The events Platonov portrays in The Foundation Pit involving the excavation of a foundation pit as part of a plan to construct a “proletarian home” and the formation of a collective farm in the nearby countryside patently mimic the structure and thematic concerns of a type of novel that had become increasingly prominent in Soviet literature over the course of the 1920s: the “production”
novel, whose staple theme was industrialization, which it typically represented as efforts of one kind or another to restart a factory idled by the civil war, to increase production dramatically within an existing factory, or heroically to create a vast new factory complex from scratch—all always as part of an effort to meet or
still better to exceed the Party’s economic plans (after 1928, the Five-Year Plan). The production novel was absorbed as a central component in the “socialist realist” aesthetic that became mandatory for all Soviet writers after the first Congress of Soviet Writers was convened in 1934, but it had in fact existed for several years before that event—as Platonov’s own Foundation Pit, written in the early 1930s, bears witness.
The 1920s were a period of intense and often acrimonious debate among Soviet literary factions over what Soviet or proletarian literature should actually look like (see the chapter on Platonov’s literary context) but one principle which increasingly came to be accepted over the course of the decade was that it should depict labor, especially labor understood to be a part of the larger effort to construct socialism. It was this aim which motivated a series edited by Maxim Gorky called A History of Factories and Plants, as well as the White Sea Canal collection, produced by a brigade of writers dispatched to the canal’s excavation site, and the flood of so-called
“production sketches” (proizvodstvennye ocherki), accounts by writers of their visits to factories and construction sites, which filled Soviet journals and newspapers during the first Five-Year Plan (the newspaper Izvestiia, for example, published production sketches by Maxim Gorky, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Fedor Gladkov; Literaturnaia gazeta ran a weekly rubric called “Writers on the Front of Socialist Competition”). Platonov made earnest efforts to contribute to this genre. Sometime in the spring of 1929 he travelled to a paper mill on the Kama river and wrote up his experiences in a sketch called
“In search of the future (A journey to the Kama Paper Mill),” which he submitted to a competition for such sketches run by the journal Smena. Unfortunately, his submission coincided with the attacks on him in the press for his story “Usomnivshiisia Makar” and it was out of the question for him to receive any kind of award. In a gesture that could be taken as a perfect symbol of his relations with official Soviet literary culture, Platonov then used the reverse side of the sketch’s typescript to write, in pencil, part of the manuscript of The Foundation Pit. In one of the most ironic pairings that resulted, one
of the sheets of paper from the latter part of the typescript extols a “lofty model of a working man” and the “fate of the whole proletarian cause” while the pencil manuscript on the reverse narrates the scene in The Foundation Pit in which a peasant lies down in a coffin and tries hard to die (Vakhitova 112–16). That the real-life Kama paper mill was rewarded for its competitiveness with radio equipment and 100,000 rubles for the construction of worker’s dormitories are also details that seem to have made their way into the tale. Platonov also spent January to April 1930 in Leningrad, at the Stalin Leningrad Metallurgical Factory, and the Russian scholar Natalia Kornienko conjectures that this visit may also have been one of the sources for scenes in The Foundation Pit (Zapisnye knizhki 7).
Both critics and ideologues of the production novel, however, generally felt that mere factual reportage of present efforts was insufficient; instead, in keeping with Gorky’s ideas about the inspirational link between art and labor (on which see the chapter on Platonov’s ideological context), the writer was urged to anticipate the utopian future while capturing its emergence in the present moment. The formula arrived at for doing this, which came to be called “socialist realism,” was highly codified. As Katerina Clark shows in her influential study of the genre, the Union of Soviet Writers (which also ran a literary institute as a forum in which to train young writers) maintained a list of approved exemplars which writers were told unambiguously to emulate. The novels that were written over several decades of socialist realism’s dominance are consequently remarkably repetitious, adhering with relatively little divergence in anything important to what Clark calls a “master plot”
populated with recurring character types and stereotypical episodes.
Because Soviet writers were often imitating earlier models, a novel such as Fedor Gladkov’s Cement, the first version of which appeared in 1925, can turn out to bear a close resemblance to a later work, such as Platonov’s The Foundation Pit—though in Platonov’s case this is because his tale is really a self-conscious commentary on the genre as a whole, that is, it is a work that is well aware that it is written in response to a cliché.
