In Stalin's Russia, The Pit tells the story of the digging of the foundation pit for a gigantic building planned for the workers to live together in the good times to come - "in the Platonov style", of course. Readers of Platonov will immediately understand what this means: absurd dialogues, existential inquiries, an exposition of the gap between the abstract ideals of socialism and its concrete implementation, naive characters who comically misunderstand the ideology that is constantly being propagated, and an original, "strange", unprecedented language.

We present this novel, which was completed by the author in 1930 but published in Russia only in 1987, in the masterful translation of Günay Çetao Kızılırmak, who has also translated Platonov's other works published by Metis.