48 pages 1 hour read

Lydia Chukovskaya

Sofia Petrovna

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1965

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Essay Topics

1.

Sofia Petrovna takes a huge historical event, the Great Terror, and focuses on individuals, showing how they’re caught behind a “wall of terror.” Does everyone have the same response to this reign of terror? Compare and contrast two characters.

2.

How does Sofia embody the ideal of the new Soviet woman? How does her commitment to living a productive, patriotic life impede her from questioning the justness of Kolya’s arrest?

3.

Explore Chukovskaya’s description of Stalinist ideology as voiced by Kolya. Are his screeds satire, or are they meant to accurately depict what someone like him would have thought?