Sofia Petrovna

In Kolyma Tales, his memories of life in Stalin's prison camps, Varlam Shalamov wrote that one of the most horrifying aspects of Stalin's rule (and, one suspects, of any autocratic system) is how arbitrary it is. A dictator takes power in the name of the people, makes laws in the name of the people, convinces everyone that what's happening is for the people to protect them from dangerous elements without and within ... Except in reality, it didn't matter what you did. Anyone could be convicted of anything at any time on any pretext.

Sofia Petrovna, then. Written in 1939 after Chukovskaya's husband was disappeared and executed, kept in a drawer for decades, only published in her home country after 50 years. The titular woman is a widow with one single son. She works in a publishing house, typing up manuscripts for the betterment of the people. She believes in the ideas, in the union, in the leader who only wants what's best for everyone even if he has to be firm sometimes. Her son is the perfect Soviet citizen, born with the revolution, well-read and intelligent and contemptuous towards enemies of the revolution ... and one day, he's arrested. (For terrorism, as it happens.) What specific act of terrorism? Where is he? What will happen to him? What can she do? No one will tell her. But she has to fight; after all, he must be innocent, he can't be like all those others who really are guilty, it must be a mistake, this isn't the corrupt imperial Russia anymore, this is a free country where everyone is equal and there are laws to protect the innocent and courts dedicated to finding out the truth. That's the whole point. If that's not true, then what is?

It's easy to draw parallels to Kafka as Sofia circles round and round that question, but there's just as much an Orwellian sense of dread here, a feeling that doesn't just apply to dictatorships. Everyone plays their part in building a society built on fear and intolerance, and the less you want to see it, the more you stare yourself blind at what happens on the other side - whether it's being grateful that things aren't as bad as in Germany, or being outraged at having to wait in line at the magistrate's office with mothers of actual criminals - the less the actual dictator actually has to do. People are all too willing to be a cog, to help drive the machine that eats them.

Then again, the perhaps strongest image here isn't necessarily the holes it smashes in high-flying ideals, but that image of a mother, aging years in months, starving in her one-room apartment next to hundreds of cans of her son's favourite food, waiting for the day he'll come home again. Any day now, any day now.