Bear and child, Soviet-style
John Bayley
THE FOUNDATION PIT by Andrey Platonov Harvill, 114.99, pp. 192 Few really good novels get written about 'important' subjects. Why should they? 'The free novel', as Pushkin called it, can be and do what it likes, and if its writer is good enough a masterpiece may result: a War and Peace or a Pride and Prejudice, Crime and Punishment or Sentimental Edu- cation. But in Tsarist Russia and in the Soviet Union the novel did have a rather special place as a potential eye-opener. It was bound to be socially significant and political, even in the few cases where it didn't try to be. Unlike Maxim Gorky, by whom he was strongly influenced, Andrey Platonov didn't aspire to be a 'great' writer. He became one accidentally. Indignation and spontaneity, the ruin of many young writ- ers, do occasionally team up with a true natural artist. Platonov, as the blurb tells us, was
passionately committed to improving the lot of his fellow human beings, excited by ideas, and the chance that engineering gave of putting them into practice in the real world.
Sounds like a recipe for literary disaster. Platonov, who'd fought with the Reds as a teenager in the civil war, should have been all set between fulfilling five-year plans to write fervent trash about Soviet man and his future. That did not happen. Instead he wrote a couple of masterpieces, Cheven- gur and The Foundation Pit, which were not published in Russia until the late 1980s. Had they been, they would indeed have been eye-openers, but their author would have ended up in Kolyma, or worse. Platonov put them away in 1930, and went on inventing engineering devices and writ- ing stories which got past the censor, if sometimes only just. Broken in health, he died in 1951, working as a janitor in the Moscow 'House of Writers'. Today in Russia, according to the critic Viktor Erofeev, 'he is increasingly described as the best writer of the post-revolutionary epoch'.
Which is odd in a way, because when the eyes of contemporary readers have been well opened, a novel from the past that once set out to do the job becomes super- fluous. Yet another novel about Soviet dis- illusionments could only be a yawn, I felt, opening the book somewhat sceptically. But I was wrong. This book really does add to the sum of great fiction, though good- ness knows how — tears in the eye at the end, and all that — partly, no doubt, because the translators have done an excel- lent job. Robert Chandler translated Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate a few years ago, a naively and yet intensely moving book on a big scale. It had small success here — read- ers no doubt felt surfeited on wars and death camps — but it became a bestseller in France, where La Condition Humaine receives more automatic respect.
Like its companion Chevengur, The Foundation Pit is a brief novel — it was written in three months in 1930 — about collectivisation and the kick-start industry that the writer was working in the midst of. The workers digging out the site of a vast communal building believe they are laying the foundation for a radiant future. Or do they? The real and nightmare subject is the new alienation from their old homes and ways, and from themselves, an alienation frantically concealed by the new polit- babble, which the author uses not at all ironically but with the abandonment of despair. This is a matter far too deep for satire. Unlike Orwell or Bulgakov, Platonov is never at a safe distance from his subject, never, as it were, standing back to look at it. The poet Joseph Brodsky, a great and perceptive admirer of Platonov, said he spoke of a country that had become the victim of the very same jargon which is generating his own fictional world. Orwell and his readers did not take Newspeak seriously because they were outside it. Platonov found it was actually writing his book.
And this is where the artistry comes in which makes the novel so moving. After a Gorky-like beginning among the workers on the site, who like all workers in fiction have for the author's benefit to spend more time talking than working, the narrative slowly and matter-of-factly becomes mad, without making any fuss about it. Soviet language has undermined Soviet reality, even as its new foundations are being built. Both madness and sanity are concentrated in the figure of a small girl, who turns up on the site, warily familiar with the right new things to say, but with no grasp of past or future. CI was frightened,' she says, 'that my mother would be a bourgeoise.') How Platonov makes a cliché child out of Dick- ens or Victor Hugo so new and moving is something of a mystery; but a clue is given by his own intense involvement in the being of this unhopeful waif, who will probably grow up to be a Young Pioneer but who at the moment talks and behaves Soviet-style with no involvement, only with a kind of crafty innocence. Dostoevsky would at once have seen this, and understood, further- more, the naked emotion that it calls forth on the writer's part. The girl Nastya is very like his own boy child Kolya at the end of The Brothers Kararnazov, and done with the same detailed art. Russian writers have always depicted children far better than we have, and the world that goes with them. Orwell clearly felt all such things strongly himself, and yet wasn't able to put them into the 'natural' old-fashioned world he tried to suggest in Nineteen Eighty Four, in contrast to its new and politicised one.
Nastya dies, of course, of typhus, at the end of the book. There is also a bear who makes a sudden appearance as a worker in a blacksmith's forge, whom one gets very attached to. Nothing in the story is tidied up, except the grave of Nastya herself. She is buried very deep by the foundation pit workers, with a slab of granite above her to keep the earth off. At last they have found something worth doing, but of course they don't now see or speak of things that way, whatever they may feel about them. At least there is no Sovietspeak to describe what they are actually feeling here, and doing Platonov added a final paragraph stating that the USSR too will die one day; but he wisely omitted it. It would have to become true anyway, if his novel were ever to be published.
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