this was really good and really effective, honestly I don't have much to say about it except that I would definitely recommend it and ... yeah it was just really good and really sad ( )

The story of a mother and son during Stalin’s Terror of the mid 1930s. Short, well-written, and chilling. And yet, as good as it is, it reminded me of Yevgenia [Eugenia in the US edition] Ginzburg’s memoir Journey Into the Whirlwind which covers the same story and is, I think, absolutely brilliant. Ginsburg’s work is actually two volumes: the first (if my memory is correct) covers the period up through her arrest and trial and the second volume (Within the Whirlwind) covers her nearly two decades of imprisonment (at the infamous Kolyma gulag) and her release. At one time, I read many memoirs of the Kolyma and the gulag more generally and, excellent as many of them were, Ginzburg’s stood out. Both the real Ginzburg and the fictional Sofia Petrovna are faithful and loyal Party members and their devotion and dedication are meaningless. The only observation that I think is even possible is that the word “terrifying” or “chilling” is drastically inadequate to describe that period and that regime. Sofia Petrovna nevertheless gives a good sense of the claustrophobia of those years and the effect of the terror on “ordinary people” and is well worth the time. ( )

Terse, flat, drily told - and one of the more harrowing stories I've read. I've read a fair amount of Russian literature, so that's saying a lot. Widow Sofia Petrovna has a son, Kolya. She works as a typist in a large publishing house, and is happy. Her son grows up and thrives, is a loyal and successful Komsomol member, becomes an engineer, is written up in Pravda as an up-and-coming star who invents a new gadget that improves productivity. Sofia Petrovna is so proud of him.

And then one day, he's arrested. A mistake, of course. A misunderstanding. They have the wrong guy. And the nightmare begins.

Hours and days, weeks, months spent in line with hundreds of wives and mothers trying to learn what has happened to their loved ones. What were they charged with? Where are they? Are they even alive? It's a risk even to be asking. And there is no way to find out. Sofia's pleasant and charismatic boss is abruptly arrested; a gifted and skillful typist (and Sofia's closest friend) is fired because she has allegedly typed "Ret Army" for "Red Army" in an article - and then kills herself, unable to find any other work. Then Sofia makes the mistake of publicly saying her friend had been a good worker. Her name is being mentioned around the office; people begin to look at her strangely. And she doesn't know if her son is alive or dead - a state she could not have imagined. The morose and stalwart party official who saw to Sofia's boss's arrest is eventually himself arrested for being insufficiently vigilant not to have caught the boss's "malfeasance" sooner. No one is safe. No one.

Welcome to the Soviet Union under Papa Joe. The novella is largely aut0biographical - it was Chukovskaya's husband who was arrested, and she spent years trying to find out what happened to him (he was executed only a few months after his arrest). The manuscript was secreted with a friend, who passed it along to his sister before he died of starvation in Tashkent. Only years later did it find its way back to Chukovskaya, and it took more years to be published. She went on to become an outspoken supporter of persecuted Russian writers: Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, et al.

The denial, the worry, the fear, the coping (and not coping) is described simply, in Sofia's limited point of view - which only seems to make the grotesquely opaque darkness more terrifying. All the things you cannot ask, the people you don't dare to speak to and who won't answer you if you do, or who will only frighten you more; the utter blank wall and dread of what could happen next, are overwhelming. The writer knows whereof she speaks, and this little novel should be part of any and every survey of Soviet and/or Russian literature. It gets a rare fifth star from me because I can't stop thinking about it. ( )

какой кошмар, какой кошмар, какой кошмар ( )

I bought Sofia Petrovna after reading Judith Armstrong's article 'Hidden Women of History: Lydia Chukovskaya, editor, writer, heroic friend' in The Guardian, and I've read it now for the 1965 Club hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings. Although the novella is a rare – possibly unique – example of fiction written about Stalin's Great Purge (1936-1938) when it was actually happening, it was of course not published at the time. Chukovskaya (1907-1996) kept it hidden until after Krushchev's Thaw in 1956 when the story was first circulated in Samizdat (manuscript form). Official publication faltered, however, in 1963 when it was decided that the book contained 'ideological distortions'. An unauthorised copy in English was published in Paris in 1965 (which makes the book eligible for the 1965 club) but there were changes made without the author's permission and the title The Deserted House was absurd, given that the titular character lives in a communal house and her disagreeable co-tenants contribute to her travails. An American publisher subsequently restored the text and the original title, giving us the form of the novella as it is today, and it became legally available in the USSR in 1988.

The European Classics edition that I have includes the Author's Note, written in Moscow in 1962, before the Soviet publishers lost their nerve, and an Afterword, which is an excerpt from Chukovskaya's The Process of Expulsion, which tells the story of her expulsion from the Soviet Writers Union in 1974. What she does not say in either of these additions is that the work is drawn from her own experience: her husband Matvei Bronstein was arrested on false charges during Stalin's Purge and for years Chukovskaya had no news of him and did not know that he had been tried and executed in 1938.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/22/sofia-petrovna-by-lydia-chukovskaya-translat... ( )