From What’s Probably an Afterword to Andrey Platonov, “The Foundation Pit”

this book looks super

All these works appear at first glance–especially to a reader unversed in Soviet history–to be highly surreal. This impression, however, is misleading; they contain barely an incident or a passage that does not directly relate to some real event or publication from these years. Platonov’s focus is not on some private dream world but on political and historical reality–a reality so extraordinary as to be barely credible.

buy book here; cf also my constant refrain, “‘Realism’ only works for people whose worldviews are already accepted as realistic. The rest of us must make do with genre”; via TK Bloom