[The final text continues: Voshchev looked around at these people . . . (See Here)]
G.
[This passage was deleted while Platonov was working on the final version of the typescript. It follows the words: “Kozlov, you’re a goat!” determined Safronov. (See Here)]
“What do you care about the proletariat and their new home? Your only joy is with your own body!”
[The final version continues: “Let me have joy!” replied Kozlov. (See Here)]
H.
[This passage was deleted during the first stage of work on the typescript. It follows the words: . . . so that he could hear the birds and the footsteps of pedestrians. (See Here)]
Voshchev stopped sleeping and opened his eyes. The fresh morning world was shining through the slits of the barrack, and Voshchev sensed his own body as if it had been newly conceived: yesterday’s labor had destroyed the old insides in him, but sleep had filled him with the first flesh of all.
Chiklin was still sleeping, and Kozlov beside him; the others were sleeping on their sides, all alike tired from the earth. Let them sleep for the time being, so that the blood they had lived through should be burned away with their breathing and so that the empty place should go on being filled with dense, palpable moisture. Beneath Kozlov’s ears the pulsing of his maternal sources was renewed, as if they were fresh springs, and his scanted face had already turned pink. It was time, evidently, for him to wake up and live consciously.
Voshchev opened the door into the outside, letting in air for the sleepers’ breathing, and then went out himself, so as not to hinder the flow of freshness onto the lying faces. In nature there was a warm light and the sound of the even noise of the bustle of petty life, which was also trying to obtain for itself the meaning of life out of something or other. Not far away was to be found an overgrown gully, and a solitary tree had bent down over it with windless branches, searching for its own birth in the earth or for posthumous cohabitation with it. On the far side of the gully there was another depression of some kind, and from there, from some invisible enterprise, came steam that had been lived out by a machine. Aside from everything, bent down in the grass, sat a poor man; his stick had been stuck into the earth, and the bundle of his possessions was hanging on it. He too was probably living with effort and hoping to receive his own happiness in full, though he might have been existing only through the endurance of curiosity.
After observation of this man, Voshchev heard the singing of a quiet voice: “Lime tree, eternal lime tree-ee.”
Further the voice went quieter, continuing the song in a whisper, and then went entirely silent. Voshchev went back into the barrack. There Chiklin was looking with unremembering eyes and silently pronouncing the song with his mouth; he had already come to, but he could not yet recall his own life—and he was remembering a song, preparing to live from the very beginning.
Kozlov was still asleep, but he was scratching his chest with his nails, suffering torment with closed eyes, and then he sat up all at once and cried out in fright.
“What’s frightened you?” asked Voshchev, going closer to help.
“There’s a rat gnawing in my chest!”
Chiklin stood up on accustomed legs and capably studied Kozlov’s body, where the rat was to be found. Chiklin wanted to kill it calmly.
“Shut your mouth!” he said to Kozlov. “And grip your hands onto your stomach—or else it’ll jump out!”
Kozlov closed his mouth with care and pressed a hand onto his stomach, to make it harder for the rat to get out of a tight place—but he suddenly felt that his insides were free and his heart light.
“It’s there!” Kozlov pointed to the jacket with which he had covered his feet.
With firm strength Chiklin kicked the jacket with the bare sole of his foot, but the place beneath it was empty.
“It’s gone!” discovered Chiklin.
Kozlov sadly took offense.
“Now, as the saying says, I’ll make a statement to the labor-protection board: rats are gnawing a working man’s heart!”
After general awakening, an outsider appeared at the barrack; out of all the workers, it was only Kozlov, thanks to past conflicts of his, who knew him. Comrade Pashkin, chairman of the Area Trades Union Council, had a face that was already elderly and a bodily torso bowed down not so much from his years as by the load of his social burden; these data caused him to speak in a paternal manner and to know—or foresee—almost everything.
“Rats, comrade Pashkin!” said Kozlov. “They are, as the saying says, gnawing and gnawing my heart.”
