The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Stalin years 213

the first and greatest philosophical commentary on the structure, language, energy level, and party-mindedness of Gladkov’s 1925 production novel Cement.

The production of cement, like the destruction of the fascist enemy, is a straightforward material task. Platonov’s position on “matter” is far more potent and strange. Socialist realist works presume that the material world can be shaped for the better. There will always be sabotage, fresh destruction, violence, waste, decay, natural disasters – Cement is full of these – but the energy that new generations can apply against this “entropy” or anarchy is not questioned. The great ally in this struggle is the industrial machine. Platonov does not reject this faith. In his autobiography he remarked that from his youth he had loved steam engines, shrill whistles, sweaty work, and that there was a link (he didn’t know exactly what) between burdocks in the field, electricity, locomotives, and earthquakes. But unlike the construction novel, where this energy passes from animate to inanimate entities (from human muscles, always tensed and hot, to the pulleys that will haul fuel to the factory or bags of cement out of it), in Platonov the flow is more often reversed. Far from being concentrated or accelerated, the energy of human beings escapes and dissipates in open space. Even people eager to work on behalf of a Purpose rapidly cool down. Or as Platonov puts it in his 1938 Turkmenistan novella Dzhan: “Men live because they’re born, not by truth or by intelligence, and while the heart goes on beating it scatters and spreads their despair and finally destroys itself, losing its substance in patience and in work.”18

Platonov’s two great themes are the persistence of inert matter and the weariness of the working body. In The Foundation Pit, both of these “gravitational pulls” prevail over human life. The very language of the narrator is thick, languid, rich in associations, weighed down. We learn in the opening paragraph that the protagonist Voshchev is an outcast, expelled from the machine factory because of his “tendency to stop and think,” which interrupted the general pace of work.19 A traditional Russian wanderer, an ascetic and a seeker, he has also absorbed the new Soviet builder’s cosmic ambitions: he “could no longer strive and walk along the road without knowing the exact construction of the whole world and what a man must seek in it” (p. 7). Voshchev wanders onto the construction site of an “All-Proletarian Home” and enlists to dig its foundation. As utopian hopes for the Home increase among the weary workers, so must they increase the depth and dimensions of the foundation pit in order to support this structure, further exhausting their strength. Among other items, their excavations reveal a hundred coffins that had been stockpiled by a nearby village. The second half of the novel recounts violent bizarre episodes from the collectivization of peasants, ending on the death of Nastya, an orphaned little