“Belarusian literature is developing like any other”

2024-03-22 11:35:27

“Ahead of Freedom Day” is the name of the tour through the cities of the Baltic countries, which on the eve of March 25, the writer Vladimir Orlov and the publisher, director of the Kamunikat.org foundation, Yaroslav Ivanyuk, who lives in Bialystok, are doing. On March 22, the meeting with the writer and his publisher will take place in Vilnius, and further on their route will be Riga, Tallinn and Helsinki. Belarusians from Klaipeda and Kaunas have already met with Orlov. Yaroslav Ivanyuk told Svaboda about the published books and the work of the blocked internet library in Belarus.

“Many Belarusians live in all points of the tour, who want to celebrate March 25 together. In Klaipėda and Kaunas, Mr. Vladimir told about the history of the BNR, the history of the declaration of independence, how everything happened. But also about what were the events before that, starting with the uprising of Kastus Kalinowski,” Yarosław Ivanyuk said. According to the publisher, the meeting program also includes conversations with readers and the purchase of new books with autographs by the author. In the musical part, musician Roman Orlov presents his songs to the public.

Director of the Kamunikat fund Yaroslav Ivanyuk is proud that the fund has already published 12 books by Vladimir Orlov. These are historical works, poems, prose, essays of the master of Belarusian literature. The collection of essays includes the famous work “This is Independence”, written back in the 90s of the last century. About this essay during conversations with readers, the author notes with regret that the work has not lost its relevance until now. Among the books of Vladimir Orlov, which are going to the readers, there are novelties.

“We are taking the second part of the “Fatherland” with us. The first “Motherland” in Belarus was recognized as extremist, now Mr. Orlov has written a sequel. But this second part, for certain reasons, was published without illustrations, about which we already have the following feedback: “The black-and-white “Motherland” was published.” In my opinion, the ambiguity is correct, because now for us, Belarusians, the situation is really not colorful”, – suggests the publisher.

Belarusian readers will also be offered books by other Belarusian authors, which were recently published by the Kamunikat fund, Yaroslav Ivanyuk said. Among them are “Kill Upalminzag” by Zmytro Bartosik, “The Book of Cemeteries” by researchers of Belarusian burials around the world Natalya Gardienka and Levon Yurevych, “Soldiers of the BNR” by Professor Oleg Latyshonko. Mr. Ivanyuk explained why they decided to republish the book, which readers saw for the first time back in 2009.

“One of the reasons is that the book is no longer on sale at all. And now, since many Belarusians emigrated from the Republic of Belarus through no fault of their own, we thought that it would be interesting for them to get acquainted with the research of Professor Oleg Latyshenko, related to military formations at the time of the proclamation of the Belarusian People’s Republic.”

How Belarusians deal with blocking

The Kamunikat.org foundation, headed by Yaroslav Ivanyuk, is also known for maintaining an online library of the same name, which contains Belarusian texts.

“There are already 56,000 Belarusian publications of various types. Magazines, newspapers, books, audiobooks, radio shows, TV shows. We are trying to gather in one place everything that is in the Belarusian language, and even what is about Belarus and Belarusians in other languages,” explains Yaroslav Ivanyuk.

In 2023, the Internet library Kamunikat was blocked by the Ministry of Information of Belarus. Yaroslav Ivanyuk does not know the reasons, but he assumes that the blocking is a reaction of the Belarusian authorities to a number of publications collected on the website kamunikat.org.

“Many materials have been collected about the death of political prisoner Ales Pushkin in a Belarusian prison. There is also a page of Nobel laureate, human rights defender Ales Bialiatski, who is being held captive, and his books are in our library. In general, I think they blocked us for collecting everything Belarusian. But Belarusians know how to use VPN technology, and the statistics of visits to the site have not worsened. We even have more visitors,” says Yaroslav Ivanyuk.

According to the creator of Kamunikat, an online library blocked by the Belarusian authorities, such a direction as recording and placing audiobooks on the website is also developing successfully. Over the past two years, more than 40 audio books of contemporary Belarusian literature have been recorded. These are books by Vladimir Orlov, Ales Arkush, Andrei Fedorenko, Lyudmila Rublevskaya. Yaroslav Ivanyuk is especially proud of the work done over the past year.

“It is very important that we recorded Svetlana Aleksievich’s five-book book, for which she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The first book, “The war does not have a woman’s face”, was translated into Belarusian by Valyantsin Akudovich, the following books were translated by Vladimir Orlov, Barys Petrovich, Andrey Khadanovich, and Siarhei Dubavets. All five books can be freely listened to on the website Kamunikat.org, as well as on our YouTube channel, where we include the best of Belarusian modern literature in audio format,” says Yaroslav Ivanyuk.

About the development of Belarusian literature in emigration

Publisher Yaroslav Ivanyuk closely follows the development trends of Belarusian literature. According to Mr. Ivanyuk, the comparison with what is happening in the national literatures of European countries does not disappoint.

“It is very telling that new publishing houses are emerging in emigration. This is also “Janushkevich”, who moved to Warsaw, where he already opened the bookstore “Knigavka”. In Prague, it is the publishing house “Viasna”, in London – “Skarina”, in Krakow – “Gutenberg poblishen”, our Kamunikat in Bialystok. If I compare it with world trends, I see that Belarusian literature is developing like any other, it is not standing on the edge of the road. Fiction, children’s books, popular-historical literature, many translations are published in emigration,” Yaroslav Ivanyuk said. According to the head of Kamunikat, Belarusian literature is no worse than other world literatures. “For me, this is literature that should be admired,” Yaroslav Ivanyuk admits.

At the same time, the publisher of Belarusian books from Bialystok does not rule out that over time the books of those authors who remained in Belarus will become common property. “Who knows, maybe soon we will get to know what the writers there wrote “in the drawer”.

According to Yaroslav Ivanyuk, non-fiction remains the most popular genre in modern literature. Belarusian émigré literature, Mr. Ivanyuk suggests, is not inferior here. Last year, according to Mr. Ivanyuk, he was very impressed by the book of documentary prose by Zmytro Bartosik “Kill Upalminzag”, which was published in the “Library of Freedom”. It was decided to republish this book through Kamunikat.

“The book tells about the 50s of the 20th century in the former Moladocan region based on court documents. Earlier, I was very skeptical about comparing the situation in Belarus after 2020 with what happened in the Soviet era, in the same 30s or 50s of the last century. But after reading this book, I realized that such comparisons are absolutely correct. Because only the method of information transmission has changed, but not the essence of the events,” says the publisher of the Kamunikat books.

Ivanyuk was struck by the author’s conclusion that in the times he researched, it was possible to go to the Gulag for 10-15 years for keeping allegedly hostile literature, and in fact Belarusian and Polish newspapers. And it turned out that nothing has changed.

“And now you can go to prison for several years for a Facebook like. This is absolutely a comparative situation. There is a moment in this book where the author visits Sukhobezvodnye in 2016, where one of the Gulag concentration camps was once located. And there he is talking to a woman at a stall, when he buys himself tissues. The woman says: “Well, it’s not what it used to be. And before that, the entire Soviet Union was sitting here!”. And she talks about it with such nostalgia: that both her grandfather and father were the ones who watched over those prisoners,” Yaroslav Ivanyuk suggests.