Going Under is a story of physical comfort and emotional and psychological suffering. This last is most precious of all because, like many Soviet city dwellers, she has to share a communal apartment in which privacy is essential unknown. Yet she will find nothing to shelter her from the pain of her memories.
The answers she was given were vague and always shifting. How would I know? Many nights, Nina finds herself dreaming of Alyosha in prison, in a labor camp, being interrogated, sometimes even being executed. The uncertainty eats away at her psyche. Nina is haunted in particular by the thought of his death. How had they turned a living man into a dead man?
What was the last thing he had seen as life abandoned him? He suffers from angina; his heart is weak from the strain of his years in camp. He was never taken anywhere, he had never suffered from cattle-trucks or dogs.
Everything was over long before that. Bilibin also confides that he is working on his own account, a book about the things he has seen in the camps. As their time nears its end, Bilibin modestly offers his manuscript to Nina. At first, she read with great excitement. As she reads on, however, she realizes that Bilibin has written nothing more than a conventional piece of socialist realism: earnest workers, conscientious supervisors, a happy collective.
For Lydia Chukovskaya, there were only two legitimate choices for Soviet writers: tell the truth or remain silent.
