Probably the Devil

Is it possible to put out the fires in your head yourself? Sonia is twenty-one; she lives alone in a small room in a Moscow communal apartment. Although she’s closed off and not very sociable, she treats herself with irony. After enrolling in a school of literary craft, she grows close to a professor, and her life turns into a chain of blurred, gloomy events. How do you get out of traumatic relationships and find your way back to yourself? This is a story about emotional dependency, anxieties, and self-destruction. What drives the heroine to erase her identity? Probably the devil. “Probably the Devil” is Sofia Astashova’s debut novel-autofiction, by a graduate of the CWS (Creative Writing School) and WLAG (Write Like a Girl) courses.

“A physiological—and therefore not very pleasant—text about violence: the emotional trap that it’s easy to fall into when you’re twenty and you think of love as something you have to earn, plead for, and suffer for. A text with no happiness or exit, and so it feels stuffy—there’s a desire to smash the window and tell the heroine to breathe as often as possible, and then to grab your legs and run. Read it and never fall into this abyss.”
— Ksenia Burzhskaya, writer.