On the outskirts of a large city, workers are digging a massive pit to construct a communal proletarian house. A hierarchy emerges among the voluntary slaves, ranging from war invalids to laborers to engineers, resembling the social conditions of Stalin's Soviet Union. Among them is Nastja, the orphan who longs for her bourgeois mother, representing the new human being. Yet in the end, she is buried in the construction pit, the collective grave that the builders of paradise (Brodsky) have dug. The heroes of Andrei Platonov exert all their strength to bring about a happy future for humanity through their labor, only to be crushed by the weight of this task: they sink into melancholy, suffer from exhaustion and brooding, or perish because there is no longer a place for them in the new order of things.