Read more
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 overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.
List of contents
Chapter One: Platonov's Life. Chapter Two: Intellectual Influences on Platonov. Chapter Three: The Literary Context of The Foundation Pit. Chapter Four: The Political Context of The Foundation Pit. Chapter Five: The Foundation Pit Itself. The generic context of Platonov's tale: the production novel. Platonov's refraction of the production novel in The Foundation Pit. Principal characters. Important symbols - The proletarian home / tower. Excavation. The language of Platonov's text. Selected annotations of events and situations in The Foundation Pit. Index.
About the author
Thomas Seifrid (Ph.D. Cornell University,1984) is Professor of Slavic Studies, University of Southern California. Author of Andrei Platonov. Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860-1930 (Cornell University Press, 2005), and numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.
Summary
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.
