Andrey Platonov (1899—1951) was born in a village near the
Russian town of Voronezh. He began to publish poems and stories in
the 1920s and worked as a land reclamation expert in central
Russia, where he was a witness to the ravages of the Great Famine.
In the 1930s Platonov fell into disfavor with the Soviet government
and his writing disappeared from sight. NYRB Classics published a
new translation of Soul and Other Stories in 2007.
.
Robert Chandler has translated selections of Sappho and
Apollinaire and is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin
to Buida. His translations from Russian include Pushkin's Dubrovsky
and The Captain’s Daughter, Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway.
His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes in the UK
and the US. His Alexander Pushkin is published by Hesperus in their
series of ‘Brief Lives’. He teaches part time at Queen Mary,
University of London.
Elizabeth Chandler is a co-translator of several volumes of
Platonov and of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter.
Olga Meerson teaches at Georgetown University and is the
author of Dostoevsky’s Taboos (in English) and Platonov's Poetic of
Re-Familiarization (in Russian). She is a co-translator of
Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, which, in 2004, was awarded the
AATSEEL prize for "best translation from a Slavonic language".
"I squint back on our century and I see six writers I think it will
be remembered for. They are Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka,
Robert Musil, William Faulkner, Andrey Platonov and Samuel
Beckett.... They are summits in the literary landscape of our
century ... What's more, they don't lose an inch of their status
when compared to the giants of fiction from the previous
century."—Joseph Brodsky“Hallucinatory and terrifying and filled
with incredible language, this is Platonov’s finest.”
—Flavorwire“The most exciting literary discovery I made this past
year was Andrey Platonov… his reputation has grown to the
point that he is frequently considered the greatest Russian prose
writer of the twentieth century. His masterpiece is The
Foundation Pit, which boils all the utopianism and horror of the
forced collectivization and industrialization of the early 1930s
into 150 tightly written…. English-speaking readers are lucky to
have the superb translation by Robert
Chandler and Olga Meerson, published last year by New
York Review Books…. Platonov’s brilliant short works can be sampled
in the collection Soul, also published by NYRB.” —The
Millions
"Andrey Platonov has not yet received the attention he richly
deserves here...[he] turns out to be one of the finest writers of
the 20th century, worthy to stand alongside Kafka and Joyce." --The
Arts Fuse "He has been described as the greatest Russian
writer of the 20th century, but some of his most controversial
works, written between 1927 and 1932, were not published in the
Soviet Union until the 1980s. Platonov's The Foundation Pit is a
satirical response to Stalin's programme of crash industrialisation
and collectivisation." –Guardian "Platonov's writing can
retain enormous power in English...The foreign reader can also now
begin to get an idea of the shape of Platonov's development as a
writer. The Foundation Pit, written at the time of the brutal
collectivization campaign of the late 1920s, plays out an image of
equally brutal directness–a construction site on which nothing ever
gets built. The pit just gets wider and deeper until it comes to
represent a grave - of Stalinism's Promethean ambitions, and of the
author's political idealism. The effect on the reader is almost
physically winding." –The Moscow Times "Acclaimed by Joseph
Brodsky as one of the great Russian writers of the twentieth
century, Andrey Platonov comes with a formidable reputation,
matched only by his relative obscurity." –The Observer
(London) "Andrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer
to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union. Born in 1899,
one of a railway worker's 10 children, he was an engineer, a party
member and a model proletarian writer before doubts about
Communism, and his literary imagination, landed him in trouble with
Stalin. His work stopped being published in the early 1930s and
only resurfaced 40 years after his death in 1951...The Foundation
Pit will stand out as his masterpiece." –The Independent
(London) "In Platonov's prose, it is impossible to find a
single dull or inelegant sentence... For Platonov's work testifies
to the only political responsibility owed by any writer to any
reader: to describe the world as faithfully, and as compellingly,
as possible. Platonov deserves to be published; he rewards being
read." –The Times (London) "In Russian writer Andrei
Platonov's novel The Foundation Pit, written in 1930 but not
published in Russia until 1987, the characters must struggle not
only with the interminable Soviet works project of the title, but
with strange spiritual maladies...One of the most deeply original
writers of the 20th century." –The National Post "Nearly all
his work is rooted in a particular place and time, and it is hard
to think of another writer who so expertly animated the sadness and
unease of the Soviet period. His fiction, at its best, has the
timeless quality of parable or folklore." –New
Statesman "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.' The Foundation
