Set during the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), it deals with the attempts of a group of labourers to dig the foundation pit of a vast building that is to house the local proletariat, before moving on to describe the expropriation and expulsion of a group of rich peasants from a nearby collective farm. Soviet writers at the time were expected to record and celebrate the achievements of industrialisation and collectivisation, and indeed, the drives to modernise agriculture were the subject of several of Platonov’s other works. Yet, having seen at first hand the effects of a policy that brought suffering and despair to untold numbers of Soviet peasants, and which threatened to stifle the spontaneity of the Revolution with deadening bureaucracy, Platonov wrote instead a cautionary fable that Mikhail Geller has called “the only adequate literary representation of those events whose significance for the history of the country and the people exceeds that of the October Revolution”.

The Foundation Pit opens with one of Platonov’s most memorable paragraphs:

On the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of his private life, Voshchev was sacked from the small machine factory where he had until then got the means for his subsistence. His dismissal notice stated that he was being removed from production on account of a situation of ongoing personal weakness and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labour.

The thoughtful Voshchev, who has some claim to be the hero of the story, is a wanderer and seeker after truth (indeed, truth is a word frequently associated with him). His meditations lend the work an existential tone (“The dog’s bored. It’s like me – it only lives because it was born”), and establish the conflict between contemplation and action that runs through The Foundation Pit (“My body gets weak without truth. I can’t live just on labour”).