Void and Construction: The Historicization of Anti-Utopian and Dystopian Social Criticism in Early Soviet Literature

By Ben Thomas

Introduction

From allegory and satire to humor and magical realism, indirect literary expression pervades Soviet literature. Many authors used these devices to subtly criticize the regime. Such a choice would seem prudent, given the era’s extreme censorship, but censors often reacted just as harshly against these works as against others. Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920–1921) was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1929–1930) met a similar fate just nine years later, and both writers suffered extreme marginalization afterward. Given this, one wonders why and how they and so many other authors of the period criticized the regime indirectly at all.  Zamyatin and Platonov did so using two related yet distinct modes: dystopia, in which society is deeply and overtly oppressive, and anti-utopia, in which society hides that oppression beneath superficial perfection. The Soviet Union in which they wrote exhibited both, using utopian revolutionary ideology to enact draconian censorship, genocide against ethnic minorities, and brutal collectivization campaigns.  Comparing their principal works should therefore reveal not only how anti-utopian and dystopian fictions practice criticism, but also to what effect on the reader they do so. Given the intensity of recent debates on the social role of literature and Russia’s current crackdown on independent journalism, anti-war sentiment, and public dissent, such an inquiry could also provide useful insights on contemporary discourse as well. Accordingly, this paper analyzes how and to what ends We and The Foundation Pit practice social criticism with respect to their anti-utopian and dystopian modes. It concludes by analyzing how each positions and challenges its reader in relation to history.

Portrait of Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of We. Yevgeny Zamyatin, 2009, PD-old-70, via Wikimedia Commons,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zamjatin.jpg

Zamyatin and Anti-Utopian Construction

The One State is the centuries-old, planet-wide society of We. D-503, the builder of the spaceship Integral and the novel’s narrator, explains that at the heart of its success is its “system of scientific ethics, i.e., ethics based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication.” Rationalism – the  notion that knowledge and progress derives from the conquest of nature with reason – governs every aspect of life in the One State, and it educates its citizens to revere this principle. Even love has been “organized and reduced to mathematical order” through the “Lex Sexualis,” a law governing when and with whom citizens can have sexual relations. More fundamentally, the One State uses a  utilitarian justification of reason as essential  to happiness. As far as D-503 reveals, the lack of any cynical, exploitative elite implies that the One State believes this “beneficent yoke of reason” humanitarian. He, his peers, and the state often praise their ancestors for creating this “yoke” and criticize the complacency of the distant past. They understand their way of life as a praiseworthy collective choice. In this way, the benevolence underlying the One State’s rationality implies intentionality in its structures.

Also of note is the One State’s practical use of reason. D-503 serves as the Builder of the Integral, a spaceship that will “integrate the infinite equation of the universe” by spreading reason to other planets and peoples. Here, as elsewhere, the One State’s rationality functions to differentiate it from the rest of the chaotic universe. The smooth, glassy Green Wall encloses D-503’s city, dividing its order from the disordered wilderness and its hairy inhabitants. As I-330, a revolutionary and D-503’s love interest, explains to him, the dichotomy is one of “entropy and energy,” where “one leads to blissful quietude, to happy equilibrium; the other… to tormentingly endless movement.” At the heart of the One State’s intentional rationality, then, lies its concern with benevolent order.

D-503 understands this in starkly material terms. He often lauds the Integral’s “graceful body… still motionless, not yet animated by fire.” The last tension left between the individual and the state, that of privacy, is mediated by the glass walls and curtains of its citizens’ apartments. The One State’s materiality projects its intentional rationality; its citizens experience its principles and sustain belief in them through its physical structures. It has convinced itself and its people that “walls are the foundation of all human” life. In doing so, the One State builds on what Foucault calls the “discipline” of the “individual… human body” to exert a new kind of biopolitical control over its people. Here, I follow Michel Foucault in defining biopolitical as the use of a “new nondisciplinary power [that] is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man… ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species.”  Biopolitical control, or biopower comprises control over “processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.” The Green Wall and glass apartments surveil and constrain citizens, the Lex Sexualis dominates their sexuality, and state policy controls reproduction. Given the One State’s biopower, materiality, and intentional rationality, it is best understood as a biopolitical construction.