Pit distresses the Russian language, showing it splayed and
shattered by the demands of revolution. In this nihilistic
allegory, completed in 1930 but not published in the Soviet Union
until 1987, workers dig the foundation pit for an enormous dwelling
to be called the All-Proletarian Home...a grim, readable Platonov
whose most familiar neighbor, in apocalyptic sensibility, is Samuel
Beckett." –The New York Times "Andrey Platonov is one of
Russia's greatest modernist scribes. Like his fellow
science-fiction writer Yevgeny Zamyatin - author of the astonishing
futurist novel We, published in the 20s - he was also among that
tortured country's most prescient literary artists...The Foundation
Pit, written in 1930 and now published for the first time in
English, is his most striking attempt to convey the extreme
estrangement suffered by ordinary people as collectivisation in
agriculture proceeded across the USSR...one of the most prophetic
nihilistic tales of this ruined century." –The West
Australian "Completed in 1930 but unpublished during his
lifetime, Platonov's masterpiece, a scathing satire of the Soviet
attempt to build a workers' utopia, gauges the vast human tragedy
of Stalinism, portraying a society organized and regimented around
a monstrous lie, and thus bereft of meaning, hope, integrity,
humanity...His dark parable is a great dirge for Mother Russia as
well as a savage analysis of the split consciousness fostered by an
oppressive system. Platonov's books are still being unearthed in
Russia decades after his death." –Publishers Weekly "Andrey
Platonov's absurdist parable The Foundation Pit is a masterly
achievement...Much of the genius of The Foundation Pit lies in
Platonov's objective style and the lively invariably abusive
dialogue, contrasting with oddly moving, isolated asides of brittle
beauty. It is a Russian Waiting for Godot crossed with Lewis
Carroll and Maxim Gorky - there is even a bear working as an
apprentice blacksmith, frantically making horseshoes as if there
were no tomorrow. And in this book, there isn't. According to the
late Joseph Brodsky, Platonov 'simply had a tendency to see his
words to their logical - that is absurd, that is totally paralyzing
end. In other words, like no other Russian writer before or after
him Platonov was able to reveal a self destructive, eschatological
element within the language itself.' The Foundation Pit is
extraordinary: strange, almost abrupt, a hallucinatory, nightmarish
parable of hysterical laughter and terrifying silences." –The Irish
Times "These books are indescribable. The power of devastation
they inflict upon their subject matter exceeds by far any demands
of social criticism and should be measured in units that have very
little to do with literature as such." –Joseph Brodsky “A
20th-century Russian masterpiece...The Foundation Pit is a savage
satire on collectivisation, a nightmarish vision of humanity
trapped by the infernal machinery of totalitarianism...Platonov's
grimly comic vision of a brave new world is as universal in its
implications as any other account of a hellish utopia our century
has produced..the dance of madness in The Foundation Pit is
articulated as the suppression of anything human - sorrow and joy,
hope and despair." –The Sydney Morning Herald "Like Candide,
Platonov's novel is a plotless allegory of human striving...The
forced industrialisation of Russia, which began in 1928 and is the
historical background of The Foundation Pit, left an estimated
15.2m dead. Even if one considers Platonov's masterpiece merely as
a conte philosophique, one may note that his model universe was
more amply observed than Voltaire's. He was also a writer perhaps
the only writer to have advanced Russian prose beyond what had been
achieved by Chekhov not a philosopher in literary disguise..." –The
Times (London) "Brilliant...Obviously a masterpiece." –Paul
Theroux “Perhaps the only writer to have advanced Russian
prose beyond what had been achieved by Chekhov.” –The Times
(London) “One of Russia’s most insistent and valuable
dissident voices.” –Los Angeles Times “Among the greatest
Russian prose writers of this century.” –New York Times “In
Russia it is Platonov who is increasingly described as the best
writer of the post-revolutionary epoch.” –Times Literary Supplement
(London)
Completed in 1930 but unpublished during his lifetime, Platonov’s
masterpiece, a scathing satire of the Soviet attempt to build a
workers’ utopia, gauges the vast human tragedy of Stalinism,
portraying a society organized and regimented around a monstrous
lie, and thus bereft of meaning, hope, integrity, humanity...His
dark parable is a great dirge for Mother Russia as well as a savage
analysis of the split consciousness fostered by an oppressive
system. Platonov’s books are still being unearthed in Russia
decades after his death.
— Publishers Weekly
In Russia it is Platonov who is increasingly described as the best
writer of the post-revolutionary epoch.
ndrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be
rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union. Born in 1899, one
of a railway worker’s 10 children, he was an engineer, a party
member and a model proletarian writer before doubts about
Communism, and his literary imagination, landed him in trouble with
Stalin. His work stopped being published in the early 1930s and
only resurfaced 40 years after his death in 1951...The Foundation
Pit will stand out as his masterpiece.
