“Julie Draskoczy’s Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag is a well-conceived and thoroughly researched study of unknown, yet truly important, aspects of the Belomor camp, a key site of Stalin’s Gulag. This study stands out through its careful archival research into fascinating prisoner writings produced in the camps—autobiographies as well as literary attempts submitted to the camp newspaper Perekovka. The body of unpublished prisoner writings that Draskoczy has studied in Moscow archives are ‘live’ accounts of camp life, yet, as Draskoczy carefully shows, they are highly mediated representations of the writers and their camp experiences, complex texts that can share narrative strategies with both futurist and socialist realist art. Given the many different literary and cultural layers that make up these writings, it takes a discerning and knowledgeable reader to do justice to the complexity of the material. Draskoczy rose to this challenge, and has produced a judicious, insightful, and readable study.”
— Cristina Vatulescu, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University

Julie Draskoczy has taught Russian history and culture at the University of Pittsburgh, Stanford University, and Patten University in San Quentin prison. She was named an Andrew W. Mellon Scholar of the Humanities at Stanford University and has studied in Russia as a Fulbright-Hays recipient. Her book and film reviews have appeared in The Slavic and East European Journal, The Modern Language Review, and Kinokultura. She has published articles in The Russian Review and Studies in Slavic Cultures and has edited numerous projects including The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe and Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.