Urals, first in Polazna and then (from November 1942) in Molotov. During this period she worked for a time as a school doctor, but on her return to Leningrad in 1944 she became once again a full-time writer. Postwar After the war, she suffered both personal and professional setbacks. In December 1945 her beloved mother had a stroke, dying in January 1946, and her projected novel about the rebuilding of Leningrad, Gorod [The city], was rejected by the publisher, forcing her to return an advance she had already spent (she managed to get Litfond, the writers' literary fund, to pay the advance in exchange for literary work). Furthermore, the zhdanovshchina of the late 1940s was not only painful for her because of the vicious attacks on friends like Mikhail Zoshchenko, it was dangerous for her because of her association with the Serapion Brothers, whose principles were now considered heretical by the Party, and the persecution of Jews and doctors involved in the Doctors' plot of early 1953 added to her peril. Although she continued to work as a translator and journalist (her sketches were published almost exclusively in Gudok [Train Whistle]), her only book published between 1945 and 1960 was Na svoikh plechakh [On their own shoulders] (1948), a collection of short prose pieces about the heroism of young Red Cross nurses in Leningrad during the war which was favorably reviewed. In the late 1950s she was abruptly dismissed from her post as head of the Translators' Section of the Writers Union. However, by 1960 she was able to publish a collection of her poetry, and another followed in 1966 (both consisted mostly of earlier work, with a few new poems). She also began publishing selections from her memoirs, though she was never able to publish them in book form (a collection was finally published in 2008). Illness forced her to stop writing in 1967, and she died in January 1969. Reception Although Polonskaya was highly respected in the 1920s—in 1926 the critic D. S. Mirsky called her "the most gifted of the young poetesses"—she fell into obscurity, both because of the difficulty of keeping a career going as a single mother and for political reasons. Her name began to be mentioned again with the revival of interest in the Serapion Brothers from the 1960s on, but only as a member of that group; the most attention she received until