While John White correctly argues  that the One State’s language reflects this rational construction, he misses the extent to which it also exerts the One State’s biopower. At the most basic level, its newspeak is grounded in references to its physical institutions. The Table of Hours, the Green Wall, pink tickets, the Guardians, the Benefactor, and many other constructed aspects of their society structure its discourse. New words also enter D-503’s language to enforce those institutions’ biopower. Human beings become “Numbers” and “unifs,” and brains become “mechanisms.” If the One State dominates all rationality and materiality inside the Green Wall and its citizens understand themselves as rational material, it follows that they have internalized the state’s biopower over them through its constructed language. Indeed, D-503 struggles to understand his own experience in any register but the biological. Until I-330 explains the One State’s history to him in his apartment in Record 28, He repeatedly refers to his dreams and sense of soul as a “disease” or “sickness.” I-330, a revolutionary and his love interest, briefly inspires him to subjectivize his self-understanding by explaining the One State’s history to him in Record 28. Only after the authorities subject him to the Operation, which literally rewrites his biology by excising his imagination, does he again explicitly define “soul” as “sickness.” In each case, the One State enforces its biopolitical construction in the minds of its people by reducing thick concepts to thin pathological  descriptions.

The deepest level of this domination emerges from the structure of the text. Everything we read is D-503’s journal, meaning that the reader learns about him and his society only through his perception and mimetic choices. However, while he constructs the narrative, the One State constructs him. In certain sections of the text, this becomes explicit. D-503 opens the first chapter by copying exactly a government news report on the building of the Integral. Rather than narrate his own project to the reader, he allows the One State to speak through him. This subjugation reaches an apotheosis after he undergoes the Operation removing his imagination. “Can it be true that I, D-503,” he wonders, “have written these two hundred pages? Can it really be true that I once felt—or imagined that I felt—all this?” Here, he exhibits incredulity as to the thought that he and the D-503 who wrote them are the same narrative self. Through the Operation, the One State has so exerted its biopower over him that it has re-constructed him as a new subject, a distinct mimetic agent. Moreover, D-503’s suspicion that he may have “imagined that [he] felt” everything narrated in the rest of his journal indicates that he has lost the concept  of experiencing anything unintelligible to a purely rational observer — to the One State. D-503’s journal is no longer his own. In this way, the One State extends its constructive impulse beyond the text to the reader’s experience of the story.

This cements the One State’s status as an anti-utopia. Over generations, its leaders and citizens have constructed it and lived in it according to a utilitarian rationality. The benevolence and authenticity of their intent, at least as far as D-503 can report, are clear. As White notes, though, this benevolent dominance of rationality allow irrational concepts, such as the square root of negative one, to torment D-503. That he must choose between that suffering and the loss of his humanity through the Operation epitomizes the injustice of the state’s suppression of irrationality. This injustice is more than symbolic. D-503 himself refers to ten dead coworkers as “ten numbers [that] are less than a hundred millionth part of the population of the One State,” indicating that its  nominally benevolent rationality facilitates shocking dehumanization. Through the Operation, it succeeds in reducing them to what Giorgio Agamben has called “bare lives,” or lives defined as bodies in a collective rather than political beings with significance in themselves. Many of its people enjoy happiness of the kind intelligible as “the quotient of bliss and envy,” but they experience nothing resembling the good life for humanity. They do not experience meaning, form enriching connections, or value. As bare lives, they simply survive. In these ways, the perfection of the One State’s biopolitical construction, no matter how idyllic and well-intentioned, creates extreme injustice by destroying its inhabitants’ humanity, by controverting what Henry Gifford calls “the right to irrationality.”

