Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit
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Written at the height of Stalin's first 'five-year plan' for the industrialisation of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivise Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's "The Foundation Pit" registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet 'production' novel, which is widely recognised as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.
Thomas Seifrid (Ph.D. Cornell University,1984) is Professor of Slavic Studies, University of Southern California. Author of Andrei Platonov. Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860-1930 (Cornell University Press, 2005), and numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.