Sofia Petrovna

A year passes, during which Sofia hears nothing from Kolya. With her age she has to start using a cane. She finds typing work at a library, where she has no interaction with her coworkers. She spends her meager salary on stockpiling Kolya’s favorite provisions in case he finally writes and asks for food. Sofia eats little herself and stops regularly heating and cleaning her apartment. The only things she keeps clean are Kolya’s books, radio, and cogwheel prototype.

Sofia writes three letters to Stalin asking for any information about her son. She receives no reply. Periodically, she goes to the legal advice bureau to speak to the friendly defense attorneys about Kolya—they’re unable to do anything to help.

One day Mrs. Kiparisova surprises Sofia at her apartment. (Mrs. Kiparisova has avoided Sofia for fear that the NKVD will connect Kolya’s case to her husband’s.) Some prisoners have been released. Sofia must inquire about Kolya at the prosecutor’s office.

After Mrs. Kiparisova leaves, the nurse and the house manager barge into Sofia’s apartment. The nurse has reported her to the house manager for cooking in her room: “She’s scorned us ever since we found her systematically stealing the kerosene. Her son’s in a camp, exposed as an enemy of the people, she herself has no fixed occupation, in short, an unreli­able element” (98). The house manager threatens to report her to the police for the infraction. After they leave, Sofia breaks down. Mrs. Degtyarenko comes to comfort her, explaining that the nurse wants the apartment for her newlywed daughter and the house manager for his girlfriend.

Sofia dreams of the reparations the state will make to Kolya for his wrongful imprisonment. After work the following day she thinks of buying the Leica camera he always wanted as a homecoming gift. She plans to repurpose the storage closet as a darkroom.

Sofia tells Mrs. Degtyarenko that she’s received a registered letter informing her of Kolya’s release (she hasn’t). Surprised to find herself making up a story, Sofia continues that Kolya will visit in a few months after working and taking a much-needed vacation. Returning to her apartment, Sofia looks at herself in the mirror, wondering if Kolya will recognize her with how much she’s aged in the past year.

While out buying bread Sofia encounters the friendly accountant from the publishing house. She’s shocked to learn that Timofeyev was arrested. The accountant—while unaware that Kolya had been arrested—is nonetheless happy to hear of his release. When Sofia returns home her mailbox is still empty.

In the kitchen the following morning Sofia continues her lie, telling the nurse and Mrs. Degtyarenko that Kolya was promoted, was approved for a luxurious vacation in Crimea, and is engaged to a loyal young woman. For the first time in a year the nurse isn’t hostile.

With the day off work Sofia cleans her neglected apartment for Kolya’s return. That afternoon a letter arrives—without a return address or postmark but written in Kolya’s hand. After asking about her, Alik, and Natasha, Kolya writes that his former classmate Sashka (who made an antisemitic comment to Alik) told the NKVD that he recruited Kolya to a terrorist organization. Beaten until permanently deaf in one ear, Kolya confessed to this fabricated crime. He beseeches Sofia to campaign for his release—he won’t last much longer in the gulag.

Sofia rushes to confer with Mrs. Kiparisova. At her apartment Sofia finds Mrs. Kiparisova and her daughter preparing for deportation (Mr. Kiparisov has been sentenced to 15 years). After pondering Kolya’s letter, Mrs. Kiparisova ushers Sofia into the bathroom to talk away from the phone, which could be bugged. She urges Sofia not to write the appeal Kolya asks for: “Do you really think you can write that the investigator beat him? You can’t even think such a thing, let alone write it. They’ve forgotten to deport you, but if you write an appeal—they’ll remember. And they’ll send your son farther away, too” (108). Furthermore, since the letter was delivered surreptitiously by someone Kolya recruited to do so, and not officially through the mail, there’s no evidence that the letter actually came from Kolya.

Sofia returns to her apartment, where she deliberates. She knows the letter is from Kolya—the handwriting is unmistakably his—but she has no way to prove it. Seeing the futility of taking it to the prosecutor or defense attorney, she burns it.

The afterword is a translated excerpt from Chukovskaya’s 1979 book The Process of Exclusion (only published in Russian, as Процесс исключения) about her expulsion from the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1974.

Chukovskaya faced many hurdles in getting Sofia Petrovna published. In the winter of 1939 she wrote the manuscript in a school notebook, basing the story on her experiences waiting in lines outside prisons for the previous two years. Having had her apartment searched three times by the NKVD and her belongings confiscated, Chukovskaya entrusted the sole copy of her manuscript to a friend, who himself faced death if found with it. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, her friend was trapped in Leningrad during the siege. Before dying of starvation he gave the manuscript to his sister, who eventually returned it to Chukovskaya.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953 and nearly a decade of De-Stalinization, Sofia Petrovna was officially approved for publication in the Soviet Union in 1962: The 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Nikita Khrushchev, expected every publishing house to publish something about the abuses of Stalin’s regime. The Sovietsky Pisatel publishing house paid Chukovskaya most of her fee and expedited production of Sofia Petrovna.

Then the political climate changed in 1963: The Communist Party began to feel that, after a decade of overturning Stalin’s legacy and rehabilitating those wrongfully imprisoned in his gulags, it was time to focus on the future. In a volte-face the chief editor at Sovietsky Pisatel reneged on their contract to publish Sofia Petrovna, citing ideological flaws.

Chukovskaya sued the publishing house for the remainder of her fee, arguing that their contract obligated them to pay her in full. After two years of delays, her case went to trial. The judge ruled in her favor, and Sovietsky Pisatel paid her within days. While Sofia Petrovna still wasn’t officially published, it circulated underground as samizdat. A copy made it to France, where it was published in 1965 under an altered title (The Deserted House). Shortly thereafter it was published in the United States under the correct title and translated into other languages. Finally, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union imminent, Sofia Petrovna was officially published there in 1988.