The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan in Russian) is great and Kafka-like: the Soviet people are digging a giant hole no one knows or remembers why and how deep. Eventually people start dying from the hard work and they are buried in the hole where others continue working

had to look up bowdlerized...

> Expurgation. An expurgation of a work, also known as a bowdlerization or fig-leaf edition, is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media

It wasn't clear if original version existed? I think of the bukowski mess

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/poetry/bukowksis-poems-wer...

In this case, the much overused 'censored' is really more accurate but like with most such works, unmangled versions were published in 90s after the fall of the Soviet Union. There's a tangential mention on the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Platonov#Official_suppo...

Platonov is "must read" if you interested in Russian literature but he's not that great.

Vladimir Sorokin wrote that he was fascinated by Platonov but soon discovered that it's too easy to imitate Platonov style.

Platonov chapter in "Blue Lard" is even more Platonov than Platonov himself.

Disregard what I said I encourage to read "Chevengur" - it's super.

Unfortunately, Platonov could not stand the torture and in the second half of his life turned into a de facto mouthpiece of the regime.

However, he was not the only one, and in the end there were no others at all.

In any translation, his texts lose their meaning; now he is interesting only as another example of the work of the totalitarian selection of the “new useful people”.

Have you read “The Seventh Man”? Was it something “the regime” wanted to see, or was it more of a spit in its face?

Platonov is so powerful that his works melt any petty ideological classification and critique (“X is good, Y is bad”).

And there's a cosmic scale from “The Motherland of Electricity” and “The Fierce and Beautiful World” to “The Seventh Man” and “Rubbish Wind”.

Potato/ Jerusalem artichoke ? (“Erdapfel”) is my fav