Heedless of Brodsky's warning, the book's translators, Robert ChandlerĪnd Geoffrey Smith, have given us a grim, readable Platonov whose most familiar neighbor, in apocalyptic sensibility, is Samuel Beckett. When the worker Voshchev is fired from his job for,Īmong other things, ''thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor,'' he is caught like a mouse in this brutal new Soviet rhetoric. The truth of all existence.'' Platonov, who died in 1951, parodies the cruelty of the era's collectivization campaign, mimicking and refracting its banal catch phrases. Their labor is more than manual, for they seek to dig to the bottom of ''this buried world that had concealed within its darkness Workers dig the foundation pit for an enormous dwelling to be called the All-Proletarian Home. In this nihilistic allegory, completed in 1930 but not published in the Soviet Union until 1987, ''The Foundation Pit'' distresses the Russian language, showing it splayed and shattered by the demands of revolution. Counting Andrei Platonov among the greatest Russian prose writers of this century, Joseph Brodsky considered him to be ''quite untranslatable, and, in one sense, that's a good thing: for the language into which he cannot be translated.'' Platonovs dystopian novel describes the lives of a group of Soviet workers who believe they are laying the foundations for a radiant future.
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