Kotlovan [The Pit]

Coming from a provincial working-class family, Platonov wholeheartedly accepted the October Revolution, and the more interesting is the fact that his works convey with unprecedented force a personal ideological tragedy, unusually clearly expressed in ‘The Pit.’ The very idea of building a ‘Common Proletarian House’ turns ‘The Pit’ into a dystopia that is shocking in its power, where the details of reality take on incredible, cartoonishly exaggerated proportions. This amazing house, conceived as a symbol of the communist ‘earthly paradise’, in reality becomes a cemetery of unrealistic fantasies.