Dr Rachel Polonsky

Murray Edwards College
  • Affiliated Lecturer, Department of Slavonic Studies
  • Director of Studies (Russian), Emmanuel College
  • Official Fellow, Murray Edwards College

Contact

About

Rachel Polonsky’s scholarly interests include nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, fiction, and memoir, often with a comparative emphasis, and the place of Russian literature in the overlapping contexts of cultural, intellectual, and political history. She has published numerous essays, articles, and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly journals and anthologies, and is a contributor to the The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement among other periodicals.

Teaching interests: 

I supervise on Russian cultural history, and nineteenth and twentieth century literature.

Research

Research interests: 

My current research interests include the various aspects of the ‘Eastern Question’ in nineteenth century Russian iterature. I have recently published several essays on contemporary Russian fiction writers in The New York Review of Books.

Published works: 

Books:

  • 2010 – Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History (Faber & Faber)
  • 1998 – English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance (Cambridge University Press)

Selected Articles:

  • 2014 – Introduction, The Queen of Spades and Other Stories by Alexander Pushkin, The Folio Society
  • 2012 – ‘Chekhov and the Buried Life of Katherine Mansfield’ in A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture ed., Anthony Cross (Open Book), 201-214
  • 2008 – ‘The Reception of Shelley in Russia’ in The Reception of P.B. Shelley in Europe eds., Susanne Schmid and Michael Rossington (Thoemems Continuum), 229-247
  • 2005 – ‘Hajji Baba in St Petersburg: James Morier, Osip Senkovskii and Pushkin’s Literary Diplomacy between East and West’, Journal of European Studies, vol.35 no.3, 253-270
  • 2004 – ‘Among the Ossetians: How Pushkin’s Travels Eastwards Altered his Self-Image as a European Poet’ (Commentary) The Times Literary Supplement 24&31 December
  • 2002 – ‘Poe’s Aesthetic Theory’ in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe ed., Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge University Press), 42-57
  • 2000 – ‘The Classics in Paraphrase: Pound, Kuzmin and the Uses of Antiquity’, Forum for Modern Language Studies vol. XXXVI, no.4, 253-270
  • 1997 – ‘Translating Whitman, Mistranslating Bal’mont’, The Slavonic and East European Review vol.75, no.3, 401-421
  • 1996 – ‘Dante and Russian Poetry’, The Cambridge Review, vol. 117, no.2328, 27-35