Suspended above The Pit

A novel set in an unspecified provincial landscape somewhere in Russia, where a crazy group of misfits are busily if haphazardly engaged in digging a vast foundation pit for a shining many storeyed building called "socialism", may not seem inspiring, yet Andrey Platonov's absurdist parable The Foundation Pit (Harvill, £14.99 in UK) is a masterly achievement.

Although completed in 1930, it was not published in Russia until the literary magazine Novy Mir printed the full text in 1987, some 14 years after a Russian edition had been published in the United States. This first English translation confirms its status as yet another Russian classic of passionate subversion, in a dazzling tradition that stretches from Gogol to Bulgakov.

Much of the genius of The Foundation Pit lies in Platonov's objective style and the lively invariably abusive dialogue, contrasting with oddly moving, isolated asides of brittle beauty. It is a Russian Waiting for Godot crossed with Lewis Carroll and Maxim Gorky - there is even a bear working as an apprentice blacksmith, frantically making horseshoes as if there were no tomorrow. And in this book, there isn't.

According to the late Joseph Brodsky, Platonov "simply had a tendency to see his words to their logical - that is absurd, that is totally paralyzing end. In other words, like no other Russian writer before or after him Platonov was able to reveal a self destructive, eschatological element within the language itself." Writing in 1984, Brodsky noted of The Foundation Pit and Chevengur - Platonov's other major work - "these books are indescribable. The power of devastation they inflict upon their subject matter exceeds by far any demands of social criticism and should be measured in units that have very little to do with literature as such."

Platonov takes Soviet jargon with its rhetoric, cliches and colloquialisms and makes it ridicule itself. As one of the unhappy characters reasons: "Everyone kept telling me to hang on until Capitalism had finally gone and snuffed it. Well, Capitalism has snuffed it and I'm still on my own under the blanket, and I feel sad. Voshchev, the token hero, attempts to comfort the first speaker by pointing out: "Sadness is nothing, comrade Kozlov, it just means that our class can sense the whole world. In any case happiness is still a long way away .

And happiness just leads to shame." Elsewhere, Platonov describes Pashkin, the chairman of the Regional Trades Union Council, as having "a torso that was bowed down not so much by his years as by the weight of his social responsibilities". Any time a problem develops, Pashkin's response is predictable: "History says happiness is inevitable. And, knowing there was no need for him to do any more thinking, he would humbly bow his despondent head." Meanwhile, Prushevsky, a depressed engineer, decides he really should kill himself. "I may be useful to people, but I don't make anyone happy. I'll write a last letter to my sister tomorrow - I must remember to buy a stamp in the morning." The narrative continues: "And, having decided to put an end to it all, he lay down on his bed and fell asleep, happy not to have to bother with life any longer. But he needed more time to savour this happiness to the full, and so he woke up at three in the morning, lit a lamp and sat there in the light and silence, surrounded by apple trees, until dawn; he then opened a window so he could hear the birds and the footsteps of the passers by."

Platonov creates a surreal atmosphere of lowkey, topsy turvy confusions. In the opening pages, Voshchev is musing over his dismissal; when he confronts the trade union committee for an explanation, he is told: "Management says you stood around thinking while everyone else was at work ... Tell us what you were thinking about, comrade Voshchev?"

The hardworking, none too bright Chiklin wanders into a deserted church to smoke his pipe and meets another smoker who says: "I used to be the priest, but now I've renounced my soul and got myself a jazzy haircut. Have a look!" Yet even the ex priest is finding it difficult to find anyone who will accept his new self . . . people still don't trust me - they say I believe in secret and that I'm a real bastard to the poor. I've got to do my probation before I can join the Atheist Club."

While the characters are conscious of living in a society where thinking is not encouraged, they are far from subdued. "Give me a break for a week, eh?" asks a man weary of being pestered by a beggar, before threatening: "Or one fine day I'll set fire to your crutches!" The scrounger is not frightened, "Go ahead. My mates will hoist me up in my cart and I'll tear the roof off your forge."

There are many echoes here of 19th-century Russian comic fiction, and this balances the weight of symbols and metaphor. The young girl Nastya, who cheerfully accepts her mother's death and is adopted by the workers, is advised: "Don't grow up, my dear - you'll regret it!" Nastya, who had asked her expiring mother: "Why are you dying, Mummy? Is it because you're a bourgeois, or is it lust death?", later comments: "I don't know why anyone goes on living! Why don't they all die and become special?" Resentful when a death forces her to give back the coffin she had been using as a toybox, Nastya reckons the dead have all the luck. Not surprisingly, she represents the fledging USSR, and she too sickens and dies.

Born 100 years ago this year, Andrey Platonov had his own tragedies. He served in the Red Army during the Civil War and later worked as an engineer. He was officially silenced, and spent the war years in various camps. Neither of his masterpieces was published in his lifetime. Released from the Gulag in 1946, he worked as a janitor and died five years later from the tuberculosis which also killed the teenage son whom Platonov nursed and briefly outlived. Far more subtle than either Zamyatin's We (1924) or Orwell's 1984 (1948), The Foundation Pit is extraordinary: strange, almost abrupt, a hallucinatory, nightmarish parable of hysterical laughter and terrifying silences.