Belarusian Russophone Literature after 2020

• In Event: Belarusian Culture II: Literature

Abstract

Viewed in the context of both world literatures and Slavic literatures, Belarusian literature exemplifies Casanova’s notion of a “minor” literature. It is produced by a small, young nation—often deemed “failed” or “incomplete”—in a borderland region that for most of its history was relegated to the periphery of a large multi-ethnic state (the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union). It is written in a “minor” Slavic language, which, moreover, is also arguably a minority language within Belarus itself, where Russian remains dominant in both public and private spheres. For the majority of Belarusians, even ethnic Belarusians who symbolically regard Belarusian as their “mother tongue,” the true “native” language is Russian. Frequently, in fact, Belarusian speakers face ridicule, discrimination, and since 2020, even persecution.

In the realm of Belarusian literature, however, the power dynamic between the two nominally equal state languages of Belarus is reversed. Only texts written in Belarusian are traditionally recognized as part of the national literary canon. The notion that an author writing in Russian is not a Belarusian writer has persisted, even after Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015.

Authors in/from Belarus who write in Russian are, thus, marginalized twice over. Their work belongs neither to Russian nor to Belarusian literature and is only tangentially connected to both. Yet, this position grants Belarusian Russophone writing twice the amount of revolutionary potential ascribed to “minor literatures” by Deleuze and Guattari. Following a brief overview of the controversial status of Russophone writing in Belarus and the ongoing debates about its legitimacy, I will highlight some strategies of subversion that contemporary Belarusian writers employ and show that in their work, Russian becomes a form of resistance both against the dominant imperial language and against the “major” essentialist notion of Belarusian literature as exclusively Belarusophone.

Author

• Jenya Mironava, Harvard U