. Petersburg in 2000. This text is almost identical to that published by Natalya Kornienko in 1994 in the volume Vzyskanie pogibshikh, but it differs from that of all previous editions. Unfortunately, even though the Nauka edition is greatly superior, Russian commercial publishers have continued, probably for reasons to do with copyright, to republish the old, more familiar text.
Platonov made his first notes for the novel in autumn 1929 and probably did the main part of the work between April and June 1930.fn1 In early 1931 he completed the manuscript and had it typed out. He left behind him four texts:
1. a manuscript now kept in the manuscript department of the Pushkin House in Petersburg (Pushkinsky Dom)
2. a typescript that used to belong to the personal archive of the writer’s daughter, Maria Andreyevna Platonova, and that now belongs to the Russian Academy of Sciences
3. a typescript kept in the Russian State Archive (RGALI) in Moscow
4. a typescript kept in the manuscript department of the Pushkinsky Dom
As he prepared Kotlovan for publication and showed it to publishers, Platonov continued to make changes. The typescript on which he made these changes is the one now kept in the Pushkinsky Dom. He corrected typing errors, made numerous stylistic changes, and deleted several passages from the first third of the novel. Next, Platonov copied these changes into the RGALI typescript. After failing to find a publisher, Platonov returned to the Pushkinsky Dom typescript and made yet more small changes, characteristically ignoring the numerous editorial comments that had by then been written on it.
It is the Pushkinsky Dom typescript that reflects Platonov’s final intentions, and it is this that has been followed both by Natalya Kornienko and by I. Dolgov, the editor of the Nauka edition. All previous editions of Kotlovan were based on the typescript in Maria Platonova’s personal archive. Not only does this typescript reflect an earlier stage in the evolution of the text, but it also contains numerous alterations by a third party, probably a well-meaning editor who was hoping to get Kotlovan published in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. As well as introducing careless errors, this editor seems to have chosen to delete a number of passages—some of them extremely important—which might be considered disgusting or morbid.
Platonov wrote fast, but he revised his work carefully. The passages included in the other typescripts but deleted from the Pushkinsky Dom typescript are for the main part philosophically over-explicit, and the first third of the novel moves along more briskly and coherently without them. The omitted passages are, however, of interest in their own right, and so we have included them in this appendix. We have also translated a few particularly striking passages that Platonov deleted while still working on the manuscript.
Serious students of Platonov should, however, consult the Nauka edition. Through the careful use of a variety of styles and fonts, this succeeds in conveying all of Platonov’s numerous deletions and insertions during the earlier stages of his work on The Foundation Pit.
A.
[This passage was deleted while Platonov was working on the final version of the typescript. It follows the words: Voshchev found himself in space, with only the horizon before him and the feel of the wind against his down-bent face. (See Here)]
Half a mile farther on stood the highway supervisor’s house. Having got used to emptiness, the supervisor was quarreling noisily with his wife, while the woman was sitting by an open window with a child on her knee, answering her husband with exclamations of abuse; the child itself was tugging at the hem of its shirt in silence, understanding but saying nothing.
The child’s patience encouraged Voshchev; Voshchev could see that its mother and father did not sense the meaning of life and were irritated, while the child lived on without reproach, growing itself up for torment. There and then Voshchev decided to strain his soul, not sparing his body in mental work, so that he could soon come back to the road supervisor’s house and tell this intelligent child the mystery of life that was all the time being forgotten by its parents. “Their body is now wandering automatically,” Voshchev observed the parents. “They don’t sense the essence.”
“Why don’t you sense what’s essential?” asked Voshchev, addressing the window. “There’s a child living with you—and you curse and swear. But the child was born to finish off the entire world!”
With the terror of conscience hidden behind the ill will of their faces, husband and wife looked at the witness.
“If there’s nothing for you to exist on in calm, you should at least respect your own child. You’ll be happier.”
“And what might you be after around here?” voiced the road supervisor with malicious subtlety. “If you’re going, then go—it’s for the likes of you they laid the road . . .”
Voshchev stood in the middle of the way, unresolved. The family waited for him to be off, keeping their own evil in reserve.
“I’d go all right, but there’s nowhere for me to go. Is it far from here to some town or other?”
“No distance at all,” replied the supervisor. “If you don’t stand still, the road’ll take you there!”
“And you respect that child of yours,” said Voshchev. “When you die, the child will keep on being.”
Having said these words, Voshchev went half a mile away from the road supervisor’s house and sat down there on the edge of a ditch; he felt doubt in his own life and weakness of body without truth.
[The final version continues: He was unable to keep treading the road for long . . . (See Here)]
B.
[This passage was deleted during the first stage of work on the typescript. It follows the words: Voshchev did his walking straight past people . . . (See Here)]
… sensing the gathering strength of his grieving mind. And when it got dark in nature, he sat down on a bench of the Trade Union Park in the depth of the town, so that he could forget himself in dark thought, having secluded himself in the cramped place of his own sorrow; in order to economize his exhausted torso, he lay down on a bench and fell asleep in the peace of
the night shared by all.
Soon a woman sat half her body on the bench and then began disturbing the hair on the sleeping head of Voshchev.
“Go away, granny,” said Voshchev in oblivion. “I don’t often sleep.”
“What kind of granny am I, boy? I’m a spare young lady.”
“Don’t torment me,” replied Voshchev. “During the day I’ll be thinking again.”
The woman went on saying something else, but Voshchev was already without memory of her.
In the morning, music resounded again. Voshchev, having come to, at once sat up amid the early dampness of the air. Military cavalry was passing by the park; ahead of it brass trumpets were singing protractedly, summoning towards victory over the class enemy. A working man was walking through the park with his child-son and telling him about the cavalry, but the child understood even more than he saw.
“Papa, I just want to shout out, ‘Long Live the First of May!’” said the boy.
And they went on farther. Voshchev was not suffering from hunger, but he knew that he had not eaten for a long time and that it was necessary to nourish himself. The town was located close to rye, and so Voshchev went into a field to pick some ears, in order to live through the time until he found out the meaning of life.
In the field was the silence of light, and warmth was setting in from the sun. The rye had not yet ripened, the grains amounted to soft pulp, but it was all the easier gradually to feed on them. Having quickly eaten his fill, Voshchev hid in the deserted thick of the rye and lay with his face to the earth in order to think up in oblivion the truth of life and to set himself forever in order within and without. He lay low and without defense; the air moved weakly over his body; the stems of the ears of rye creaked in early maturity; somewhere beyond the fields a man was stepping along a track and talking to himself. And, before he started thinking, Voshchev waited for the man to pass.
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