1) Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit (Котлован) is one single-chapter, 140 page book. WHO DOES THAT.
(Answer: Platonov. He was one of Olesha's contemporaries [of course he was], and managed to write things that no one could fit into any genre; Mirra Ginsburg called The Foundation Pit "a satirical tragedy," and Caryl E., "experimental fiction.")
…
2) Mirra Ginsburg's introduction, which is entirely helpful and lucid in many ways (I even highlighted a section on the general trends in Russian literature that aren't even directly relevant to Platonov!), includes a section on the character studies written in Foundation Pit. It ends with this passage:
"And finally the child – one of Platonov's many unforgettable portraits of children – almost a dream child this time, a daughter of the dead […], the child who represents the 'bright Communist future' for whose sake all the present activity is carried on, who learns and mouths revolutionary slogans until they sound like cruel taunts, and who, in the sorrowfully ironic climax of the book, dies as winter sets in […]"
I will ask again, WHO DOES THAT.
Look, I read introductions. I read authors' introductions, collectors' introductions, editors' introductions, translators' introductions, I even read (and revel in) fictional introductions. I know not everybody does. I get that. But they are there for a reason, especially in the case of translated or edited texts. And I don't mean "there" as in, published with the book, but "there" as in, BEFORE the freaking book begins. Not after. That's an Afterword. That is a thing, people.
DO NOT TELL ME what characters are going to die. Especially, especially, if that death is the crux of the sorrowfully ironic climax of the book. That's just cruel.
(more on The Foundation Pit and it's sorrowfully ironic climax after the jump)
So The Foundation Pit is an exceptionally weird book, which I say having just read Envy. I mean business here.
Author: Andrey Platonov, born "in the black earth belt some two hundred miles south of Moscow, the eldest son of a railway mechanic" in 1899. He came onto the scene in the 1920s, along with Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Babel, Pilnyak, Olesha, Zoshchenko and the rest, but differed from them in that "he was less European, less worldly, more Russian," having origins not in the middle class, but in a world of urban workers just recently emerged from the peasantry.
During his lifetime, Platonov was only ever able to publish short stories and poems in literary journals, and those not regularly. He was constantly barred from publication for a multitude of reasons, including that he showed "antisocial individualism, anticollectivism, pseudo-humanism, nihilism, kulak deviations, and anarchic hostility to the Soviet state." He escaped death during the purges, but his son was sent to Siberia for alleged plotting, and only returned home in time to die of tuberculosis.
Platonov himself volunteered to serves as a war correspondent during WWII, and was rather prolific, but the story he wrote about soldierly life after returning home was met with new vitriol, and he was relegated to publishing only folk tales rewritten in a mandated pro-Stalinist mode until his death in 1951, after years of poverty and illness.
Date of publication: Would you believe me if I said not in his lifetime? Imagine that. Written over a four-month period between 1929 and 1930, The Foundation Pit only existed in manuscript form until samizdat networks got it over the borders and published in the émigré journal Grani in Germany in 1968. It wasn't published in Russia until 1987, when Novy Mir finally took it on.
Why this matters: Platonov is not a name that any literary tradition is built on, at least not until recently. While he did publish some stories and essays in his lifetime, his participation in the early Soviet literary scene was too spotty to make an impression on the public, and his "rehabilitation" after Stalin's death, which began only in 1958, tried to put him in the "framework of the usual clichés, seeking to show that, despite some errors, he really was 'one of us'."
After the 1980s, however, with the publication of his longer works, Platonov became the object of a certain kind of veneration, with people from all philosophical and political walks claiming him as наш, or "ours." Anyone at all versed in Russian literature or culture recognizes that concept. Russians want nothing if it is not able to be наш in some way. In any case, looking at Platonov, especially in the context of the time in which he was writing, is interesting, in that while he wrote in that landscape, his work is not ultimately a part of it, not in the same way as the rest of it is. The Foundation Pit is as much a product of glasnost as it is of the heady days of the early USSR.
Especially telling is a quote from Evtushenko (gross shiver) on the back cover:
"There is not an educated reader in the USSR who does not know Platonov, and not a single professional writer alive in this country who would not pay tribute to his mastery."
So what is this novel about, anyway?: A great many things. According to Mirra Ginsburg, "it is a cautionary tale, a philosophic inquiry, a political grotesque, a symbolic portrait of a society and a period, and a fragmented self-portrait – a work of many facets and marvelous inventiveness. […] Through abstraction, Platonov achieves universality. Every man becomes Everyman or a facet of Everyman, and the novel assumes a larger than life, almost legendary quality." She also dwells on the word absurd.