Pashkin never hurried to answer, in order that people should see him thinking, but he would answer carelessly: let the essence of his word act in its own right!
“Where are the rats? Why would they come here? You haven’t got any women here—there’s no one to create dirt. Most likely you’re sleeping with excess—and so you dream of animals. You’ve had a visit from the sanitary doctor! But if you’ve got rats, then organize yourselves a Circle for the Promotion of Aviation and Chemical Defense. You can hunt any creature—yes, you can use petty small fry to practice against the bourgeoisie! Yes, it’s even all to the good—even if there really is a rat! How can you not understand?”
“We understand,” respectfully announced Safronov. “We’ve got no way out—we have to understand everything.”
Wrinkling himself from cares and his customary informedness, Pashkin went around the living accommodation with his own stride, studying with an unprepossessing look its hygienicity and cubic volume—and he found the conditions decent. The proletariat, after all, was still only beginning to make an existence for itself, so there was no one from whom it could demand benefits. Pashkin gloomily knew almost all of this, and he even felt bored.
[The final version continues: “It doesn’t matter,” he would usually say at a time of difficulty. (See Here)]
I.
[This passage was deleted during the first stage of work on the typescript. It follows the words: Kozlov followed straight after him and, having distanced himself, said . . . (See Here)]
“Comrade Pashkin, there’s a Voshchev here—just joined up with us. He has a transcript from a document. He’s been ordered, as the saying says, to organize the meaning of life, but he’s digging the earth and he’s forgotten. You tell him—”
“I see no conflict here,” concluded Pashkin, and left Kozlov without consolation.
After Pashkin, Kozlov sat down to eat some liver with yesterday’s bread, which Safronov called not stale but merely cold. And the others also ate nourishment, in order to bring their own body to strength, and then to labor. Only Chiklin and Voshchev did not eat anything; Chiklin was to be found in the depth of the neighboring gully, while Voshchev was standing on the wasteland beside the foundation pit and listening to Red Army soldiers in the town singing one and the same song:
Sukhariki—chupchiki,
Chup-chi-ki . . .
He had heard that song back in his childhood; it had been sung by the soldiers of the Russo–Japanese War. Now too, people were singing it, and, the same as during that distant time, the sky was covered by misty heat, while the sun was shining desertedly over all the ancient unpeopled frailty of the earth. This meant that Voshchev was living his life in vain; his life was not changing, it was like a frozen childhood and in it there was no truth at the end. There in the field a hut could be seen—if anyone was living there, he was living elementally, not according to consciousness, and he could not organize a collective farm. The grief of the universal condition was beginning to torment Voshchev; he sensed the whole of external life just as he sensed his own innards, and now and then he made a hoarse sound in his throat, opening his mouth for announcement:
“Chiklin, where’s Marxism? All around are weak places and one empty, eternal time—my health will disappear again.”
“That’s just it,” said Chiklin. “What we need here is a building, but what lies here is empty space—like it or no
t, you get irritated by need. But we’ll manage, we’ll heap high all the emptiness.”
Voshchev looked at the low torso of Chiklin, which all its life had been wordlessly turning food into the digging of earthen pits, and he took a spade, so as to labor close to him. Kozlov, trying not to think and not to reckon life, was cutting the clay with a spade and putting it up on top; he would have liked not to feel either, in order to come back to himself only in the evening or in sleep. For Kozlov and all the workers sleep was almost their main life; there they saw the world already completed to the end, and what remained for them was a brief happiness of existence and slow breath in their chests. Often they would turn facedown in their sleep, in order to sleep tighter to the earth, deeper and more irrevocably. Kozlov would awake, as if deceived, and he would work the first hours in irritation, but with still less pity for himself, because nothing had yet been completed into being and it was possible he might die too early. When Kozlov grew weak from the clay, he would lose proletarian faith and head off inside the town, in order to write defamatory reports and to see to various conflicts with a view to organizational achievements.
