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Public Lecture by Dr Polly Jones (Oxford University)
“Should I stay or should I go? Finding a Niche in Late Soviet Literature"

Late Soviet intelligentsia life is increasingly analysed in terms of ‘niches’, ‘havens’ and ‘grey zones’ within Soviet institutions, which enabled Soviet intellectuals to pursue their interests and agendas in relative autonomy. My paper will use archival research and oral history to analyse the formation and maintenance of an important niche for Soviet writers of the Brezhnev era: the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series (1968-91) in the Soviet publisher Politizdat, which became a ‘haven’ for many of the major writers of the period. My paper, as the title suggests, challenges the notion of these writers’ linear trajectory out of Soviet literature after 1968, by analysing the diverse reasons why Voinovich, Aksenov, Gladilin, Okudzhava and many others agreed to be part of this biographical series in the 1970s and beyond, rather than writing exclusively for samizdat and tamizdat. I will also analyse how the series’ editors sought to establish this ‘niche’ in Soviet publishing, highlighting the importance of self-definition against Soviet orthodoxy (the creation of a sense of svoi, to use Alexei Yurchak’s terms), and emphasising the constant effort and tension of maintaining such niches, as yet under-appreciated by historians of the period.

Bio Note
Polly Jones is Associate Professor and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow in Russian at University College, Oxford. She previously held posts at UCL and Princeton. She is the author of Myth, Memory, Trauma. Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (Yale University Press, 2013) and editor of The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization (Routledge, 2006), as well as the author of many articles about Soviet literature and cultural politics.

This event is part of the course .