The title “Gulag Fiction” might strike readers as a provocative choice for a study of Gulag literature. Gulag survivor testimonies were dedicated to documenting the camps and prisoner experiences. Revealing truths about the camp system was a central driver of such texts; Gulag fiction, one might argue, was instead found in propaganda texts (like Maksim Gorʹkii’s infamous volume on the White Sea-Baltic Canal) that white-washed mass death, minimized or erased the presence of prisoners, and shrouded the Gulag in allegory. Yet, as Jones argues, Gulag literature, even survivor testimony, has always balanced the documentary and the artistic, what Leona Toker called its “bi-functional” nature. In this book, Jones embraces this duality, taking as her focus “literary narratives of the camps” (15) from the Stalin era until the present. In so doing, Jones offers original insights into the role of the Gulag in Soviet and Russian culture over the past several decades.

Jones’ focus on Gulag fiction both limits and broadens her consideration of Gulag writing. On the one hand, it means focusing largely on a relatively small set of predominantly male authors who wrote about the camps within the genres of short story and novel. The first two chapters of Gulag Fiction focus primarily on two titans of Gulag survivor literature, Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—as well as Georgii Demidov, a third author who wrote prose in conversation with theirs (in addition to corresponding with each survivor). As Jones admits, the focus on fiction tends to bracket out the contributions of female authors like Evgeniia Ginzburg, many of whom chose to write their experiences using memoirs or other types of documentary prose. Yet the focus on fiction is liberating in other ways. First, it gives Jones the freedom to move beyond texts written by survivors to examine the full range of literary responses to the Gulag. Second, it allows for the focused analysis of two major themes in Gulag literature, perpetrators and the role of memory. Examining Gulag fiction rather than survivor testimony per se follows trends in Holocaust studies, a field where literary responses in the second generation and beyond have received significant attention in recent years.

Gulag Fiction brings two additional sets of writing into the scholarly conversation on Gulag literature. The first consists of fictional works written by non-survivors in the post-Stalin era. Some of these, like Georgii Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan and Vasilii Aksenov’s The Burn, were written by second-generation Gulag survivors. Others, like Vasilii Grossman’s Everything Flows, were written by those who knew many camp survivors. The second set is a wave of Gulag novels from the 2010s and 2020s. Despite the progressive crackdown on individuals and organizations commemorating the Gulag and Stalinist terror, there was nevertheless a “flowering of Gulag literature” (5). Novels like Zakhar Prilepin’s The Abode (2014), Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (2015), and Viktor Remizov’s Permafrost (2021) enjoyed remarkable commercial success with readers and spawned television, film, and stage adaptations. The purpose of these works often differed significantly from previous waves of Gulag literature: rather than critique Stalinism and directly confront memory of the camps, they used the Gulag as a prism through which to examine other issues in contemporary Russian society. In writing about Prilepin and Remizov in particular, Jones notes that, “These stories bear more than a passing resemblance to the works of Dostoevskii and Solzhenitsyn, and echo these writers’ interests in Russia’s identity and destiny, as manifested through experiences of incarceration” (47). Thus, in the “post-memory” era the Gulag has become a way to explore personal histories and to connect to older Russian cultural traditions. In analyzing these works, Jones reminds us that “…the Gulag has been a particularly prominent, persistent and productive preoccupation of Russian literature” (3) for several decades, as it remains today.

Gulag Fiction is not only original and insightful—it is also clear, concise, and aimed at a broad audience. It fits well in Bloomsbury’s Russian Shorts series that is intended for undergraduate students, general readers, and scholars. Paired with literary texts, as well as other short scholarly works like Jeffrey Hardy’s The Gulag: History and Memory, it would be an ideal book for a course on the history, culture, and/or literature of the Gulag. Given that Jones explicitly brings Gulag fiction into conversation with Holocaust studies, it might be assigned in comparative courses on the literatures of trauma and concentration camps. Most of all, it is a major contribution to Gulag studies, suggesting new and fruitful areas of inquiry at a time when explorations into the history and memory of Stalinist repression remain under grave threat in Russia.