The Foundation Pit (Russian: Котлован, romanized: Kotlovan) is a gloomy symbolic and semi-satirical novel by Andrei Platonov.

They attempt to dig out a huge foundation pit on the base of which a gigantic house will be built for the country's proletarians.

[1] Platonov's work is a representation of the conflict that arose between Russian individuals and the increasingly collectivized Soviet state in the late 1920s.

I say - first, despite Kafka, because surrealism is by no means an aesthetic category, associated in our view, as a rule, with an individualistic worldview, but a form of philosophical fury, a product of the psychology of a dead end".

When asked why he stands idly for hours when he should be working, Voschev responds that he is trying to find the true meaning of life and that, if he succeeds, his happiness will raise productivity.

He learns that the group will be digging an enormous foundation pit in which they will later construct a housing complex for the country's proletarians.

Safronov, the most politically active worker at the foundation pit, complains when managements tells them to stop working for the day.

Chiklin, a typical worker at the site, discovers a gully that he feels the group can use for the foundation pit without having to dig so far into the earth.

However, Safronov condemns him for thinking outside of the box and asks whether he received "a special kiss in infancy" that allows him to make better decisions than the government's experts back in Moscow.

Both claim that the other is trying to undermine the workers' goals, but Safronov leaves when Kozlov recalls the time he "incited a certain poor peasant to slaughter a cock and eat it."

Voschev continues to spend his days picking up leaves and other pieces of nature as proof that the world was created without purpose.

He then recycles an old excuse, telling Safronov that he would like to take some paid time off in order to search for the meaning of life, which will increase productivity.

Chiklin walks through an old tile factory and finds Julia, the boss's daughter whom Prushevsky — and he, too, it is realized — kissed so many years earlier.

Zhachev, the cripple at whom Voschev yelled during one of the opening scenes, decides that he will kill of the local adults once Nastya has grown up.

When Nastya goes to sleep, the men resolve to start working early in the morning so that the housing complex will be completed for any other underage visitors in the future.

Kozlov unexpectedly shows up at the worksite wearing an expensive suit, the result of having been appointed chairman of the labor union council.

Voschev, who followed the peasant claiming ownership of the empty coffins, returns to the worksite to announce that Kozlov and Safronov are dead.

Chiklin and Voschev travel to the village in order to retrieve the bodies but discover that Kozlov and Safronov have been brutally murdered.

He has not received any mandates from management and is worried about both underachieving and overachieving, fearing that the peasants will use smaller animals like goats in order to prop up capitalism.

They leave for a literacy class taught by the activist, who teaches women and young girls how to write socialist words and slogans.

Chiklin finds out that the local priest has been providing the activist with a list of names of the people who enter the church to pray.

Zhachev and Nastya visit the village, and Yelisey introduces them to the local blacksmith: an anthropomorphic bear who touts a keen ability to sniff out and kill kulaks.

He tells Chiklin, who begins feeling sorry for the people they've killed, that Marxism, along with scientific advancements, will resurrect Lenin one day.

The activist receives a letter from the Soviet government stating that any peasants who seem too willing to have their property collectivized should be treated with suspicion as undercover agents.

Zhachev, who at the beginning of the novel vowed to kill all of the adults at Nastya's coming of age, refuses to help reconstruct the foundation pit.

He concludes The Foundation Pit with a quick note: "Will our soviet socialist republic perish like Nastya or will she grow up into a whole human being, into a new historical society?

… The author may have been mistaken to portray in the form of the little girl's death the end of the socialist generation, but this mistake occurred only as a result of excessive alarm on behalf of something beloved, whose loss is tantamount to the destruction not only of all the past but also of the future.

Lack of meaning in life leads to a feeling of boredom, a drop in the "pace of work", dismissal and loss of livelihood.

One of the heroes of the Pit (Kozlov) generally doubts the need for happiness, declaring that from him "only Shame", while sadness implies involvement in the whole world.

The Irish Times called the book a "hallucinatory, nightmarish parable of hysterical laughter and terrifying silences," and The Independent referred to Platonov as the "most exciting Russian writer to be rediscovered since the end of the Soviet Union.