Sofía Petrovna (Lidia Chukovskaya, 1967/1988)

the physical, moral and psychic collapse of a mother during the Great Stalinist Terror

Abstract

This article analytically reviews the character of Sofia Petrovna in the novel Sofia Petrovna (Lidia, Chukovskaya, 1967/1988) in the context of the police persecutions carried out by the Stalinist regime between 1935 and 1938 known as the Great Terror. This novel, written clandestinely during that period, recounts Sofia's struggle to find out the whereabouts of her son Kolia, arrested for no apparent reason; the sterile determination of this mother from Leningrad in the face of the monstrous Soviet bureaucracy and her own stigmatization as a relative of an enemy of the people, are factors that constitute not only the fictional plot of this work, but also the silenced chronicle of millions of Soviet women. martyred to the point of destitution or death by the judicial and police bodies of the USSR, including the author herself, who lost her husband, the physicist Matvei Bronstein, during the purges.