Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
Comparative Literature
First Advisor
Judith Kalb
Abstract
Although Lydia Chukovskaya’s novella Sofia Petrovna (1965) is not considered to be an autobiographical work, the life story of its protagonist, Sofia Petrovna, and the life of Lydia Chukovskaya herself have certain parallels. Chukovskaya’s very own fate, which she described in the foreword to the novella and in her other biographical works, is often viewed inseparably from the novella. However, among the many connections between the fictional fate of Sofia Petrovna and the real fate of Lydia Chukovskaya, one aspect that has not been properly explored by the critics is the “dialogue” between the author and the protagonist with respect to how they construct truth and knowledge and what transcendental values they rely upon in this process. In my thesis, I address this gap in current research by putting Lydia Chukovskaya and Sofia Petrovna into a dialogue of two equals. In particular, I consider the interactions between them on multiple levels (or plateaus), including: (i) the intermingling of their selves with each other as of two witnesses of Stalin’s Great Purges, (ii) the intermingling of their selves with the broader context of the Russian literary tradition, and (iii) the intermingling of their selves on the coordinate plane of the book as a physical object (in the English translation of Sofia Petrovna by Aline Werth). Thus, instead of text-centric, author-centric, reader-centric, or context-centric approaches separately, the approach to the novella used in this thesis is more like a “multi-plateau” approach, reading this novella at the intersection of several plateaus (which also have intersections within themselves), each of these plateaus being an indispensable facet in truth construction in the novella.
Rights
© 2024, Angelina Rubina
Recommended Citation
Rubina, A.(2023). Truth and Knowledge in a Literary Text and Beyond: Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna at the Intersections Between Selves, Culture, and Paratext. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/7636