Gulag Fiction
Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:14th Nov '24
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A unique analysis of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system from Stalinism to the present.
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.
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
[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 *
ISBN: 9781350250390
Dimensions: 208mm x 130mm x 16mm
Weight: 280g
168 pages