"But they don't ask who's handing over the money," said Sofia Petrovna
timidly. "They only ask who it's for."
Kipisarova took her by the hand and led her away from the crowd of people.
"They don't need to ask," she whispered. "They know everything."
Her eyes were huge, brown, and sleepless.
I'm delighted to have found Sofia Petrovna (1967; translated by Aline Werth) by Lydia Chukovskaya (1907-1996). I've read a number of novels by men about the experience of living under Soviet totalitarianism, but never one by a woman, and never one that gives such an intimate insight into what life was like for those who had to carry on in the aftermath: those who, when the regime abruptly swooped down and disappeared their loved ones, had to endure the slow death of hope that was waiting for news of their fate.
Chukovskaya notes in a foreword that she wrote the novel in 1939-40. It was impossible to publish, but she felt compelled to hide it in a drawer even so, protecting it for twenty-five years as "a piece of evidence". It is, she says, "the tale of a witness" - she means, I think, both her protagonist, Sofia Petrovna, and herself - "striving conscientiously, against the powerful forces of falsehood, to discern and record the events which occurred before [her] eyes". Chukovskaya's emphasis on both seeing (discern) and remembering (record) is key: in many ways, Sofia Petrovna's central struggle is not to find her voice and be heard, but rather to understand and accept what is happening to her.
Sofia Petrovna, you see, is a true believer. She is introduced as a devoted mother who pours all her energy into raising her beloved son, Kolya, after the premature death of her husband: the opening paragraph of the novel explains that she immediately took a typing course, so that she could afford for him to go to university rather than begin work young, since "Fyodor Ivanovich would never have allowed his son to go without a higher education". Once established in a job, though, it is not all about Kolya; Sofia derives a real sense of achievement from doing her job well:
"I would like to say that the work of the typing office, under the supervision of Comrade Lipatova, has already attained an exceptionally high standard."
Sofia Petrovna blushed and it was a long time before she dared to raise her eyes again. When she at last decided to look around, she thought everyone seemed extraordinarily kind and attractive, and she found the statistics unexpectedly interesting.
But we also see the quality that will eventually tear her apart. Sofia is content, even happy, with the way authoritarianism orders her world and shows her her place in it. She embraces the hierarchy within her workplace with the fervour of someone who has finally come home; singled out for overtime by her young boss, she is left all a-glow with "a feeling of pride in his authority". (She also goes in for some seriously kitschy seasonal decoration: "Sofia Petrovna glued the curly head of the child Lenin in the center of a big, red, five-pointed star, and Natasha put it up on the very top of the tree - and everything was ready").
Her habits of obedience are reinforced by Kolya, who joins the party and tends to come home spouting establishment lines. When a wave of arrests takes in a friend of Sofia's, he explains that "it was necessary to rid Leningrad of unreliable elements" - Sofia's friend being one such element, "not a real Soviet person" because "she didn't recognize Mayakovsky as a poet". Sofia is dazzled by her son's education and the certainty of his pronouncements, although in an early sign of trouble she has to cajole herself into seeing the sense in one man's arrest, because he's "such an esteemed doctor". One type of authority being gobbled up by another is distressing to her; both doctor and state must be respected, and yet they cannot both be right.
Nevertheless, Sofia keeps telling herself that everything is all right; when her faith occasionally falters, as when her boss is arrested, there's always someone around to talk her back around:
"What do we know?" retorted Natasha hotly. "We know he was director of our publishing house, but we don't actually know anything more than that. Do we really know about his personal life? Can you really vouch for him?"
The self-cannibalising logic of the system becomes inescapably clear, and simply inescapable, when Kolya is arrested. Sofia Petrovna, who has consoled herself time and again that only guilty people are arrested, and that anyone who has nothing to hide has nothing to fear from the state, is sent into meltdown. At first she floats in a sea of denial: "She must rush off somewhere at once and clear up this monstrous misunderstanding", is her first response. Queuing up day after dreary, fruitless, soul-destroying day at the relevant government office in an effort to find out where Kolya is being held, and why, she tells herself over and over again that she has nothing in common with the equally desperate women around her:
"No point waiting for him to return! Those who wind up here never return."
Sofia Petrovna wanted to interrupt, but decided not to get involved. In our country innocent people aren't held. Particularly not Soviet patriots like Kolya. They'll clear the matter up and let him go.
After all, she reads about confessions from enemies of the people in the newspapers every day: the people who are arrested, the people who are executed, really do harbour evil in their hearts towards their fellow citizens. The regime does not make mistakes (except in Kolya's case); "She was sorry for them, of course, as human beings, sorry especially for the children; but still an honest person had to remember that all these women were the wives and mothers of poisoners, spies and murderers." There is no smoke without fire, right? People certainly don't get arrested because they happen to be related to someone else who was arrested, or because one of their former co-workers named them under torture, or completely arbitrarily.
The second half of the novel is essentially a portrayal of Sofia Petrovna slowly breaking under the contradiction: the impossibility of believing in both her son's innocence and the Soviet system's infallibility. The true believer finds herself lost in a familiar world ("She felt as if she were not in Leningrad at all, but in some unknown city"), living among the marginalised and the hunted while the ground shifts endlessly beneath her feet. Disturbing.
~~Nic