Emily D. Johnson is the Brian and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma. She studies twentieth-century Russian literature and history and the legacy of the Stalinist labor camp system. Her most recent book is Rethinking the Gulag (Indiana University Press, 2022), which she co-edited with Alan Barenberg.
Written by one of Russia’s best-known horror writers, Anna Starobinets, Look at Him (Three String Books, 2020) is an unusual book: it reads partly as a memoir and partly as a journalistic in...
Photo: Shevaun Williams
My training as a scholar of Russian literature and culture colors my readings of Dubravka Ugrešić’s work. No matter how hard I try to stop myself from reaching for parallels i...
When we first began work on this special section devoted to post-Soviet literature, what we were trying to commemorate seemed very clear. We wanted to take stock of all the ways in which East European...