A Companion to Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit

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.