Written at the height of Stalin's first «five-year plan» for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize 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 recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an...
