The Chandlers have brilliantly dealt with the challenges of rendering into readable English the extraordinary quality of Platonov's prose. 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 Irish Times 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. 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. Platonov managed to make the miseries of forced industrialization into a story as gripping as anything in Dickens, as moving and as artful John Bayley, Times Literary SupplementĪndrey 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. The Foundation Pit will stand out as his masterpiece Independent His work stopped being published in the early 1930s and only resurfaced 40 years after his death in 1951. 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.

Andrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union.

The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov