Sof&soft;ja Petrovna: the Little (Wo)man of St. Petersburg in the Crucible of History
Rimgaila
Salys
Lidija &Chachek;ukovskaja's novel (written 1939–40, published
1965) situates its female heroine in the
Gogol&soft;-Dal&soft;-Dostoevskij St. Petersburg tradition—the
depiction of the little man of nineteenth-century Russian
literature. In one line of this tradition the endangering of a loved
one causes the &chachek;inovnik hero to question the status quo, the
established social or political order, generating doubts that lead to
a qualified or tenuous illumination accompanied by disaster, madness
or death (Cejtlin). &Chachek;ukovskaja's novel presents a range of
varied responses as Nata&shachek;a, Alik and Sof&soft;ja Petrovna
herself (a kind of Soviet everywoman and product of both
pre-revolutionary and Stalinist mass culture) come to consciousness, a
process which in a twentieth-century context entails a more tortuous
complexity than its nineteenth-century prototypes.
During her 1965 court appearance &Chachek;ukovskaja was criticized
for writing negativist documentary prose. Although the public events
in the novel are all based on fact and chronologically accurate, this
quality enriches rather than detracts from the novel's fictional
plot. The 1936–37 Pravda Staxanovite
initiative, 1937 wreckers' trials, and Kol&soft;cov's December 1937
article in Pravda are all closely connected to
events, the significance of which Sof&soft;ja Petrovna refuses to
recognize. Given her media-induced illusion that she lives in a just
society protected by the new Stalinist constitution, Sof&soft;ja
Petrovna initially sees the arrests of Kolja and the director of the
publishing house as ordinary misunderstandings, and imagines Kolja's
vindicatory meeting with the interrogator as a set-piece from an
adventure film. Kolja's circumstances in prison undergo a similar,
highly ironic displacement as Sof&soft;ja Petrovna pictures her son as
Princess Tarakanova, the subject of Flavitskij's famous 1864
historical painting. Gradually Sof&soft;ja Petrovna descends into a
second, more sinister line of reasoning: those arrested must be guilty
of something, and even Kolja may have acquired enemies through
inexperience. In her third phase of rationalizing the status quo,
Sof&soft;ja Petrovna concludes, along with Alik, that the lower levels
of government are corrupt, while the upper echelons remain ignorant of
events. Her struggle to believe in two opposite and incompatible
realities (the integrity of the regime and Kolja's innocence) finally
collapses into derangement when she comes under attack herself from
the inhabitants of her communal apartment. Unable to bear exclusion
from mainstream society and the great Stalinist family, Sof&soft;ja
Petrovna escapes once again into fantasy, now shading into madness,
inventing happy letters from the vindicated Kolja. But the final
ironic reversal—a real letter from the imprisoned
Kolja—destroys her fantasy and forces her into temporary
awareness. Yet the conclusion of the novel can only be read as
indeterminate: is the burning of Kolja's letter only the culmination
of his mother's lifelong flight from reality or, having come to full
awareness of the Stalinist government's crimes, does she realize that
it is pointless to appeal to the perpetrator of a crime for justice
for the victim, and that she must destroy any evidence that might harm
Kolja and send her into exile? Whatever the reader's conclusion,
Sof&soft;ja Petrovna's destruction of Kolja's letter from the camps
points backward to his letters from Sverdlovsk, which she preserves
religiously with her other treasures and, more subtly, outward to
&Chachek;ukovskaja's preface in which she explains why she was unable
to bring herself to burn the manuscript of the novel.