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Above all, I have the good fortune to have as my closest collaborators - my wife, who shares my love of Platonov - and the brilliant American scholar, Olga Meerson. One indication of how deeply many Russian writers and critics admire Platonov is the extent of their generosity to his translators I now have a large list of people I can turn to for help. During the last 15 years, however, I have been regularly attending Platonov seminars and conferences in Moscow and Petersburg. In the early 1990s I was working in the dark. Second, Platonov is very hard to translate.

Our NYRB version is the only English translation of Platonov's definitive text. First, the original text was never published in Platonov's lifetime, and the first posthumous publications - on which our Harvill translation was based - are now known to have been severely bowdlerized. I wanted to retranslate 'The Foundation Pit' for two reasons. I myself have translated this book twice - in 1994 for The Harvill Press, and in 2009, in collaboration with my wife Elizabeth and the American scholar Olga Meerson, for NYRB Classics. In spite of what is written above, I did not write an introduction for Mirra Ginzburg's translation of THE FOUNDATION PIT. Amazon have an annoying way of jumbling together reviews of different translations.