Sofia Petrovna Study Guide

Lydia Chukovskaya was born in 1907 in present-day Finland, though the country was part of the Russian Empire at that time. Her father was Korney Chukovsky, perhaps the most famous Russian author of children’s books. Growing up in St. Petersburg, Chukovskaya took to reading at a young age and purportedly showed an early interest in social justice, though she mainly spent her time reading poetry. Because of her father’s literary success, the family house was often full of influential Russian artists, exposing Chukovskaya to a wide range of thinkers. When she was of working age, she took a job in a publishing house and also began her own career as a writer, publishing her fist story under a pseudonym. During this period, she married a well-known physicist named Matvei Bronstein. The young couple had daughter, but the family was split up in the 1930s when Joseph Stalin’s campaign of repression—known as the Great Purge or the Great Terror—began. Chukovskaya’s husband was arrested on false pretenses, imprisoned, and executed in 1937, though she didn’t know his final fate until much later. Chukovskaya herself would have been arrested, too, if she hadn’t been traveling at the time. She began writing her first novel, Sofia Petrovna, in 1939 while desperately awaiting news about her husband. The novel is notable for its real-time, firsthand account of the Great Purge. It was secretly distributed among writers and editors for years before its eventual publication in 1965. In the decades after the Great Purge, Chukovskaya devoted herself to advocating for Soviet dissidents, speaking out in support of a number of influential Russian cultural figures facing suppression. She died in her father’s old country house in 1996.

Sofia Petrovna is set in the Soviet Union in the mid-to-late 1930s, when the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, carried out what’s now known as the Great Purge. The Great Purge was a frenzied campaign of state repression ostensibly aimed at consolidating power and striking down anyone who wanted to sabotage the Communist Party. This campaign largely began because of the assassination of a high-ranking Soviet politician, Sergei Kirov, in 1934. At that time, the Stalin regime was experiencing internal division, and Kirov’s assassination prompted an investigation that purportedly revealed plots within the government to sabotage Stalin. The validity of these claims has been thrown into question in more recent times, but Stalin’s regime nonetheless used these alleged plots to justify mass arrests and executions—arrests and executions that initially began at the government level and then spread to general population. The vast majority of the so-called “dissidents” imprisoned or executed during the Great Purge were completely innocent, and the government used fearmongering tactics to create an atmosphere of constant dread for those who hadn’t yet been persecuted. The death toll between 1936 and 1938 is now estimated to have been somewhere between 700,000 to 1.2 million people. Most prisoners who weren’t executed were sent to forced labor camps known as Gulags that were scattered throughout the Soviet Union, making it that much harder for survivors to reconnect with their families in the aftermath of their sentences.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Sofia Petrovna is that it’s quite possibly the only surviving novel about the Great Purge that was written while the events themselves were still taking place. There are, however, a number of books about the horrific persecution of Soviet citizens at the hands of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, for instance, is about a Soviet citizen who is arrested and imprisoned by the Stalin regime. There’s also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a work of nonfiction that chronicles not just the terrors of the Great Purge, but also life in the Gulags (political labor camps where many innocent Soviet citizens were sent). Solzhenitsyn also wrote In the First Circle, a novel about the intellectuals who were sent to Gulags during the Great Purge and forced to form research teams—a topic based on his own experience in a Gulag. (Lydia Chukovskaya herself advocated for and defended Solzhenitsyn’s dissident literature.) More broadly, it’s worth considering Sofia Petrovna alongside other works of literature about Soviet repression—like, for instance, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago or, for a more modern title, Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow.