"I squint back on our century and I see six writers I think it will be remembered for. They are Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, William Faulkner, Andrey Platonov and Samuel Beckett. . . . They are summits in the literary landscape of our century . . . What's more, they don't lose an inch of their status when compared to the giants of fiction from the previous century."-Joseph Brodsky
"Hallucinatory and terrifying and filled with incredible language, this is Platonov's finest." - Flavorwire
"The most exciting literary discovery I made this past year was Andrey Platonov. . . his reputation has grown to the point that he is frequently considered the greatest Russian prose writer of the twentieth century. His masterpiece is The Foundation Pit , which boils all the utopianism and horror of the forced collectivization and industrialization of the early 1930s into 150 tightly written. . . . English-speaking readers are lucky to have the superb translation by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson, published last year by New York Review Books. . . . Platonov's brilliant short works can be sampled in the collection Soul , also published by NYRB." -The Millions
"Andrey Platonov has not yet received the attention he richly deserves here. . . [he] turns out to be one of the finest writers of the 20th century, worthy to stand alongside Kafka and Joyce." --The Arts Fuse
"He has been described as the greatest Russian writer of the 20th century, but some of his most controversial works, written between 1927 and 1932, were not published in the Soviet Union until the 1980s. Platonov's The Foundation Pit is a satirical response to Stalin's programme of crash industrialisation and collectivisation." - Guardian
" Platonov's writing can retain enormous power in English. . . The foreign reader can also now begin to get an idea of the shape of Platonov's development as a writer. The Foundation Pit , written at the time of the brutal collectivization campaign of the late 1920s, plays out an image of equally brutal directness-a construction site on which nothing ever gets built. The pit just gets wider and deeper until it comes to represent a grave - of Stalinism's Promethean ambitions, and of the author's political idealism. The effect on the reader is almost physically winding." - The Moscow Times
"Acclaimed by Joseph Brodsky as one of the great Russian writers of the twentieth century, Andrey Platonov comes with a formidable reputation, matched only by his relative obscurity." - The Observer (London)
"Andrey Platonov is the most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union. Born in 1899, one of a railway worker's 10 children, he was an engineer, a party member and a model proletarian writer before doubts about Communism, and his literary imagination, landed him in trouble with Stalin. His work stopped being published in the early 1930s and only resurfaced 40 years after his death in 1951. . . The Foundation Pit will stand out as his masterpiece." - The Independent (London)
"In Platonov's prose, it is impossible to find a single dull or inelegant sentence. . . For Platonov's work testifies to the only political responsibility owed by any writer to any reader: to describe the world as faithfully, and as compellingly, as possible. Platonov deserves to be published; he rewards being read." - The Times (London)
"In Russian writer Andrei Platonov's novel The Foundation Pit , written in 1930 but not published in Russia until 1987, the characters must struggle not only with the interminable Soviet works project of the title, but with strange spiritual maladies. . . One of the most deeply original writers of the 20th century." - The National Post
"Nearly all his work is rooted in a particular place and time, and it is hard to think of another writer who so expertly animated the sadness and unease of the Soviet period. His fiction, at its best, has the timeless quality of parable or folklore." - New Statesman
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