The son of a railway worker who also gilded the cupolas of churches, Andrey Platonov was born at the turn of a century – on 1 September, 1899 – and between town and country, on the edge of the central Russian city of Voronezh. It seems fitting that he should have been born so close to important boundaries in both time and space.  He was almost certainly an atheist, yet his work is full of religious symbolism and imbued with deep religious feeling. He was a passionate supporter of the 1917 Revolution and remained sympathetic to the dream that gave birth to it, yet few people have written more searingly of its catastrophic consequences.  The language of his mature work is deeply idiosyncratic yet also strangely impersonal; I have heard it described as ‘the language that might be spoken by the roots of trees’.

One of his greatest works, The Foundation Pit (1930-31) begins with a group of workers digging a giant pit. The pit is intended for the foundations of a tower that will be a home to the whole of the local proletariat – but the tower is never built and the pit comes to be used as a grave for the little orphaned girl who had symbolized the workers’ hopes of a bright new future.The novel can be read as Platonov’s response to the devastation brought about by Stalin’s twin policies of rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, but the tragedy he evokes in this novel is apocalyptic and universal.  

It has been a joy to learn that Platonov was also an inspiration to one of the finest Russian painters and sculptors of the last fifty years – Kirill Sokolov (1930–2004), who lived the second half of his life in England. Sokolov produced a number of illustrations to The Foundation Pit. Many of these—two 1991 drypoints and nine 2000 drawings lifted and printed from wax crayon orginals (artist's technique)—are now in the collection of the Andrey Bely Museum in Moscow.  They were donated by the artist’s widow, Doctor Avril Pyman, who has kindly allowed us to reproduce four of the later drawings.

The first illustrates the moment when two of the workers rescue the orphaned girl from the cellar where her mother has just died. The second shows the peasants preparing to enter the collective farm. The third shows a peasant saying goodbye to his horse; Platonov has already explained that ‘the less impecunious peasants had kept their horses without nourishment, so that they would enter social ownership only with their own bodies and not lead their animals after them into sorrow.’ The last shows us Misha the bear, who works as a blacksmith’s assistant and is honoured as the most downtrodden member of the entire local proletariat.

I myself have been reading and translating Platonov for well over thirty years now, and I have no doubt that he is the greatest Russian prose writer of the last century. Joseph Brodsky thought the same, and so do many, many contemporary Russian writers and critics.

Robert Chandler, translator of The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov

To see the illustrations Solokov created for Platonov's Foundation Pit, click to read this New York Review of Books article here.