[The final version continues: Right up until noon time passed without incident. (See Here)]
J.
[This passage was deleted while Platonov was working on the final version of the typescript. It follows the words: About two hours later Voshchev arrived with some samples from the drill holes. (See Here)]
“He, probably, knows the meaning of nature’s life,” Voshchev quietly thought of Prushevsky. Worn out by his consistent anguish, he asked, “You don’t happen to know why the world came to be, do you?”
Prushevsky dwelt his attention on Voshchev. “Are they going to be intelligentsia too?” he wondered. “Can we really be twins, both born of capitalism? My God, how boring his face is already!” [Platonov’s emphases]
“No,” replied Prushevsky.
“But you should have learned that—it seems they tried to teach you.”
“We were each just taught some dead part: I know clay, I know static mechanics and the heaviness of weight, but I don’t know machines well and I don’t know why the heart beats in an animal. They never explained to us the entire whole, or what lies inside.”
“In vain,” decreed Voshchev. “How come you’ve been alive for so long? Clay’s good enough for bricks, but it isn’t enough for you!”
[The final version continues: Prushevsky took hold of a sample of ground . . . (See Here)]
fn1. Natalya Duzhina has made a convincing case for these dates in Putevoditel’ po povesti A. Platonova “Kotlovan” (still, unfortunately, unpublished). Many previous publications, in Russian and other languages, date Platonov’s work on the novel wrongly. The confusion first arose because one of the typescripts bears the note: “December 1929–April 1930.” These dates, however, are written in another hand and were evidently intended to indicate not the period when Platonov worked on the novel but the period during which Total Collectivization was at its most frenzied. It is also worth noting that the action of The Foundation Pit takes place in a somewhat different time frame from that of the real events that inspired it: from summer to the beginning of winter, rather than winter and spring.
fn2. Throughout this passage Platonov seems to be alluding to Mark 2:23–28, the account of how the Pharisees reprimand the disciples for unlawfully plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath, and Christ in turn reprimands the Pharisees, saying: “The Sabbath was made for Man, and not Man for the Sabbath.” As often with Platonov’s biblical allusions, there is a reversal. Platonov’s rye hopes to be redeemed by Man; in the Gospel bread—or rather, God in the form of bread—redeems Man.
fn3. Under a system which was phased out from late 1929, there were seventeen different categories of workers; first category received the lowest pay, seventeenth category the highest. The average pay for workers on a building site was 130 rubles a month; Voshchev’s salary was extremely low.
FURTHER READING
The following translations of Platonov’s work are recommended:
Among Animals and Plants, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson (London: Pastoralia, 2008)
Happy Moscow, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler et al. (London: Harvill, 2001)
The Hurdy-Gurdy, trans. Susan Larsen, in Theater (Fall 1989)
The Portable Platonov, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler et al. (Moscow: Glas, 1999)
The Return, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone (London: Harvill, 1999)
Soul, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson (London: Harvill, 2003)
Soul and Other Stories, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler et al. (New York: NYRB Classics, 2007)
Two of Platonov’s best short stories are included in this anthology:
Robert Chandler, ed., Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (London: Penguin Classics, 2005)
This volume summarizes both the political and literary background to The Foundation Pit and Platonov’s own thinking:
Thomas Seifrid, A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009)
And the following provide more general historical background:
Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford, 1986)
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants (New York: Oxford, 1996)
John Scott, Behind the Urals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)
Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag (New York: Oxford, 2007)
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Copyright © The Estate of Andrey Platonov
English translation copyright © The Harvill Press 1996
Translation copyright © Robert Chandler 1996
Revised Translation copyright © Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson 2009
Afterword and Notes Copyright © Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson
This publication has been supported by The Arts Council of England
Originally published in Russian as Kotlovan by Ardis, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1973
First published in Russia in Novy mir, 1987
First published in Great Britain by The Harvill Press in 1996
This edition of the revised translation was first published by the New York Review of Books in 2009
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