Böcker av Thomas Seifrid

Staging the Absolute examines the use of public ritual to interrupt the flow of history, a distinct element in Russian culture during the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

Written at the height of Stalin's first "e;five-year plan"e; for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "e;production"e; novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973.

This is a 1992 study in English of Andrei Platonov, a writer who belongs to a Russian philosophical tradition that includes Solov'ev, Bakhtin and Pasternak. The book investigates the interrelation of themes, imagery and the use of language in his prose.