Subsequently, no character in the novel makes that mistake again as the Party activist goes about forcing the poor and the small/ middle peasantry into the kholkoz, the collectivised farm. The pace is set by the first paragraph of the novel where Voshchev is discharged from his job in a machine factory 'because of his increasing loss of powers and tendency to stop and think amidst the general flow of work'. That is for good reason and is indicated right in the beginning of the novel.

There are over a dozen major characters and is mainly a novel of action and development, there are few soliloquies or psychological portraits of the characters. It describes the impact of the forced collectivization that Stalin introduced in 1927. The Foundation Pit is the most well known of Platonov's novels. He was working as a window cleaner in the Soviet Writer's building when he died. His major works were to be published decades after his death in 1951. His enthusiasm was soon to be curbed and his disenchantment was to be reflected in the novels that he subsequently wrote.

Once its enthusiast- he came from a working class background and immediately after the revolution graduated as an engineer and worked towards the electrification plans, he was sensitive to the brutality of its implementation. In that Andrey Platonov followed in the footsteps of the other great Russian novelists and used the medium of the novel to comment on the progress of the Russian Revolution. There is also a remarkable continuity of themes with Russian writers taking up, as it were, themes from a previous novel by a different writer and taking them forward. The classical Russian novel was more than a work of literature, it was more often than not a means for communicating ideas and for philosophical discourse.

The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov