The excavation

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The excavation is a novel by Andrei Platonow (1899–1951), which was finished in 1930 in the Soviet Union , but could not appear there until 1987 because of the censorship .

content

Industrial worker Voschtschew, who worked too slowly because of his thoughtfulness, was fired on his 30th birthday. He joins a group of construction workers who are digging a building pit for a large "common-proletarian house" on the edge of a nameless city. The work dragged on until the end of summer, when the group discussed the purchase of a radio or an orphan girl that could personify the future residents and, more generally, the future in order to increase work motivation. Then the foreman Tschiklin flashes the memory of an enthusiastic childhood sweetheart, he runs into town and finds his dying former lover in a factory basement, whose childish daughter he rescues in the barracks of the construction workers. The work continues slowly until autumn, when they reveal a secret coffin store of the farmers in a nearby village. The protagonists bring these coffins back to the villagers and become witnesses and contributors to theCollectivization of the larger individual farmers ( kulaks ). These are driven onto a raft in the meanwhile beginning of winter and left to certain death downstream. Nastja, the rescued orphan girl, catches a cold at the joyful festival of the village over the liquidation of the peasants, dies from it and is buried in a rock grave at the bottom of the excavation pit. In the last few lines, the narrator addresses his readers, to whom he explains that in the death of the little girl he expressed his concern about the “downfall of the socialist generation”.

Narrative

The crippling doubt about the priorities and measures set by the party runs through the novel as one of the red threads from the beginning to the final author's comment. The motifs of violence, disappointment and futility form the texture of life in town and country in the approximately 20 dialogical scenes of the novel. The omniscient narrator typifies his dozen of the protagonists with mostly a few lines, few of whom are convinced of the building of socialism in the Soviet Union. Almost all of them lack education and conviction, and the fear of being behind or ahead of the party line is their constant companion. Like the changing of the seasons, socialism is not something that it was wanted or created by itself, but a fate that adults can hardly endure or do not expect to survive.

Nature reflects the vain hopes of the protagonists for a fulfilled life when z. B. "in the distance, floating and without rescue, (...) an indistinct star (shone), and it will never come closer." These frequent epiphanies of disappointment sum up the futile demands for truth in the investigation of one's own situation, for the individual Sense of life and personal happiness, which are sacrificed for the immediate benefit of the socialist movement and the ordered enthusiasm. Even the excavation remains empty at the end and the changing of the seasons as well as the fate of the death, casual killing and systematic murder of the kulaks are still the clearest developments. In a symbolic historiography of the events, one of them repeatedly collects the rubbing marks of the socialist construction in a much too small sack into which he stuffs the “obsolete things”, the memories of the victims of the new society, for a later purpose.

The author lets the reader experience the unhoused life of his characters primarily through the dialogues. The cosmos of their language is out of joint, like the world of dragging figures that the reader hesitantly follows. In Gabriele Leupold's new translation , the protagonists unintentionally distort foreign words and slogans of the party, bend logic, speak in puzzles and metonymies of their commands, which have been shortened to the point of loss of meaning. The extensive notes in the present edition demonstrate the use of frequent quotations from the socialist press, which become parodies in the mouths of the characters and the narrator. The author supplements the found and modified material with ironic remarks, his neologisms and poetic images that make the novel a challenging language experiment.

The protagonists usually talk and act with one another as poor and repellent as the external nature and the locations, as roughly, irritably and violently. The characters, who address themselves as "bastard", "piece of dirt" or "parasite", are overwhelmed by their socialist fate and linguistically overwhelm the other individuals again and again through insults, through category errors, through shifting into a wrong plural or abstract: Voschtschew "now cleared them A possibility that childhood (could) grow up in this permanent house. ”But he“ still does not know whether there is anything special in general existence ”, whether it would be allowed to remain an individual under socialism. But the author hints at his answer by having the little girl buried under the socialist structure.

interpretation

Platonov was a revolutionary from the very beginning and for a short time even a member of the Soviet Central Committee for Agriculture and Forestry. As an agricultural engineer, he was familiar with the conditions that he condensed in his pictures. The circumstances and the paraphrasing use of Stalin quotations allow the creation to be limited to the years 1929/1930. Platonov radically criticizes the unfolding Stalinism , which wants to "transport the population into socialism". Instead of the “new human being”, he prophetically sees a new degeneration of human beings, who have already grown bearskins on individual figures because they dance to the tune of their respective new trainers. Since for Platonov truth, meaning in life and individual happiness are not only the distant effects of socialism, but also prerequisites to be met today, he was able to forecast the failure of the socialist project because of his “insane circumstances” very early on.

Translations

In 1971, Suhrkamp-Verlag put a translation (by Aggy Jais) of the original Russian edition "Котлован" under number 282 in its Suhrkamp Library series. The publishing house Volk und Welt published the first GDR translation by Werner Kaempfe in 1989 .

The new Suhrkamp edition from 2016

Since the end of the Soviet Union, Andrei Platonov has been a research topic for censored literary studies that has led to a large number of publications and, in this edition of his "excavation pit", to more than 30 very useful comment pages. The translator, Gabriele Leupold , and the Büchner Prize winner Sibylle Lewitscharoff also commented on the novel and their reading impressions in two afterwords. With these additions to Platonov's text, a readable edition has emerged, which, however, does not mention the in-house first translation, let alone the other publications.

literature

  • Andrei Platonov : The construction pit . Novel, translated from Russian, with comments and an afterword by Gabriele Leupold. With an essay by Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2016, 240 p., ISBN 978-3-518-42561-9
  • Andrei Platonov : The people of Jan. The takyr. The excavation. Stories, letters, photos, documents. Edited by Siegfried Heinrichs. Oberbaum-Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-926409-79-7

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andrej Platonow: The excavation , The Juvenile Sea , Dshan , novels. Translated from the Russian by Alfred Frank and Werner Kaempfe. Edited by Lola Debüser . With an afterword by the editor. Berlin, Volk und Welt, 1989, 459 pp. ISBN 3-353-00511-0 .