— The Independent (London)
Completed in 1930 but unpublished during his lifetime, Platonov's masterpiece, a scathing satire of the Soviet attempt to build a workers' utopia, gauges the vast human tragedy of Stalinism, portraying a society organized and regimented around a monstrous lie, and thus bereft of meaning, hope, integrity, humanity. The novel's central image is the digging of an immense foundation pit for a communal high-rise project to house the local proletariat, a project that remains a big hole. The story is also eerily prescient: as Chandler notes in his valuable introduction, it foreshadows the doomed Palace of Soviets, which was begun in Moscow in 1932 but never built after years of excavation. Loaded with irony and images of the walking dead, and spiked with mordant digs at Soviet conformity and bureaucracy, Platonov's somnambulistic nightmare is filled with characters cut off from normal human feelings and reality as they convince themselves that party slogans, precepts and careerist hustling are meaningful keys to the future. Platonov (1899-1951), himself a disillusioned revolutionary who fought in the Red Army during Russia's civil war, was also a deep lyric prose-poet of everyday life and nature, as revealed in this beautiful translation. His dark parable is a great dirge for Mother Russia as well as a savage analysis of the split consciousness fostered by an oppressive system. Platonov's books are still being unearthed in Russia decades after his death. The first English translations of The Foundation Pit came out in the 1980s, but has since been found to be incomplete. (Nov.)
"I squint back on our century and I see six writers I think it
will be remembered for. They are Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Robert
Musil, William Faulkner, Andrey Platonov and Samuel Beckett....
They are summits in the literary landscape of our century ...
What's more, they don't lose an inch of their status when compared
to the giants of fiction from the previous century."-Joseph
Brodsky"Hallucinatory and terrifying and filled with incredible
language, this is Platonov's finest." -Flavorwire"The most
exciting literary discovery I made this past year was Andrey
Platonov... his reputation has grown to the point that he is
frequently considered the greatest Russian prose writer of the
twentieth century. His masterpiece is The Foundation Pit, which
boils all the utopianism and horror of the forced collectivization
and industrialization of the early 1930s into 150 tightly
written.... English-speaking readers are lucky to have the superb
translation by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson, published last
year by New York Review Books.... Platonov's brilliant short works
can be sampled in the collection Soul, also published by NYRB."
-The Millions
"Andrey Platonov has not yet received the attention he richly
deserves here...[he] turns out to be one of the finest writers of
the 20th century, worthy to stand alongside Kafka and Joyce." --The
Arts Fuse "He has been described as the greatest Russian writer of
the 20th century, but some of his most controversial works, written
between 1927 and 1932, were not published in the Soviet Union until
the 1980s. Platonov's The Foundation Pit is a satirical response to
Stalin's programme of crash industrialisation and
collectivisation." -Guardian "Platonov's writing can retain
enormous power in English...The foreign reader can also now begin
to get an idea of the shape of Platonov's development as a writer.
The Foundation Pit, written at the time of the brutal
collectivization campaign of the late 1920s, plays out an image of
equally brutal directness-a construction site on which nothing ever
gets built. The pit just gets wider and deeper until it comes to
represent a grave - of Stalinism's Promethean ambitions, and of the
author's political idealism. The effect on the reader is almost
physically winding." -The Moscow Times "Acclaimed by Joseph Brodsky
as one of the great Russian writers of the twentieth century,
Andrey Platonov comes with a formidable reputation, matched only by
his relative obscurity." -The Observer (London) "Andrey
Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered
since the end of the Soviet Union. Born in 1899, one of a railway
worker's 10 children, he was an engineer, a party member and a
model proletarian writer before doubts about Communism, and his
literary imagination, landed him in trouble with Stalin. His work
stopped being published in the early 1930s and only resurfaced 40
years after his death in 1951...The Foundation Pit will
stand out as his masterpiece." -The Independent (London) "In
Platonov's prose, it is impossible to find a single dull or
inelegant sentence... For Platonov's work testifies to the only
political responsibility owed by any writer to any reader: to
describe the world as faithfully, and as compellingly, as possible.
Platonov deserves to be published; he rewards being read." -The
Times (London) "In Russian writer Andrei Platonov's novel
The Foundation Pit, written in 1930 but not published in
Russia until 1987, the characters must struggle not only with the
interminable Soviet works project of the title, but with strange
spiritual maladies...One of the most deeply original writers of the
20th century." -The National Post "Nearly all his work is rooted
in a particular place and time, and it is hard to think of another
writer who so expertly animated the sadness and unease of the
Soviet period. His fiction, at its best, has the timeless quality
of parable or folklore." -New Statesman "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.' The Foundation Pit distresses the
Russian language, showing it splayed and shattered by the demands
of revolution. In this nihilistic allegory, completed in 1930 but
not published in the Soviet Union until 1987, workers dig the
foundation pit for an enormous dwelling to be called the
All-Proletarian Home...a grim, readable Platonov whose most
familiar neighbor, in apocalyptic sensibility, is Samuel Beckett."