Andrey Platanov’s monument in Voronezh, Russia. Voronezh2.jpg , CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andrey_Platonov,_Voronezh2.jpg

Void and Platonov’s Ambiguous Dystopia

The society of The Foundation Pit, set near a nameless provincial Soviet city evoking the 1930s, functions very differently from the One State. Most of its characters spend the length of the novel digging an enormous foundation pit for a future “all-proletarian apartment house,” . Several characters also depopulate the countryside, killing and collectivizing every peasant they can find. Everyone in this world, even the victims, in some way creates or leaves behind empty space. When one worker, Chiklin, visits a church, he finds it vacant but for its former priest. He tells Chiklin that he “do[es] not feel the loveliness of creation any longer—and [is] left without God.” Not only is the church empty of believers, but the one man left inside is himself empty. Whereas the One State in We predicates its existence on its own material construction as rational, the society of The Foundation Pit seemingly exists to create voids, empty space that appears unlikely to ever be filled.

The most overt among these voids are linguistic. One day, Chiklin and Voshchev, another worker, hear an activist falsely telling collectivized peasants that several propagandistic terms end in hard signs. When they question him, the activist declares that he is doing so “because Party lines and slogans are designated by words, and because a hard sign is more useful than a soft sign. It is the soft sign which has to be abolished.” Not only has the society of the pit created gaps in its languages, but it has also tried to fill them with replacements devoid of meaning. Where words once signified concepts, they now designate nothing beyond allegiance to the Party. Each signifier has lost its signified, and the result is a senseless language. Nearly the entire society uses it, and even the narrator describes Voshchev’s birthday as “the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his personal life.” These words refer to the day of an individual’s birth but remove the layers of cultural meaning present in the term “birthday.” As Thomas Seifrid demonstrates, this may be a criticism of Stalinism’s assumption that its new language legitimates its utopian project. Such phraseology, he writes, “appears not only to be capable of referring to the concrete world but to contain the algorithm for its remaking.” The new Stalinist dialect claims to offer a future utopian order despite its own internal senselessness.

The psychological ramifications of these voids become apparent when the society of the pit’s inhabitants search for embodied truth and meaning. Prushevsky, the man originally behind the all-proletarian home, has long “felt… an end to the further understanding of life,” and he suspects that he will never find anything more than a “hollow place to which there was no need to strive.” This existential anxiety is also bound to his work on the pit, as he is “afraid of erecting empty structures.” Both Voshchev and Prushevsky find that the foundation pit becomes the “central locus for [their] quest[s] for meaning and truth,” as Tora Lane notes, and the former spends weeks digging it in search of that truth. The physical vacancy of the pit thus inscribes existential problems, or philosophical reckonings, especially as they pertain to embodiment. One harassed peasant, for example, feels his “heart [move] up on its own into his soul” and “move[s] his legs so as to help his heart shudder.” He views his physical body is an instrument separate from his soul. Here and elsewhere, as Seifrid argues, characters’ souls remain divorced from, yet subordinate to their bodies and therefore vulnerable to the same meaningless suffering. Mere being becomes a struggle. In sum, the people of the pit find that physical voids prompt them to confront their existential ones as well.

From this senseless misery, the society of the pit’s dystopian nature becomes clear, but its problems run much deeper than simple suffering. Each void mediates another; the physical emptiness of the pit and the linguistic meaninglessness of the new proletarian dialect all structure deep existential problems. However, many existentialist philosophers, notably Søren Kierkegaard, consider confronting existential problems to be crucial in living well despite the impossibility of solving them rationally. This is so, Kierkegaard claims, because it allows one to take a leap of faith into an uncertain subjectivity and make one’s own meaning by living authentically. Such authenticity is what Voshchev means when he says that he is “agreeable not to possess the meaning of existence” so long as he can “observe it in the substance of the body of another person near him.” Some scholars, such as Cate Reilly, have argued that The Foundation Pit is simultaneously utopian and dystopian because its misery engenders democratic feeling and excises the unreal in the name of hope. However extreme suffering is still extreme suffering, democratic or not. Instead, I suggest, the society of The Foundation Pit is best understood as an ambiguous dystopia, in that its collective misery offers the faint hope of individual well-being through an existential leap of faith.

Particularly in view of the workers’ love for Nastya, an orphaned girl whom they adopt and convert into a vocal communist, the possibility of and need for such an individual leap may imply that of a collective one as well. As Lane argues, Platonov “explores the Revolution as a promise,” “not as the memory of the past but as the forgotten memory of a common presence” in the name of “retrieving the experience of common being.” Indeed, Nastya’s aristocratic mother, the last vestige of the Tsarist system, dies just after she appears, and Nastya spends the rest of the text heeding her dying exhortation to hide her noble heritage. The groundlessness that so many scholars have noted in the novel is sociocultural, a lack of historical reference point beyond the destruction of the past. In Andrei Bitov’s words, “Platonov start[s] from the Revolution as point zero,” which Reilly claims should allow Platonov to create a society with a robust future-consciousness. While the death and burial of Nastya, the workers’ symbol of hope, inside the pit reveals the futility of simple optimism, the basic fixation on the future as possibility remains. Just as Bolshevik ideology was founded on faith in a communist utopia to come, so does Prushevsky lament the fact that “he [can]not perceive ahead of time the structure of soul of the residents-to-be in the all-proletarian home.” The most fundamental vacancy of all in the society of the pit, then, is the liminal void in which it exists: the ill-defined space between its vanished past and uncertain future. 

Cover art for both The Foundation Pit and We. Photo by Madeline Hossler. 2022.

Void and Potential, Teleology and Argument

In her study of the modern dystopian tradition, Erika Gottlieb categorizes The Foundation Pit as an Eastern dystopia concerned with present injustice and We as a Western dystopia interested in a future social order. This East-West dichotomy  oversimplifies historical consciousness in both novels. She claims that “Platonov’s novel offers no ‘window on history’; at no point do we see what… could have led the people of Russia” to build the foundation pit, but she misunderstands the notion of a “window on history” as mere anthropological data . Platonov’s real “window on history” is his construction of the society of the pit’s experience of history, of its status as caught between a destroyed past and an uncertain future. 

We defies Gottlieb’s label similarly. She claims that because the One State is a far-future society with Soviet resonances, the novel is concerned exclusively with the future. The text certainly explores how the Soviet Union could change for the worse — D-503 describes an extreme form of Frederick Taylor’s detail-oriented, micromanagement-obsessed system of industrial organization — but Zamyatin’s concerns with it derive from his immediate social milieu, especially the Taylorist and poet Aleksei Gastev. Zamyatin’s work satirizes totalitarian and industrial principles rooted firmly in his present and, through their origins in the works of Taylor and Marx, the distant past. It sees the utilitarian, materialistic conflict between social rationality and irrationality as driving history toward perfect rationality, the One State operates according to a teleology echoing Marx’s dialectical materialism. The Ancient House, a small museum of the past, roots their society in a time when irrationality dominated, and the novel ends with the Operation’s complete destruction of that irrationality. As White notes, D-503 may be conscious of this history on some level: “Is it not clear,” he laments, “that now I do not live any more in our rational world but in the ancient delirious world, in a world of square-root of minus one?” From this point of view, We conceptualizes an anti-utopian history according to a dialectical rationalism, so to speak, not some future anti-utopian point within history. Together, the two novels’ holistic historical consciousnesses illustrate the potential shortcomings  of Gottlieb’s historical dichotomy in regards to these specific texts.

Instead, Zamyatin and Platonov’s visions diverge on their spatialization within history and, therefore, on their methods of and intentions for social criticism. Whereas The Foundation Pit confronts its reader with a liminal void between a destroyed past and the uncertain future, Zamyatin’s novel presents the reader with a filled space in a constructed history. In We, the One State sees itself as part of a long history determined by a consistent dialectical rationalism, but We criticizes only the teleology therein, not the dialectic itself. Indeed, I-330 famously declares that “there is no final [revolution]; revolutions are infinite.” The One State, of course, disagrees, which manifests in the novel as its materialized construction of a false teleology. Zamyatin likely situates the reader so because of his anti-utopia’s resonance with the political situation in which his immediate readers lived. While he was writing We in the early 1920s, the ability of the Soviet Union’s leaders and leftist intellectuals to cooperate in realizing the latter’s revolutionary ideals was coming into serious doubt. Despite the positive intentions behind those ideals and some popular belief in Party leaders’ solidarity with them, they had already begun to enable extreme oppression. This might as well be the plot of an anti-utopian novel itself. In turn, this resonance allows Zamyatin to argue that in his society, the dominant method of doing history was as much a teleological fallacy as that which rules the One State. The Mephi, I-330’s revolutionary organization, then become key to understanding his proposed replacement. They hope to create a society functioning according to a more authentic historical paradigm, one admitting that conflict between order and disorder will endure forever. This is why Gifford and White have both argued that at the heart of the novel lies a belief in the “right to irrationality.” We expects the reader, after being shown a constructed historical paradigm evocative of their own, to understand that living a fundamentally human life is only possible in a society tolerant of both.

The Foundation Pit, on the other hand, presents its reader with a society between a destroyed past and the uncertain future to actualize its ambiguous dystopian project. In Platonov’s 1930s Soviet Union, the destruction of Tsarist, Orthodox, and aristocratic institutions was nearly complete. He clearly did not invent the sensation of groundlessness so prevalent in his novel. Moreover, Stalinism was only just beginning to signal that it likely could not form a new “experience of being in common” while Platonov was writing the novel. The Foundation Pit would thus have forced the contemporary reader to confront the desolate, liminal emptiness in which they lived. This process is more than an effort to torture the audience, however. In his preface to the 1973 English edition, Joseph Brodsky writes: 

The Foundation Pit is an exceedingly gloomy work, and the reader closes the book in the most depressed state of mind. If at this moment direct transformation of psychic energy into physical energy were possible, the first thing one should do on closing the book would be to rescind the existing world-order and declare a new age.

In this way, The Foundation Pit poses a challenge to the reader after subjecting them to “an unusual degree of anguish or insecurity.” One wishes to redraw the world along different lines, to create a new “common mode of being,” but the impossibility thereof leaves one  with only Platonov’s insistent questions as to the extent of one’s agency in history. This gives rise to what Afanasov has called Platonov’s “dialectic of happiness” and, as Reilly puts it, “demand[s] the reader’s judgment” on the “incommensurabilities” therein. Differences of phrasing aside, both correctly understand the novel as provoking such terrifying dislocation in the reader that they have no choice but to make themselves a solid epistemological, historical ground. What, Platonov asks, do you believe will happen? Can you control it? How will you survive to live well?

Certainly, the two novels’ projects are not as opposed as they appear, especially regarding hope. Zamyatin seems to have either had second thoughts on the ambiguous ending of We, as his later unpublished film treatment of the novel ends in a relatively clear victory for the Mephi. Platonov admits the possibility of both an individual leap of faith into a new subjectivity and a new common mode of being. Some modicum of hope, however small, remains in both. Contrary to Andrzej Dróżdż’s assertion that they merely “mocked” the “kind of images of reality which served for ideological propaganda,” they also enact social criticism using holistic historical perspectives. Mimetic ideological satire certainly runs deep in both novels, but his argument misses the extent to which each novel makes its case by challenging its readers intellectually or emotionally. We pushes its reader to question a particular mode of doing history, makes a specific critique of that method, and presents a coherent alternative. It makes a two-sided argument. This squares with Zamyatin’s struggle to publish the novel in the West and its popularity among émigrés, as the dialectical rationalism that he criticizes was not restricted to the Soviet Union. The Foundation Pit, by contrast, is more concerned with how the contemporary  reader lives. It shows them where they exist in history and challenges them to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith toward a new common mode of being. In Livingstone’s words, one endures a defined sequence of responses while reading: “despair followed by recovery, a kind of endangerment followed by a kind of deliverance.” Indeed, the only solace Voshchev ever finds amid his existential misery is innocence in others, such as the workers, the parade of children, and Nastya. While Livingstone overstates ambiguous relief as “deliverance,” it nevertheless underscores in the text the basic desirability of taking the Kierkegaardian leap of faith toward a new subjectivity. 

Conclusions

Through close readings of Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit and Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, this paper has sought to understand how and to what end dystopian and anti-utopian Soviet prose might make indirect social criticism. In sum, Platonov’s novel depicts a liminal void between a destroyed past and the uncertain future, while We confronts its reader with a biopolitically enforced, falsely teleological history. Placing the reader in that situation  allows We, as an anti-utopia, to make the argument that living in a society capable of tolerating irrationality is the only way to live a fully human life. By contrast, The Foundation Pit challenges the reader to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith into an uncertain common subjectivity. We makes a two-sided argument, and The Foundation Pit encourages the reader to make their own judgments about the past and future in the interest of living well.

Few literary genres have impacted public discourse so deeply as have the dystopian and anti-utopian traditions. George Orwell’s 1984, after all, gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe governments’ deceptive use of language to dominate and rewrite thoughts. Exploring in detail exactly how and to what end writers of different subgenres have created such literature, as this paper has sought to do, can clarify what it meant  to write indirect social criticism in the early Soviet Union and how art can reveal or counteract social injustice. However, this paper’s account has by no means been a complete one. Future work would do well to examine Platonov and Zamyatin’s works in more rigorous existential and epistemological terms. I have only refrained from doing so here for lack of philosophical background. More recent Russian dystopias and anti-utopias, such as Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik and Tatiana Tolstaia’s The Slynx, could also inform a broader inquiry into how the subgenre’s functions have changed since Platonov and Zamyatin’s time. As did their Soviet Union, today’s Russia leaves some of its brutal censorship and genocide in the open while hiding the rest beneath messianic discourse of a  “Russian World,” a future Eurasian utopia born of conquest. The potential for analysis work on dystopian and anti-utopian fiction  is almost limitless. Such work has ramifications for our understanding of art’s role in the modern and postmodern worlds, our self-conception in relation to history, and our ability to live well in the face of extreme injustice.

Endnotes

1 I loosely use “indirect literary expression” to describe literature that somehow clothes or veils its main thematic thrusts. This definition is neither airtight nor exhaustive, but I refrain from theorizing it extensively here in the interests of focus and concision.Max Eastman, Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (Taylor & Francis, 2021), 82-94.

2 Thomas Seifrid, A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (United States: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 24.

3 Evgeny Zamyatin, We (New York: Avon Books, 1987), 13.

4 Zamyatin, We, 21.

5 Zamyatin, We, 1

6 Zamyatin, We, 1.

7 Zamyatin, We, 165.

8 Zamyatin, We, 33.

9 Zamyatin, We, 41.

10 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador), 242-243.

11 Foucault, Society, 242.

12 Foucault, Society, 243.

13 John White, “Mathematical Imagery in Musil’s Young Törless and Zamyatin’s We.” Comparative Literature 18, no. 1 (1966): 76.

14 Zamyatin, We, 5; 32.

15 Zamyatin, We, 39, 102, 124, 127, 128, 131, 160, 232.

16 Zamyatin, We, 231.

17  White, “Mathematical Imagery,” 77.

18 Zamyatin, We, 107-108.

19 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (United States: Stanford University Press, 1998), 114-115.

20 Henry Gifford, The Novel in Russia: From Pushkin to Pasternak (United Kingdom: Hutchinson University Library), 162.

21 Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1973), 19.

