Recently, in a private conversation, I mentioned that I discovered the writer Lydia Chukovskaya after reading two of her novels, Sofya Petrovna (1939) and Going Under (1949). The conversation turned to the fate of Chukovskaya herself, whose husband, physicist Matvey Bronstein, was repressed in August 1937, and eventually spilled over to the period of the Great Terror and the circumstances surrounding the 1937-1938 purges. My counterpart expressed several thoughts that shocked me. In general, they can be summarized with the phrase: surely they would not imprison innocents.

The main character herself arrives at the same thought in the novella titled Sofya Petrovna. At first, standing in endless queues, she tries to help her arrested son, find out what had happened to him and get his case reviewed, being completely convinced of his innocence. And later she starts to believe that he was arrested for good reason and stops fighting for him, agreeing with the idea that 'nothing can happen to an honest person in our country'. She understood the times she was living in.

But it turns out that in a country of unlearned lessons, this story remains timeless.