And according to the back flap: Set in a small Russian town during the First Five-Year Plan and the forcible collectivization of agriculture, Platonov's surrealist masterpiece portrays a group of workmen and local bureaucrats engaged in digging the foundation pit for what is to become a grand "general" building where all the town's inhabitants will live happily and "in silence." A brilliant tour de force of narrative and stylistic invention, and a dark satire on Stalin's "reforms," the novel reflects Platonov's deep despair about the Soviet world and regret for its early promise.
Main characters?: Ah, well. Most of them die. Just saying. But, again according to Ginsburg, "Mirroring the cruel shambles to which revolution and human will (in all its complexities and motivations) have reduced life, Platonov […] plays, almost musically, endless variations on character, needs, goals and situations within this central theme of the absurd."
The characters she labels as most important are:
Voshchev, who the novel opens on, a pathetic dreamer who loses his job at the factory for thinking to much instead of working, and who wanders into the next town and ends up on the pit digging team by chance, and who collects bits of the earth and remnants of "liquidated" kulaks into sacks to be cataloged and pondered on, and who is endlessly in search for the truth behind life.
Prushevsky, the depressed "intellectual" engineer, who is alone in life and whose sister doesn't write, and who constantly plans to just lay down and die, for there is no thought and no life to be worth anything anymore.
Chiklin, whose fist is like a sledgehammer, and who works and works without thinking, and is a staunch supporter of the proletarian cause, punching (sometimes to DEATH) anyone who is scum bourgeoisie or who he thinks might only be faking their devotion to the cause (see: various peasants, see: reformed priest, see: unfortunate activist). He adopts the little girl, Nastya, after he sees her mother die on the abandoned factory floor, and carves the foundation pit wider and deeper in his grief at her death.
Zhachev, the imperialist cripple, who shares Chiklin's zeal for beating on non-proletarians and protecting the girl, and who knows himself to be part of the old world order, just building the new world for Nastya's generation to grow into.
Pashkin, the grey, stooped bureaucrat who is unique in having a wife (and a jealous one, at that, for all the lack of women there seem to be in socialized society), who is only telling everyone their work is not efficient enough whenever he visits the pit.
Kozlov, another pathetic character, who is a "stickler" for the correct, mocked by everyone else on the workforce, and who rises in rank only to be murdered (alongside the crew leader Safronov) by a peasant later on. Who is then murdered by other proletarians on the street. And who is buried alongside his victims, and a second peasant, who all but begged for Chiklin to punch him to death to join them.
Nastya, the young girl already mentioned above, who is adorably awful and says things like: "Liquidate the kulak as a class. Long live Lenin, Kozlov, and Safronov! Regards to the poor kolkhoz, but not to the kulaks."
There is also a smithy bear. I have no idea how fantastical that is meant to be; I know little of bear husbandry in revolutionary Russia. But I am certain the bear in the narrative is intended to be taken as a very real bear. Who, incidentally, hammers out wheel irons and beats up kulaks and cares for Nastya like a human.
Bears, anyone? Anyone?
According to Caryl: "Platonov's two great themes are the persistence of inert matter and the weariness of the working body. In The Foundation Pit, both of these 'gravitational pulls' prevail over human life. The very language of the narrator is thick, languid, rich in associations, weighed down. We learn in the opening paragraph that the protagonist Voshchev is an outcast, expelled from the machine factory because of his 'tendency to stop and think,' which interrupted the general pace of work. A traditional Russian wanderer, an ascetic and a seeker, he has also absorbed the new Soviet builder's cosmic ambitions: he 'could no longer strive and walk along the road without knowing the exact construction of the whole world and what a man must seek of it."
and, regarding entropic scenes like the dance party after the kulaks are dispatched down the river,
"The cumulative effect of these entropic scenes in Platonov is mesmerizing and suggests that his materialism was of an entirely original, non-dialectical sort. Such a message was not welcome during the Stalinist era of heroic achievements. Matter, Platonov suggests, is not so easy to mobilize or control, nor can mere words energize it. Energy flows slowed through it than we suppose and cannot be stored reliably in it."
Most telling quotation?:
"Are you happy now, comrades?" asked Chiklin.
"We are," came back from the whole Orgyard (organized yard). "We don't feel nothing now, and there's nothing but ashes left inside us."
Cheery.
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