‘the sun, like blindness, hung indifferently over the poverty of the earth’

platonov and the (foundation) pit

platonov has a strange attitude to materialism. in most of the books that horsemouth has read he affirms it and then reduces his characters to such material poverty that theirs becomes a struggle with mere existence (this is one interpretation - possibly a wrong one). it has more in common with the works of the desert fathers than with other novelists of the soviet era.

but in the foundation pit it is as if he has been possessed by the spirit of bulgakov. he gives us a character who goes on and on about thinking when he should be working, the arguments for materialism and against idealism are given to his workmates, that and good honest ‘shoulder to the wheel’ exhortations.

it is a world close to home not mythically far away (in a chevengur or a dzhan) - the book (at least in this translation) is almost banally critical and this overpowers the usual effect of platonov’s work (that material reality is not enough and is in the process of dying out anyway - things age and are sad in his work, they are reduced to mere fragments, discarded they are lonely without people, that material reality is so hostile to humanity that it can almost be left behind).

the harvill edition is carefully constructed kasimir malevich's head of a peasant on the front cover, a feed in quote from viktor erofeev of the times literary supplement, some stage direction by joseph brodsky on the back cover - we are steered to towards reading the novel both in terms of ‘the theme of chronic alienation’ and as the history of that alienation as a product of the soviet state.

in the introductions (by his daughter maria platonova, by robert chander one of the translators) we are offered collectivisation and the famine that caused as the source of platonov's disenchantment and his daughter is offered up as the role model for the girl in the book who dies and whose burial ends the book (is she buried in the foundation pit?). brodsky points us towards platonov’s language - seen as sick and sundered from reality - platonov as krauss, as sprachskritik. but elsewhere platonov gives his incantatory communist glossolalia to his central characters - his heroic engineers.

horsemouth always assumed it was there because it had to be there to give the book a chance at publication - that it was code and disguise to get it past gorky and the socialist realists - but it also reveals the hegelian mystical kernel still present within marxism (for all this loose socialist realist talk of materialism). quite how this relates to platonov’s other themes horsemouth does not know.

today is the anniversary of the death of alan lomax (2002)