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FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Foundation PitBy Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, Vintage, 224pp, £8.99

A LITTLE GIRL REFUSES to hand over the coffin in which she has been keeping her toys. Eventually, she needs it herself. Somewhere in provincial Russia an unlikely team of bewildered, alienated workers are haphazardly occupied in digging a vast foundation pit for a shining, many-storeyed building called socialism – except the hole is actually a grave for them all. Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, written in 1930 and eventually first published in its original Russian in 1973 – in the US – and later, in 1987, by Novy Mir, is as much parable as it is polemic; the genius of this short, brilliant satire about Stalin’s brutal collectivisation lies in Platonov’s extraordinary and extreme use of language. The test for his translators is to convey the meaning without losing Platonov’s essential Russian whimsy.