Polly Jones

Polly Jones

Schrecker-Barbour Tutorial Fellow in Slavonic and East European Studies; Professor of Russian

Links

Modern Languages Course

Personal Webpage

Contact information

Polly.Jones@univ.ox.ac.uk

Teaching

I was lecturer for seven years at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, and a Davis fellow at Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies before taking up the Schrecker-Barbour fellowship and Associate Professorship at University College in 2012; I was promoted to Professor in 2020.

I teach a wide range of 19th-21st-century Russian literature and culture and translation papers at undergraduate and graduate level for the faculty and college; these include specialist courses on my period of expertise, such as papers on Gulag literature, late Soviet literature, Solzhenitsyn and Petrushevskaya. I welcome graduate student enquiries for supervision of projects on 20th or 21st-century Russian literature, cultural history and memory studies (current supervision includes projects on contemporary Ukrainian and Russian war film; the economics of late Soviet art; intelligentsia cults in late socialism; professional theatre in the Gulag; Soviet-era ballet in Kazakhstan).

Research

The key question that I’m interested in is how citizens of authoritarian regimes, especially writers and other cultural practitioners, find ways to express themselves, by navigating or evading censorship and other political controls. Much of my research to date has concerned the ways that memories of Soviet and Russian experiences were articulated in Soviet-published, samizdat and tamizdat narratives in the Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras. I am now increasingly interested in the literature and culture of the Putin era, especially its intersections with contemporary memory politics of the Stalinist and Soviet past. I have recently completed a book on Gulag literature from the 20th to the 21st century, and am exploring a new project on contemporary political prisoner narratives in Russian and Ukrainian literature and other media. I am also working on the collaborative project, ‘The 101st kilometre. Provincial Marginality from Stalin to Gorbachev’, which explores the migration and settlement patterns and communities produced by Soviet restrictions on residency in major Russian, Ukrainian and Latvian cities for Gulag returnees and other ‘marginals’. I appear regularly on UK and international radio, TV and podcasts to talk about Russian culture and history, and I acted as consultant to Armando Iannucci’s film ‘The Death of Stalin’ (2017). I was appointed a trustee of Pushkin House in London in 2024.

Selected Publications

Books

Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (London: Bloomsbury, 2024)

Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)

Myth, Memory, Trauma. Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013 (paperback 2016))

Writing Russian Lives. The Poetics and Politics of Russian Biography (MHRA, 2018)

The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization. Negotiating Social and Political Change in the Khrushchev Era, edited volume (London: Routledge, 2006; paperback edition 2009)

The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). Co-edited with B. Apor, J. Behrends, A. Rees.

Selected Articles

‘Kilometres 51 and 101: the development of Soviet residency and banishment policies in Ukraine, 1917-1940′ (co-authored with Olena Stiazhkina, Tamara Vronska), Europe-Asia Studies (2024)

‘The Censor’ and ‘The Camp’,  chapters in The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, eds Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich, Emma Widdis (CUP, 2024)

‘The Thaw’s Provincial Margins: Place, Community and Canon in Pages from Tarusa‘, Slavic Review, vol. 80, winter 2021

Introduction to Vasilii Grossman, Life and Fate (Everyman Classics, Penguin, 2022)

‘‘Life as big as the ocean’: Bolshevik Biography and the problem of personality from late Stalinism to Late Socialism’, Slavonic and East European Review, 96:1 (2018), 144-73

‘The Zones of Late Socialist Literature’, The Cambridge History of Communism, ed. J. Fuerst, S. Pons, M. Sandle (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 376-98.

‘Diagnosing the Stalinist Sickness. Images of Illness in Aleksandr Bek and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’, MLR, 111. 4 (October 2016), pp. 1062-89.

‘The Fire Burns On? The Fiery Revolutionaries Biographical Series and the Rethinking of Propaganda in the Early Brezhnev Era’, Slavic Review, 74: 1 (2015): 32-56

‘Worlds of Discontent and Dissent after Stalinism’, Kritika, 15, 3 (Summer 2014): 637-52

‘Iurii Trifonov’s Fireglow and the “Mnemonic Communities” of the Brezhnev Era’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 54, 1-2 (2014): 1-26

‘The “thaw” goes international. Soviet Literature in Translation and Transit in the 1960s’, in A. Gorsuch, D. Koenker, The Socialist Sixties. Crossing Borders in the Second World (Indiana University Press, 2013)

‘The Personal and the Political: Opposition to the “Thaw” and the Politics of Literary Identity in the 1950s and 1960s’, in D. Kozlov, E. Gilburd, eds, The Thaw. Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto University Press, 2013)

‘Breaking the Silence: Iurii Bondarev’s Quietness between the “sincerity” and “civic emotion” of the Thaw’, in M. Steinberg, V. Sobol, eds, Interpreting Emotion in Russia and Eastern Europe (Northern Illinois University Press, 2011)

‘Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw’, Slavonic and East European Review, 82:2, 2008.

‘“A Symptom of the Times”: Assigning Responsibility for the Stalin Cult in the Soviet Literary Community, 1953-64’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42: 2, 2006

Selected Media

Contact Univ

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