Staff profile

BIOGRAPHY

My first PhD dissertation, defended at Moscow State University in 2010, examined two contrasting yet corresponding instances of creative nonfiction epitomized by Tom Wolfe in America of the 1960s and Viktor Shklovsky in Soviet Russia of the 1920s. After completing my studies, I was offered a job at Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Observer), a leading Russian scholarly journal in the field of literary criticism/theory, intellectual/cultural history, and cultural/Slavic studies. Then I taught for several years at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (full-time from 2019 to 2022, online from 2022 to 2025) and headed its Russian and Comparative Literature master's programme. My constant subject of interest has been literary journalism, an influential hybrid form of nonfiction writing. I was initially interested in its American variety; at some point, it became my intention to integrate relevant Russian material, still largely neglected by scholars, into the global context. It was the work I had done on Vlas Doroshevich's book on the Sakhalin penal colony that eventually led me to my PhD project at Durham.      

Supervised by Dr. Viktoria Ivleva and Professor Andy Byford, I am writing a cultural history of katorga, the Russian Empire's system of penal labor, informed by its overwhelming presence in Russian life between the 1820s and 1910s and focused on expressions, forms, and practices produced by katorga itself as well as on the role that it played in Russian culture in general. I am interested in how it was discussed, represented, and imagined -- and in the manner in which these discussions, representations, and images corresponded to what was happening in Russian literature, society, politics, etc. My project is seeking a comprehensive, multidisciplinary understanding of the ways katorga shaped the empire, leaving a dramatic and lasting legacy that is very much alive today.