The Foundation Pit: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Foundation Pit: Analysis of Major Characters" delves into the complex lives of characters navigating the challenging landscape of Soviet society in the early 1930s. Central to the narrative is Voshchev, a former machinist turned laborer, who grapples with the meaning of existence amid suffering, ultimately losing his quest for truth after the death of a young girl named Nastya. Prushevsky, a young engineer, embodies a rationalist's despair, as his lack of emotional connection leads to feelings of hopelessness, despite his ambition to create a communal living space. Chiklin, the strong brigade leader, represents the hardworking proletariat but faces personal tragedy and disillusionment, leading him to continue his labor as a means of coping with despair.
Zhachev, a legless war veteran, displays a blend of intelligence and hostility while harboring a protective affection for Nastya. The young girl herself symbolizes the lost beauty of a bygone era and the hope for a brighter future, yet her tragic fate reflects the broader theme of loss within the revolutionary context. Lastly, the unnamed activist serves as a critique of zealotry, illustrating the perils of blind devotion to ideology, ultimately facing alienation and disillusionment. Collectively, these characters present a poignant exploration of human emotion, ambition, and the sometimes harsh realities of societal change.
The Foundation Pit: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Andrei Platonov
First published: Kotlovan, wr. c. 1935 (English translation, 1973)
Genre: Novel
Locale: a provincial city and nearby village in Russia
Time: The early 1930's
Voshchev (VOH-shchehv), a former machinist, now a laborer in the crew digging a foundation for a multiple housing unit in the Soviet Union in the early 1930's. At the age of thirty, he lost his job because of a tendency to “stop and think.” Amid the changes in the Soviet Union designed to build the new society after the revolution, he feels the need to understand the “sense of the action” and the enduring meaning of life. He sees suffering everywhere, and his main quality is compassion. He strikes the death blow to the activist as punishment for the activist's error in believing that he had a monopoly on truth. Voshchev, the truth-seeker, deserts his search when Nastya dies.
Prushevsky (prew-SHEHV-skee), an engineer and intellectual with an “excited” heart. He is only twenty-five years old, but he is “gray” because, as a scientist and rationalist, he regards the world as dead matter, a perception that limits and depresses his imaginative mind. It was his idea to build a great communal building, for which the foundation pit is being excavated by the powerful labor of the crew. The building will eliminate exactly those individual relationships in which the engineer is deficient, those that bind people together. He has the memory of a lost love, a glimpse of a woman whom he never saw again; it provides his only feelings. This man without love can build only the structure that will unmake humankind itself. His lack of feeling leaves him in despair, wishing for suicide.
Chiklin (CHIH-klihn), the brigade leader of the diggers. He is very strong, hardworking, and generous. An older man, he has a “small stony head,” thick with hair; he is a worker, not a thinker, and cannot express in words what he feels. Devoted to the revolution, he too has encountered the one woman for him and lost her. Unlike the engineer, he goes in search of her and finds her dying, cared for only by a young child, her daughter, Nastya. He takes Nastya under his protection as his hope for the future. When the girl dies in spite of his efforts, he digs her grave deep enough to allow her never to be troubled by the earth. Chiklin is a sledgehammer in his strength, the emblem of the proletarian defender of the revolution, but he too is left without faith at the end of the novel. He continues digging as the only way to bear his despair.
Zhachev (ZHAH-chehv), a legless man, wounded in the “capitalist” World War I. Intelligent and caustic, Zhachev, with “brown, narrow eyes,” is verbally aggressive and hostile. He suffers from the “greed of the deprived,” extracting food and services from everyone, exploiting their guilt at his disability. He forgets his own needs in his devotion to the girl Nastya, whom he tries tenderly to protect as what will live and thrive when he dies.
Nastya, a young orphan girl adopted by the digging crew. She is the daughter of the beautiful bourgeois woman whom both Prushevsky and Chiklin have loved from afar, having seen her in her youth and never forgotten her. She is all the beauty of the old regime that they have missed and that the revolution lets die. Nastya represents for all the men the claims of the future for which they labor and suffer, an ideal Communist state envisioned but, as yet, far from achieved. Her presence at kolkhoz (collective farm) in the process of being established gives them hope and their labor meaning. She is pitiless in her commitment to the revolution, scolding backsliders and excoriating bourgeois remnants for their behavior. Her death is symbolic of their loss of hope, and it is a counterpoint to the establishment of the collective farm at the cost of the pain and death of the kulaks.
The activist, a man who is so much the Party official that he gets no name. He has been sent to liquidate the landowning peasants and establish the kolkhoz. He follows government directives to the letter, ignoring his own feelings and ideas. In his zeal, he even goes beyond the requirements in his callous devotion to the Party's aims. When the Party deserts him, sending an order canceling all he has achieved and calling him a class enemy as he has called others, his disillusionment is complete. He takes his coat from the feverish Nastya, signaling his alienation from the dream. Chiklin strikes him as a traitor to the revolution, and Voshchev finishes him off for his having sucked all meaning in life into his own commitment.