22 Platonov, Foundation Pit, 104.

23 Platonov, Foundation Pit, 101. In Russian, hard (Ъ) and soft (Ь) signs alter the pronunciation of surrounding phonemes. Language reforms in the early Soviet Union greatly reduced usage of hard signs in written Russian.

24  Platonov, Foundation Pit, 1.

25 Thomas Seifrid, “Writing against Matter: On the Language of Andrej Platonov’s Kotlovan,” The Slavic and East European Journal 31, no. 3 (1987): 383.

26 Seifrid, “Writing,” 383.

27 Platonov, Foundation Pit, 28-29.

28 Tora Lane, “A Groundless Foundation Pit,” Ulbandus Review 14 (2011): 68; 70.

29 Platonov, Foundation Pit, 100.

30 Seifrid, “Writing against Matter,” 371-373.

31 Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino, The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 207; 9-10.

32 Platonov, Foundation Pit, 19-20.

33 Cate Reilly, “Digging The Revolution: Andrey Platonov and The Pit of Progress,” College Literature 48, no. 3 (2021): 528; 536.

34 Tora Lane, Andrey Platonov: The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution (Lexington Books, 2018), 3; 134.

35 Lane, Andrey Platonov, 8.

36 Reilly, “Digging,” 546.

37 Platonov, Foundation Pit, 64.

38 Platonov, The Foundation Pit, 28.

39 Erika Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2001), 159; 63-64.

40 Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction, 159.

41 Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction, 56-60.

42 Zamyatin, We, 33.

43 Carden, Patricia. “Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Aleksei Gastev and Evgeny Zamyatin,” The Russian Review 46, no. 1 (1987): 3-4.

44 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (United States: Modern Library, 1906), 25-26.

45 White, “Mathematical Imagery,” 77.

46 Zamyatin, We, 174.

47 Zamyatin, We, 174.

48 Carden, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia,” 2.

49 Carden, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia,” 2.

50 Gifford, Novel in Russia, 162; White, “Mathematical Imagery,” 72.

51 Lane, Andrey Platonov, 6.

52 Angela Livingstone, “Danger and Deliverance: Reading Andrei Platonov,” The Slavonic and East European Review 80, no. 3 (2002): 401-402.

53 Joseph Brodsky, Preface to The Foundation Pit (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1973), x.

54 Livingstone, “Danger and Deliverance,” 402-403.

55 Nikolai B. Afanasov, “The Dialectics of Philosophical Meanings in The Foundation Pit,” Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences 63, no. 5 (May 15, 2020): 68.

56 Reilly, “Digging the Revolution,” 545.

57 Brett Cooke, “Second Thoughts on the End of Utopia? Zamiatin's Film Scenario, ‘D-503’,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 45, 3-4 (2011): 429-430.

58 Andrzej Dróżdż, “Parodies,” in More After More. Essays Commemorating the Five Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia, ed. Ksenia Olkusz, Michał Kłosiński, and Krzysztof M. Maj (Ośrodek Badawczy Facta Ficta, 2017), 211.

59 The philosopher Jonathan Lear makes a similar argument in the context of Indigenous North American cultural devastation in Radical Hope. See especially Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 99-100.

60 Livingstone, “Reading Andrei Platonov,” 402.

61 Livingstone, “Reading Andrei Platonov,” 410-411.

Author Bio

Ben Thomas is a fourth-year undergraduate studying comparative literature, Russian, East European and Eurasian studies, and political science at Emory University. He has published work on philosophy; Soviet, German, and British literature; and U.S. education policy, and he speaks Russian and German. His thesis in progress will explore the influence of the Russian heroic epic, fairy tales, and Stalinism on early Soviet children’s literature. Thomas has also interned with the Carter Center, a congressional campaign, Emory’s English department, and California’s Environmental Protection Agency. After graduation, he plans to attend graduate school for Slavic studies or comparative literature.