Formally emerging in 1929, the Gulag was a vast system of incarceration that came to reach every corner of the USSR. At its peak, in the early 1950s, 2.5 million citizens were interned in its camps and settlements; over its lifetime, an estimated 20 million people were forcibly imprisoned. In this episode, Professor Polly Jones discusses her new book, Gulag Fiction, which considers the literary output of this expansive carceral archipelago. How did writers seek to relate the trauma they experienced while imprisoned in the Gulag? And how is that trauma fictionalised today?

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