Even a cursory glance at a couple of socialist realist exemplars reveals a similarity of plot and character type to The Foundation Pit. In Gladkov’s Cement the hero, Gleb Chumalov, is a recently demobilized Red Army soldier—that is, someone like Voshchev released from his previous role in life—who returns to his native town on the Black Sea only to find that he must adjust to the new social conditions of the post-revolutionary era. One depressing discovery he makes is that the local cement factory has fallen into disuse during the Revolution and civil war and now has goats grazing on the weeds that have grown up in its yard (Voshchev, meanwhile, sleeps in a weedy lot that turns out to be a future construction site).
Gleb enthusiastically sets out to to organize the local workers and get the factory up and running again (in this Gladkov follows a formula that was to harden into dreary cliché in Soviet literature which held that the principal natural desire of every proletarian was to labor in a factory). The workers’ rushed, spontaneous efforts, however, bring no results because (according to the logic of this dominant type of Soviet literature, which as Clark notes was written to illustrate the Bolshevik party’s view of itself) the workers need to learn to submit to Party guidance, even when it demands what their naïve but purist political minds regard as shameful compromises (such as postponing the production of cement in order to repair a ropeway so that firewood can be brought over the adjacent mountain range, or accepting the technical advice of the bourgeois foreign engineer who had once run the factory). When two workers are shot by bandits while working on the ropeway their deaths are treated not as unfortunate casualties but as necessary, almost ritual sacrifices to the Bolshevik cause (just as a vigil is held over the murdered Kozlov and Safronov in Platonov’s tale). Eventually the Party’s managerial wisdom proves itself and the factory is restarted, on the fitting date of the fourth anniversary of the Revolution—an event portrayed by Gladkov, who came from an Old Believer family, with distinctly eschatological overtones, as though the very mountains and air were rejoicing in the event. Gleb has been transformed from a wily loner into a disciplined and subordinate member of the collective.
The novel represents the production of cement as a transcendent fulfillment, the filling with substance of what had been a void: the literal emptiness of the abandoned factory as well as the meta phori cal wasteland of postrevolutionary economic ruin (in Platonov’s tale no one undergoes transformation and nothing is produced except a pit which serves as a grave—pointed inversions of parallel moments in a production novel like Cement).
In the 1932 novel Time, Forward! by Valentin Kataev—to take just one example written on the eve of socialist realism’s formal declaration as the mandatory aesthetic for all Soviet artists, i.e., precisely when Platonov was writing The Foundation Pit—the hero, David Margulies, is an engineer like Platonov’s Prushevsky who is caught up in a utopian construction project. In this case it is the giant smelter at Magnitogorsk, the factory complex built by the Soviets from scratch in the Ural mountains. As in The Foundation Pit, the audacity of the endeavor is underscored by repeated refe-rence to the town and its smelter having been created as if out of nothing, in the middle of a wasteland (bare steppe in the case of Time, Forward!, the vacant, weed-covered lot in The Foundation Pit;
compare the similar motif in Gladkov’s Cement). One of the signal achievements of the Magnitogorsk project is moreover the five-story building of brick and glass (i.e., in this steppe setting, a tower) which has been erected to house the plant’s workers. The central drama of the novel, however, has to do with the characters frenetic efforts to beat a record, recently set by a rival group in Khar’kov, for the amount of concrete poured in a single day. Margulies finds himself torn between two conflicting views of the situation. On the one hand are more cautious engineers and the technical manuals for the cement mixers they have imported from Germany; on the other are enthusiasts, both workers and journalists, who want to race ahead at all costs. Margulies is willing to take a “dialectical” view of science and side with the youthful enthusiasts but he keeps warning that construction cannot be rushed beyond the technical capacity of the machines at their disposal (the calculations Prushevsky must run in order to ensure that the soil on the construction site can
support the increasingly monumental edifice the characters dream of building form the parallel moment in Platonov’s tale). In the end, though, the view that machines should serve socialism rather than the other way around prevails (abetted by recitations of speeches by Stalin in which he warns Russia against falling behind the technological accomplishments of the west, the penalty for which is to remain an “Asiatic” backwater). The triumphant breaking of the record by the Magnitogorsk workers is presented not just as a feat of labour but as a triumph over nature. Margulies even promises a skeptical American visitor that the Soviet Union will bring a lost paradise back to humanity, surrounding the continents with warm streams to mitigate the effects of winter—precisely the ameliora-tive dreams nurtured by Platonov’s characters but disappointed at his tale’s end.