"Sofya Petrovna" is one of the main books of Russian literature about the Great Terror. Lydia Chukovskaya (1907-1996), the daughter of Korney Chukovsky, wrote her famous novel in Leningrad in the winter of 1939-1940 without any hope of publication. In 1937, her husband was arrested and shot in '38. She spent two years in prison queues, unsuccessfully trying to find out his fate. Years later, Lydia Korneevna will say this about this terrible time: "I wanted to write a book about a society damaged in the mind; the unfortunate, crazy Sofia Petrovna is by no means a lyrical heroine; for me it is a generalized image of those who seriously believed in the reasonableness and justice of what was happening..." In the mid-1960s, the story will be published in the West, but in our country it will become available to the reader only in in 1988. In addition to "Sofia Petrovna", this edition includes two autobiographical novels by L.K. Chukovskaya – "Dash", which focuses on the short life of her repressed husband, a talented theoretical physicist, and "Descent under Water", dedicated to the campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" in the last years of Stalin's rule. "For all the conceivable advantages of future novels and short stories, they will be written in a different era, separated from 1937 by decades. My story was written on the fresh trail of the events that had just happened. This is its difference from the works that will be dedicated to the years 1937-1938 at any time ..." (Lydia Chukovskaya)