The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.19 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 in it” (p. 7). Voshchev wanders onto the construction site of an “All-Proletarian Home” and enlists to dig its foundation. As utopian hopes for the Home increase among the weary workers, so must they increase the depth and dimensions of the foundation pit in order to support this structure, further exhausting their strength. Among other items, their excavations reveal a hundred coffins that had been stockpiled by a nearby village. The second half of the novel recounts violent bizarre episodes from the collectivization of peasants, ending on the death of Nastya, an orphaned little

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girl, the mascot and muse of the builders. They bury her deep down in the pit, almost in solid rock, so the earth can no longer harm her.

The Foundation Pit has been called a parody of the “Five-Year Plan novel” – novels that celebrate the accomplishments of a planned economy – and the parallels, or inversions, of the Stalinist industrial-production narrative are startlingly evident.20 Both The Foundation Pit and Cement depict building projects in the wilderness. The cast of characters in both includes party activists, labor enthusiasts, an old-regime specialist recruited to socialist labor, and a small martyred girl. Violence against class enemies is routine. Both feature “materialist” heroes in the sense of people who believe in the defining power of matter: Voshchev and the two Chumalovs. But there the similarities end. The cement factory rises and the All-Proletarian House sinks. That opposing movement along a single axis partakes of a larger, more disturbing difference in the economy of the two sites, which concerns the relationship between material things, energy flow, and language. In this novel, Platonov offers his alternative to the dynamic of “consciousness” versus “spontaneity” that underpins the official socialist realist worldview. We consider here only two episodes, common to both novels: an “expropriation scene,” and the death of a young child.

In Chapter 11 of Cement, a Party detachment arrives in town to strip the local bourgeois households of their surplus, round them up with their miserable bundles, and lecture them on the new state of affairs. “You’ve been living in palaces,” says Gleb, “now try huts for a while!” (p. 185). For all the grim-ness of the event, the scene radiates energy: the communist worker Lukhava strides up to the homeless families, his hair “fluttering like black flames”; “with flaming face, Polia ran up to Gleb” (p. 185). At the very moment of inventory, however, the Whites and Greens join forces and attack the factory. The Reds call an emergency meeting. Motion gives way to more motion. In this whirling knot of events, wealth is grabbed, redistributed, robbed, for a short time even produced – and in all these transactions we sense the dialectic so important to Maksim Gorky in his 1934 speech: in the New Russia, there will be no more superfluous people. Even the capitalists in their comfortable homes can be a source of goods, just as Engineer Kleist is a source of technical knowledge. Matter – energized through machines, guided by ideology, seized by revolutionaries and redistributed by committee – can transform life. The dialogues in Cement abound with slogans that promote the continuity between human and mechanical bodies. “Idleness and jabbering!” the engineer Brynza shouts to Gleb at the beginning of the factory reclamation project. “These are machines, and machines are not words; they’re hands and eyes!” (p. 17).

The death of Nyurka, the Chumalovs’ daughter, works another variant on the same task, that of “steeling” the body and controlling emotions. Part of

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