Katharine Hodgson is Professor in Russian at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on poetry of the Soviet era, including the work of Leningrad poet Ol’ga Berggol’ts and poetry of the Second World War.

Alexandra Smith is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include literary and film theory, critical theory, Russian literature of the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, intermediality and the history of ideas. She is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006).

This book is the result of a project led by the authors and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which explored the way attitudes towards the cultural legacy of the USSR have evolved since 1991. A co-edited book (with Joanne Shelton), Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon, appeared in 2017.