-The New York Times "Andrey Platonov is one of Russia's greatest
modernist scribes. Like his fellow science-fiction writer Yevgeny
Zamyatin - author of the astonishing futurist novel We, published
in the 20s - he was also among that tortured country's most
prescient literary artists...The Foundation Pit, written in
1930 and now published for the first time in English, is his most
striking attempt to convey the extreme estrangement suffered by
ordinary people as collectivisation in agriculture proceeded across
the USSR...one of the most prophetic nihilistic tales of this
ruined century." -The West Australian "Completed in 1930 but
unpublished during his lifetime, Platonov's masterpiece, a scathing
satire of the Soviet attempt to build a workers' utopia, gauges the
vast human tragedy of Stalinism, portraying a society organized and
regimented around a monstrous lie, and thus bereft of meaning,
hope, integrity, humanity...His dark parable is a great dirge for
Mother Russia as well as a savage analysis of the split
consciousness fostered by an oppressive system. Platonov's books
are still being unearthed in Russia decades after his death."
-Publishers Weekly "Andrey Platonov's absurdist parable The
Foundation Pit is a masterly achievement...Much of the genius
of The Foundation Pit lies in Platonov's objective style and
the lively invariably abusive dialogue, contrasting with oddly
moving, isolated asides of brittle beauty. It is a Russian
Waiting for Godot crossed with Lewis Carroll and Maxim Gorky
- there is even a bear working as an apprentice blacksmith,
frantically making horseshoes as if there were no tomorrow. And in
this book, there isn't. According to the late Joseph Brodsky,
Platonov 'simply had a tendency to see his words to their logical -
that is absurd, that is totally paralyzing end. In other words,
like no other Russian writer before or after him Platonov was able
to reveal a self destructive, eschatological element within the
language itself.' The Foundation Pit is extraordinary:
strange, almost abrupt, a hallucinatory, nightmarish parable of
hysterical laughter and terrifying silences." -The Irish Times
"These books are indescribable. The power of devastation they
inflict upon their subject matter exceeds by far any demands of
social criticism and should be measured in units that have very
little to do with literature as such." -Joseph Brodsky "A
20th-century Russian masterpiece...The Foundation Pit is a
savage satire on collectivisation, a nightmarish vision of humanity
trapped by the infernal machinery of
totalitarianism...Platonov's grimly comic vision of a brave
new world is as universal in its implications as any other account
of a hellish utopia our century has produced..the dance of madness
in The Foundation Pit is articulated as the suppression of
anything human - sorrow and joy, hope and despair." -The Sydney
Morning Herald "Like Candide, Platonov's novel is a plotless
allegory of human striving...The forced industrialisation of
Russia, which began in 1928 and is the historical background of The
Foundation Pit, left an estimated 15.2m dead. Even if one considers
Platonov's masterpiece merely as a conte philosophique, one may
note that his model universe was more amply observed than
Voltaire's. He was also a writer perhaps the only writer to have
advanced Russian prose beyond what had been achieved by Chekhov not
a philosopher in literary disguise..." -The Times (London)
"Brilliant...Obviously a masterpiece." -Paul Theroux "Perhaps the
only writer to have advanced Russian prose beyond what had been
achieved by Chekhov." -The Times (London) "One of Russia's most
insistent and valuable dissident voices." -Los Angeles Times "Among
the greatest Russian prose writers of this century." -New York
Times "In Russia it is Platonov who is increasingly described as
the best writer of the post-revolutionary epoch." -Times Literary
Supplement (London)
Completed in 1930 but unpublished during his lifetime, Platonov's
masterpiece, a scathing satire of the Soviet attempt to build a
workers' utopia, gauges the vast human tragedy of Stalinism,
portraying a society organized and regimented around a monstrous
lie, and thus bereft of meaning, hope, integrity, humanity...His
dark parable is a great dirge for Mother Russia as well as a savage
analysis of the split consciousness fostered by an oppressive
system. Platonov's books are still being unearthed in Russia
decades after his death.
- Publishers Weekly
In Russia it is Platonov who is increasingly described as the best
writer of the post-revolutionary epoch.
ndrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be
rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union. Born in 1899, one
of a railway worker's 10 children, he was an engineer, a party
member and a model proletarian writer before doubts about
Communism, and his literary imagination, landed him in trouble with
Stalin. His work stopped being published in the early 1930s and
only resurfaced 40 years after his death in 1951...The Foundation
Pit will stand out as his masterpiece.
- The Independent (London)
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