Malygina notes that one can think of Platonov’s characters as arranged on a scale of increasing “humanization,” with the lowest position being occupied by those reduced to a near-animal exi-stence, barely subsisting on the boundary between life and death and having no “excess of life” available to them for higher mental functions. Thus the diggers at the foundation pit “sleep like the dead” (26–7) and in their waking hours descend into a pit to work.
An entry in Platonov’s 1930 notebook reads, “A typical person of our time is naked—without soul or possessions, in the bath-house dressing room (predbannik) of history, ready for everything except the past” (Zapisnye knizhki 42; bathhouses in Russian culture are sometimes associated with death and the underworld—as is play-fully represented, for example, in Mikhail Zoshchenko’s 1924 story
“The Bathhouse,” whose narrator-hero is stripped to a state of naked ness and robbed of his meager possessions when he visits an average Leningrad bathhouse). A similar character appears in the 1929 screenplay “Mashinist.” Platonov calls him simply “the seredniak” (a peasant of middling wealth, supposedly between
a kulak and a poor peasant or bedniak) and describes him as
“barefoot and poorly dressed. He gazes into the distance with empty eyes drained of color, barely comprehending anything” (234). Later, when this character is running from an approaching train but in his confusion fails to get off the tracks, Platonov notes that “his face does not express fright—he runs automatically and observes with empty, clear eyes the sunlit world around him” (236). In the screenplay it is another poor peasant named Kuz’ma, rather than a violent Zhachev-like figure, who regularly meets out proletarian
“justice” by striking people with his fist—except that Kuz’ma is so weak that he is the one who collapses from the blow.
Kozlov
An entry in Platonov’s notebook for 1930 reads: “Kozlov is a lover of conflict. Illness, so devoted to liberation that it’s funny” (Zapisnye knizhki 39). The root of his surname in Russian is “kozel,” or “goat,”
which in prison slang of the time also meant “sexual pervert”
(Kharitonov 157). Kozlov indeed continues the thematic line of troubled sexuality begun in the tale by Zhachev: he “caresses him-self at night under the blanket” and then has insufficient strength to work during the day. Considering that it is Kozlov together with Safronov who is murdered at the collective farm, another possible association with the root of his surname is “kozel otpushcheniia,”
“scapegoat,” which would sardonically reverse the motif of sacrifice ordinarily attending such deaths in Soviet novels. The commentators to Platonov’s notebooks also point out that there was a Kozlov area (okrug) in the Central Black-Earth Region (known by its initials as TsChO, or Che-Che-O in the local pronunciation—this was the region about which Platonov and Pil’niak wrote the satirical sketch that got them into trouble with the critics of RAPP in 1929) and that it became famous in 1930 for attaining one of the highest percentages in the country—94%—of “total collectivization” of its agriculture (Zapisnye knizhki 333 n. 92).
Nastya
In mainstream Soviet literature children and young people are typically represented as embodiments of the communist future (not least in Alexander Fadeev’s wartime novel The Young Guard, about an underground antifascist youth movement; Young Guard was also the name of a journal for young people which began publication in 1922, and a publishing house). At times Soviet literature suggests that children must be sacrificed, however. In Gladkov’s Cement Gleb and Dasha’s daughter Nyurka, who bears some resemblance to Nastya, is given up to an orphanage so that her mother can devote herself to Party work. She dies in the orphanage’s impoverished and unsanitary conditions (there is also an eerie scene toward the end of the novel in which an infant corpse is found bobbing in the Black Sea surf). Naiman and Nesbet also point out a parallel between Nastya as an embodiment of the communist future and Zola’s Travail, where children are destined to transcend class boundaries (625).
That Nastya so readily accepts the ideology of the Five-Year Plan, agreeing to forget her bourgeois mother (until she falls ill and asks for her mother’s bones), mindlessly reciting political slogans, and goading the bear on his “dekulakizing” raids suggests that she is in part a satire on this Soviet stereotype. That she has “come to love the Soviet government and now collects objects for recycling,”
as Prushevsky reports in his letter, does so as well—but a drive to collect recyclable items was a real part of the campaign to collectivize (specifically, to help fund the purchase of tractors) and was often carried out by bands of girl Pioneers (Zapisnye knizhki 332 n. 91). Nastya’s existential fate, however—her death at the end of the tale from illness brought on by being left unprotected before the elements—lends her figure another meaning and suggests another lineage. Deaths of innocent children occur throughout the works of Fedor Dostoevsky, where they always sentimentally signal lost possibilities for human happiness (Nelli in The Insulted and the Injured, who is probably one of Nastya’s prototypes, or Ilyusha in The Brothers Karamazov) or serve as a litmus test for utopia (as,
again, in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan asks his brother Alyosha whether he would be willing to arrange eternal happiness for all of humanity if the price to be paid for it were the death of an innocent child). Behind Dostoevsky’s dying innocents, certainly behind Nelli in The Insulted and the Injured, very likely stands little Nell, whose melodramatic death is the culmination of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. The fact that Nastya sleeps in a painted coffin (and keeps her toys in another) already marks her as a macabre ironization of Fedorovian hopes for redemption from physical suffering in The Foundation Pit. Her orphanhood, a common tragic state for characters in Platonov (e.g., Sasha Dvanov in Chevengur), is another such marker. Platonov’s notebook for 1930 contains an entry which would appear to refer to Nastya and which reads, “The word ‘mama’
has been repealed” (Zapisnye knizhki 43). That Nastya dies and is buried in the pit is the pre-eminent symbol of utopia’s failure in the tale. At the same time, the name “Nastya” comes from “Anastasiia,”
which in Greek means “resurrection” (Kharitonov 167). Platonov appended a note to his manuscript of The Foundation Pit which appears in Kotlovan and in the Chandler/Meerson translation, but not in Ginsburg or some other Russian versions: “Will the USSR [esesersha] perish like Nastya, or will it grow up to be a complete human being, into a historically new society? This was the concern which formed the theme of the work as the author was writing it.
The author may have erred in having portrayed in the girl’s death the demise of the socialist generation, but this error resulted from excessive concern for something beloved, whose loss would be equivalent to the destruction not only of the past but of the future as well” (Kornienko 150; Kotlovan 116). An entry in Platonov’s 1930 notebook suggests something similar: “The dead in the foundation pit are the seed of the future in the earth’s aperture. The bath house dressing room” (Zapisnye knizhki 43; underlining his). If Platonov intended these notes earnestly, Nastya’s death at the end of The Foundation Pit may be more ambivalent than somber; but if he was simply looking for some kind of optimistic turn in the hopes that it might make his tale publishable, the mood remains tragic.