Assessment of Sofia Petrovna

Novels written during a period of time depicting the hardships of those eras become voices of those who lived through them. Lydia Chukovskaya’s novella “Sofia Petrovna” is that kind of work. The story’s protagonist and title character lives her life as normally as she can while caring for her only son Kolya. When he’s arrested the heart of the novel is Sofia’s endless attempts to find out why, and how to get him out. As a historical narrative as well as a work of literature the novel is a kin to many novels written during times of great strife.

For historians the narrative within the story is about how for many women like Sofia Petrovna who have seen their lives turned inside out during Soviet Russia’s Great Purge. The novella can be used as a way of assessing how women who dealt with the loss of someone who has been arrested whether innocent or guilty as well as the long lines near the prison to see whether they would be able to see their husbands or sons only to be turned away. It can also assess how people were treated just for knowing someone who may or may not be associated with terrorist activities like Sofia’s coworker Natasha who was fired for writing Ret instead of Red only to have the head of the department publically shame her in a meeting.

The literary qualities of the book are that it does follow a standard conflict, crisis, resolution that most stories have even if the resolution is that Sofia burns her son’s letter at the end for fear of the letter damning him further as well as having her exiled. It shows how her happiness was taken away in a moment even when she knew of her son’s innocence. Those she tries to defend either abandon her when she needs them most, or in the case of Natasha poisons themselves just so they wouldn’t have to keep living in a world that doesn’t care about her. The novel is something that can teach someone about what happened during a point in history as well as show others how the treatment of the innocent as well as the guilty during the Great Purge was the same because they were all scrutinized the same.

Comments

The Eye Sees Everything Psychoanalysis and The Tell Tale Heart

Psychoanalysis is one of the most well-known critical approaches in literature, it shows the literary critic the mental state of not only the main character, but the author as well. In the book Critical Theory Today , Lois Tyson describes psychoanalytic criticism as “The notion that human beings are motivated even driven by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware – that is, unconscious.” (Tyson, 12) This theoretical approach was created by Sigmund Freud from his theories on the unconscious mind and that people repress the things they don’t want to remember and that they go through several stages when they trying to repress memories. Almost as if a person is dealing with the five stages of grief, the stages of repression follow a similar pattern these stages include selective “perception, selective memory, denial, avoidance, displacement, and projection.” (15) These stages come from what a ...

Montresor’s Downfall A Psychoanalytical look at Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado

Psychoanalytic Criticism is an approach of critical thought that follows “how and why people behave the way they do,” this theory is practiced in more than one field outside of literature. Some theories have been developed alongside other literary theories and those have been further developed by different theorist. Psychoanalysis as a school of literary theory can focus on one or more than one aspect of a literary work by focusing on the author, a specific character, the literary text, and even the audience that is reading the text. The most famous critic of psychoanalysis is Sigmund Freud who developed the original theory consisting of the unconscious mind, the desires of a person or character, and a defense. Freud further developed this into the id, the ego and the superego. Each of these aspects of the theory is dominated by a particular aspect; the id is dominated by pleasure, the ego is dominated by realit...

Psychoanalysis and Hamlet

Note: I feel like this is probably not my best paper but I'm posting it anyway. Hamlet is considered one of the most flawed characters in English Literature. After the death of his father, and his mother remarrying immediately afterwards to of all people his Uncle Claudius, Hamlet is pushed towards the brink trying to deal with all of these sudden changes. All of these changes put together can create instability in Hamlet’s mind as his world is shaken by the sudden changes. When psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote T he Interpretation of Dreams he introduced the world to the ideas of the id , the ego and the superego in which encompass the way the mind is influenced by events from their younger years. Freud said that “the predominantly passionate, irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche the id, or “it.” The ego, or “I,” was his term for the predominantly rational, logical, orderly, conscious par...

Stephanie Trinidad

Search This Blog