Gulag Fiction - (Russian Shorts) by Polly Jones (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus.

The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.

Review Quotes

"[Polly Jones'] fascinating Gulag Fiction ... spans decades of immense change, and one of its strengths is that it situates each novel in its proper context, as knowledge of the Gulag system expanded after Stalin's death and again after the fall of the Soviet Union. The final chapters, on fiction by or about perpetrators and post-memory... are particularly valuable." --The Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Polly Jones is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, UK. She has published extensively on Soviet literature and memory politics, including two monographs (Myth, Memory, Trauma (2013) and Revolution Rekindled (2019)), several edited volumes (including The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization (2006)) and numerous articles. She is embarking on a new collaborative project about the concept of the '101st kilometre' in Soviet penal policy and practice.