"Exist, You Bastards--For Now!"
Andrei Platonov’s experimental apocalyptic novel about the collectivization of the Soviet countryside should remind readers of today of what can happen when social reform, no matter how needed, takes precedence over people.
By Eve Tushnet
Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, written in 1930–1, is a short apocalyptic novel in which bears are proletarians and politics can turn even the Russian winter into summer. It’s a carnivalesque, experimental work in which language is distorted all the way down to the grammatical bedrock, opening the way for mass killing to be justified by the placement of a comma. It’s also a rare firsthand literary account of the collectivization of the countryside under Joseph Stalin. The Foundation Pit shows nature, language, hierarchy, the economy, and the body, all pliant in the hands of ideology—this was the hope of the Soviet project, that the world could be remade.
The novel interweaves two halting plotlines: In a field, workers are digging out the titular pit; in a nearby village, officials are ferreting out “kulaks” (the ever-expanding category of “rich peasants”) and rounding them up for exile. The pit is supposed to hold the foundation of a giant communal home in which the proletariat can live in safety and harmony. It won’t get finished. By contrast, the kulaks will indeed be denounced, herded, and sent away, probably to their deaths—although the unexpected ritual they enact before they leave will make their exile far less satisfying than the Communists had hoped. Throughout the novel, characters move easily from the pit to the village and back, sometimes pursuing private projects along the way, including the rescue of an orphaned child called Nastya.
Pit was published in a bowdlerized form outside the Soviet Union in 1969 and within it in 1987; it has only been available in its complete form since 1994. In 2009 it was reissued by the New York Review of Books in a translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson. Their notes give historical context, letting readers see just how little Platonov had to twist a reality which already followed the logic of nightmares.
Platonov (a pseudonym taken from his patronymic) was already a literary figure when he began working in land reclamation for the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture in 1921. His job sent him throughout the Soviet countryside during the most intense periods of collectivization, including the period now known as the Terror Famine. Platonov was a true believer in the Revolution, but his literary work trades in ambiguities and half-spoken thoughts. The Foundation Pit is not quite a satire of life under totalitarianism, not quite a picaresque. It has the high hilarity of despair and the grim discipline of hope.
The pit in the title is one of the great literary buildings, worthy of standing alongside Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinths and libraries. It’s also a punchline: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the Tower of Babel—you can’t even get there! Most of the characters in Platonov’s novel are supposed to be building a giant communal home for the proletariat. But instead of striking upward at the heavens, the pit expands endlessly, a devouring horizontal hell. In Uncle Joe’s house are many mansions, and all will have a place… but for right now, I think we need to make the pit a little bigger.
Platonov captures the romantic thrill of revolutionary belief.
The novel’s other setting is the collective farm near the pit. This farm and its village are where most of the apocalyptic events occur. While the actual collectivization Platonov described took place from the winter of 1929 into the spring, he changes the setting to take his characters from the summer mowing down into winter—a winter in which heat hangs above the fields, and fat summer flies buzz, because all the animals lie slaughtered on the melting snow.
Much of the book’s humor comes from the jargon of the day, and the deadly, whiplash-inducing changes in the Party line, which can reverse itself within the course of a single order. Horses collectivize, roosters manifest, little girls get organized. Platonov uses clunky, weird Russian, which the translators render into clunky, weird English: “‘Give them all back!’ the man said from out of himself, as if out of rubbish”; “[L]et me organize myself close to you!”; “some boring peasant … died in person.” These Rube Goldberg locutions suggest a language repurposed from scrap material by somebody new on the job. Platonov insistently describes characters as “lonely” and “bored,” as if these are the only two emotions left—or as if they are the only acceptable terms for reactionary emotions like sorrow, nostalgia, regret, and despair.
But wasted lives, bureaucratic jargon, and even distorted language are things anyone could write about. What gives The Foundation Pit its distinctive flavor is that Platonov shares—or shared, since his own position as author remains ambiguous—the dream of the Soviet Union. Again and again his characters think of the children, the future generation who must be “orphaned” (a term which comes up again and again) in order to live pure socialism. One child in particular represents the violent innocence of the revolutionary generation. This is the girl Nastya.
Nastya (short for Anastasia—as the translators note, a name meaning “resurrected”) was found beside her dying mother, a bourgeois woman. The mother’s body is so starved and frozen that her legs have become covered in downy fur like that of an animal. (When bears are proletarians, maybe the bourgeoisie must grow fur.) When her mother dies, Nastya is taken in by the crew at the foundation pit. And here she becomes an ideal revolutionary. She says things like, “…I didn’t want to get myself born—I was afraid my mother would be a bourgeois.” When a kulak is condemned, the little girl notes, “Bastards like him make life boring.”
Platonov captures the romantic thrill of revolutionary belief: “Youth was nothing to [a young village woman], her own happiness was nothing to her—close by she could feel a hurtling, ardent movement… and now she was standing and asking to be taught these words, to be taught to feel the whole world’s light in her head so that she could help it to shine.” But he also depicts the morning-after of this political ecstasy. Nastya’s fervor becomes a literal and deadly fever. In the end, in a scene of aching tenderness, the foundation pit at last reveals its true destiny as Nastya’s tomb.
