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    Published : 2024-11-20
    Vol. 72 No. 7 (2024)

    Lydia Chukovskaya’s Going Under as a Novel-Diary

    Małgorzata Ułanek



    DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh247207.15

    Abstract

    The subject of the article is Lydia Chukovskaya’s work Going Under (1949–1957) – a novel stylised as a diary, also including autobiographical elements. Making the poetics of the genre a point of reference, the article discusses creation of the writing self (the diarist) – the main heroine, Nina Sergeevna (Chukovskaya’s alter ego), as well as writing strategies on the one hand allowing one to consider the text as an intime journal with the characteristics of a confessional and introspective statement, on the other hand – as a literary testimony of the epoch, unveiling the tragedy of 1937 and the later years in the Soviet Union, and as a kind of a soliloquy – a monologue that “desires to be heard”. It has been demonstrated that Chukovskaya’s novel, as a borderline genre, not only performs functions typical of a diary – autotherapeutic/cathartic, “person-creating” (the act of self-knowing) – but it is also marked with self-referentialism, because as the narrator-writer’s diary it reveals her understanding of “the creator’s word” in terms of ethics and responsibility for the truth. It is also an example of “a text within a text”, for it contains the storyline of the novel’s main heroine.

    Keywords:

    Lydia Chukovskaya, Going Under, genre, novel-diary, autobiographicality, soliloquium



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    Roczniki Humanistyczne · ISSN 0035-7707 | eISSN 2544-5200 | DOI: 10.18290/rh
    © The Learned Society of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin & The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Humanities


    Articles are licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)