Josephine von Zitzewitz will show excerpts from “The Gulag: People and Fates” [Гулаг: Люди и судьбы, Director: Aleksandr Slobodsky], a documentary that grew out of a recent oral history project undertaken by the Research and Information Centre “Memorial” (St Petersburg). She will introduce the project and also report on the present efforts of “Memorial” to maintain and publicise archival and museum collections at a time when funding is scarce and suspicion rife.

Josephine von Zitzewitz is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Russian Studies at the University of Cambridge, having previously held appointments at Oxford University. She specialises in the literature and culture of the late Soviet Union, in particular samizdat and Leningrad culture of the Brezhnev era. Her book “Music for a Deaf Age: Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar” will be published in 2015. Josephine von Zitzewitz has been a voluntary research associate with the Research and Information Centre “Memorial” since 2004.

Film excerpts in Russian, talk in English

This is a Pushkin Club event and all are welcome.