We today long for the same transformations for which Platonov longed. We long for a home for everyone, care for all children, harmony with nature.
Death hangs over the novel like that winter-summer haze of flies. The villagers insist on keeping one last possession: their own coffins. Nastya takes one of these coffins for her bed and another for a toybox. Voshchev, the closest thing the book has to a hero, seeks to “know the fundamental arrangement of the whole world”—longing for a truth so abstract as to be ridiculous. Voshchev collects and cherishes useless things. Although Voshchev insists that “inner meaning would have improved productivity,” his tenderness toward “objects of unhappiness and obscurity” suggests a conviction that truth and consciousness are most precious where they’re least useful. Voshchev is also a stand-in for the author, writing a book he won’t be able to publish, piling up strange abandoned trifles until they make a tomb.
The novel’s most haunting scene is the kulaks’ farewell. These “rich peasants,” who were really sent to death or exile in an ever-expanding purge, are not heroes. Back in the bad old days, they beat Misha the proletarian bear. But now he toddles through the village sniffing out their houses, and when he comes to the house of a class enemy, he roars. The rounded-up kulaks will be sent away on a raft, to nowhere in particular.
The night before the kulaks get on the raft they do something taken from the recurring reality, in which eternity penetrates and reinterprets time, of the Orthodox liturgy. On the last Sunday before Great Lent, Orthodox believers, in Platonov’s day and our own, celebrate Forgiveness Vespers. Each person goes to every other person asking forgiveness and receiving the ritual reassurance, “God forgives and I forgive. Forgive me, a sinner.” Or, as Platonov describes it:
“Wait a moment,” said Chiklin. “Let them say farewell to one another until the life to come.” …
Each one began to kiss an entire queue of people, embracing a body that had until then been alien, and all their lips sadly and lovingly kissed each person.
“Farewell, Aunt Darya, and forgive me! Don’t hold it against me that I burned your barn down.”
“God will forgive, Alyosha. Anyway the barn no longer belongs to me.” …
“Farewell, Yegor. We lived cruelly, but we end according to conscience.”
After the kissing, they all bowed down to the ground, each in front of everyone, and then got back onto their feet, free and empty now in their hearts.
This is a useless thing, like Voschchev’s crumpled leaves. It doesn’t change the material realities. It doesn’t avert anybody’s fate and it isn’t the same as reparation. The scene has a whiff of nostalgia—the last farewell—and a whiff of apocalypse—the revelation of a hidden truth.
The Foundation Pit is a document of a particular time and place. As the notes point out, some of its most surreal and horrifying episodes are all but literally “ripped from the headlines” of the early ’30s. But its reissue by the NYRB is more than an obeisance to historical memory. We today long for the same transformations for which Platonov longed. We long for a home for everyone, care for all children, harmony with nature. Climate change has perhaps made Platonov’s phantasmagoric imagery all the more appealing, as we begin to suspect that not solely our actions or even our systems must be transformed but we ourselves. We, too, espalier our language in the hope of making it bear more fruit, though we rarely achieve more than distortion. We, too, seek harmony and end up grimly exercising violent control. We, too, love our neighbor—and we’ll destroy anybody who stands in the way of our guillotine love. Platonov corrects our own time by the intensity of his pity for the innocent—and for the guilty.
The Russian for “farewell” here is the same as saying, Forgive me.
The Foundation Pit is not a simple cautionary tale in which the overthrow of the old order is a fall from grace. Platonov even emphasizes, in incidents such as the personal history of the proletarian bear, how violent and unjust the prerevolutionary world was. He remembers how much he hungered for its transformation. And yet in all the novel’s metamorphoses—mother into fur-bearing animal, bear into proletarian, winter into summer, home into coffin, and coffin into home—the only transformation which offers some hope is the forgiveness vespers of the kulaks.
Nastya is humanity, small and helpless and destroyed by the innocence which made her so precious. But the kulaks are also humanity: complicit, criminal even, suddenly forced to acknowledge their need for mercy and, in their extremity, willing to give it. The raft is the opposite of the foundation pit. (It’s completed, for one thing.) It’s crammed with humanity, whereas the foundation pit is empty save for one small body. It travels endlessly through a hostile environment, whereas the pit turns its environment into itself. The raft is the home of the revolution’s enemies and the pit is intended for its heroes. They have one great similarity: They’re both coffins. And yet they also have one great difference: In the foundation pit an innocent is buried; on the raft, the guilty are reborn.
Platonov writes, “Liquidating the kulaks into the distance brought [the veteran] Zhachev no calm; he even felt worse, though it was not clear why.” He calls after the raft, “Fa-are we-ell, parasites!”
“‘Fa-are we-ell,’ responded the kulaks sailing off to the sea.”
The Russian for “farewell” here is the same as saying, Forgive me.
G.K. Chesterton has this bit about a little red-headed girl:
With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization.
Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.
What takes The Foundation Pit beyond surreal satire, and suffuses it with pity, is that Platonov knows the force of Chesterton’s point. Nastya is a lacerating, accidental rejoinder: The little girl deserved a world turned upside-down, and all that her revolution gave her was a pit in the earth.
Eve Tushnet is the author of Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith, as well as two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story. She lives in Washington, DC.