Overview

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.

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9781350250390

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Reviews

Polly Jones' new book provides readers with a helpful introduction to Gulag fiction that is grounded in recent research. The chapters on 21st-century novels set in the Soviet detention sites are particularly strong and will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Russian literature as well as to those interested in labor camp literature specifically. - Emily D. Johnson, Professor of Russian, University of Oklahoma, USA Why has fiction about Stalin’s camps flourished in the twenty-first century, even as the Kremlin crushes dissent with remorseless brutality? Polly Jones explores this puzzling cultural phenomenon, revealing the tangled roots of the Gulag in Russia’s literary imagination. Timely and compelling, this will be essential reading for anyone curious about Russian democracy. - Dan Healey, Emeritus professor of Russian and Soviet History, University of Oxford, UK

Author Information

Polly Jones is Associate 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.

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