We are delighted to invite you to this evening talk where author Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry will be discussing her debut novel, Between Dog and Wolf, with Professor Polly Jones. Praised for its encyclopaedic detail of everyday life in the last years of Communism and its evocation of the intensity of female friendships, the book is a deeply personal account of what it is like to come of age during a time of great upheaval.

Best friends Anya and Milka have grown up together in Brezhnev’s Moscow, envisioning a joyful future for themselves far away from the hardships of their parents’ and grandparents’ lives. Now it is 1985: the hour between dog and wolf, when one state has ended and another has not quite begun. Along with their friends Petya and Aleksey, the teenagers’ days are fuelled by sex, alcohol and cigarettes, sharing secrets and desires, arguing about history and politics, and discussing forbidden books. But the world is changing. As they yearn for the freedom to choose their fates, they encounter tragedy, the crumbling of a cruel but familiar regime, and a brief flourishing of hope before the next repressive regime takes root. Although the novel depicts a chaotic and desperate era, it also pulsates with life, friendship, love and hope – as its characters struggle to survive, to save their country and one another.

Polly Jones is Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow at University College, Oxford, and Deputy Chair of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. She is the author and editor of several books on Soviet cultural history and politics, including Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography and Myth (OUP, 2019) and Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (Yale, 2013). Her next book Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin will be published later this year by Bloomsbury. Professor Jones appears regularly on radio and TV to talk about Russian culture and history, and was consultant to Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin.

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