Remembering Belarus’s Revolutionary Summer: Memory, Outrage and Mobilization in Contemporary Belarusian Literature

• In Event: Belarusian Culture II: Post-2020 Memory Practices

Abstract

What many observers called “the Belarusian revolution” in 2020 did not result in the overthrow of the Lukashenko regime, but a brutal escalation in state violence that has continued ever since. In other words, the political reckoning between state and society was only put on hold through the brute force of the state’s repressive apparatus, and an important segment of the conflict has moved from the streets to the realm of texts and images. Given the epochal significance of the protests for Belarus, a key task for cultural activists is to keep alive their memory. As Ann Rigney puts it: “the memory of civic violence becomes caught up in a dynamic of action and reaction whereby memory works as a mobilizing force and becomes itself a renewed act of resistance”. Just as the regime tries to forget 2020, an increasingly multilingual, diasporic network of activists has sustained cultural resistance by maintaining the memory of the victims, the violence, and the emotional highs of spontaneous grassroots mobilization.

This paper examines the literature of the protest movement, arguing that the written word in particular has played a crucial role in creating cultural memory of the protests. In the aftermath of 2020–2021, new Belarusian publishing initiatives such as Skaryna Press (London, from 2022) and Hochroth Minsk (Berlin, from 2023), combined with heightened interest in Belarus at western publishers (e.g. edition.fotoTapeta, Berlin), have produced a lively and international literary market for Belarusian prose and poetry, in both Belarusian and Russian languages and code-switching mixtures, whereby a strong emphasis is placed by many authors on the protests and their aftermath. Authors such as Hanna Komar, Artur Kamaroŭski, Kryścina Banduryna, Julia Cimafiejeva, Aĺhierd Bacharevič, toni lašden and many others have crafted a sustained cultural resistance to the regime.

Author

• Simon Lewis, U of Bremen (Germany)