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Dr. Polly Jones will present the key arguments of her new book, Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin, reflecting on the challenges and possibilities of writing a short history of this durable and diverse genre of Russian and Russophone literature. Existing histories of the genre have largely focussed on Soviet-era texts by labour camp survivors (notably Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, and their debates about the nature of camp experience and prisoner selfhood). Building on this important work, Jones widens the focus to include less well-known former prisoners, Soviet-era writers with less direct experience of the camps, and contemporary post-memory fiction; Jones also highlights Gulag fiction’s interest in perpetrators and the Gulag’s ‘grey zones’ throughout late socialism and especially in the 2000s. These perspectives can offer a more complete and more complex picture of Russian literature’s persistent preoccupation with the Gulag, and its myriad intersections with memory politics and activism, from the 1920s to the 2020s.
Polly Jones is Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow in Slavonic Studies at University College, Oxford. Her books include Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography (OUP), Myth, Memory, Trauma. Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (Yale UP) and, in late 2024, Gulag Fiction; Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloomsbury). Current research includes a creative, collaborative exploration of life on the fringes of Soviet cities (in Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan and Russia), and a new project on contemporary political prisoner writing.
