Not in flames but books may rot. What the state does to Belarusian literature

Publishing an extremist book in Belarus has become easier than ever before. In the past, officials would attach the label of “extremism” only to individual works, but now they have gone so far as to declare several publishing houses extremist outright. This shift directly affects writers like Artur [name changed], who, given the current risks, is choosing to write rather than publish.

“I have gone into fantasy. It is an excellent genre—you can create any dictator you like in it, and life will find its way in regardless. Write a children’s fairy tale, and you will end up with Cipollino; write fantasy, and you will end up with The Lord of the Rings,” says Artur.

Repression against literature in Belarus has, in all likelihood, reached its peak. This is not because the Belarusian authorities can no longer think of anything new, but rather because there is simply no one left to repress in this field.

“People in suits, ties, and earpieces turned up to the book launch”

Recently, Pavieł Ancipaŭ’s book Arriving Somewhere, Doing Something, and Leaving was declared extremist. Pavieł dedicated a post on social media to this recognition. “Congratulations,” wrote fellow Belarusian writer-extremist Alhierd Bacharevič beneath Paviel’s post. There were also a few other comments: “Brilliant!”, “That is a mark of quality,” and “Money well spent.”

When contacted, Pavieł initially hesitated to consider the court’s extremist classification of his book a compliment. He reflected, however, that if "extremism" was identified in his work, the officials must have read it very carefully—an attentiveness that, in some sense, serves as a compliment to the author.

“I was convinced that they [the officials] do not read books — that they only watch moving pictures on YouTube. But then one book I sent to Belarus got stuck at the post office for a long time, and that is when I became anxious. It seems they did read it after all,” says Ancipaŭ.

The book is written in the autofiction genre: the author revisits old text messages, recounts stories about friends, his studies at a literary institute, jobs, side work, and attempts to write a book. In general, Ancipaŭ writes about personal matters, yet the officials managed to read political content into it all the same.

To find out that he was now an extremist, Ancipaŭ had to visit the Ministry of Information's website. In contrast, the publisher and writer Zmicier Višnioŭ was telephoned directly by the same ministry. Though he was not declared an extremist, he was informed that he had been conducting illegal business activity for six years. Shortly afterwards, Višnioŭ ceased to be a publisher and remained simply a writer. He later described the call in his new book, “I Am the Meat That Zmicier Prepared.” In the book, much as in real life, a female official tells him that the publishing house’s operations have been suspended and warns that “criminal adventures” await him back home.

In both the book and real life, Zmicier did not return to Belarus to find out precisely what adventures the Ministry of Information had prepared for him. As a result, the publishing house had to be liquidated. For a long time, they searched remotely for a liquidator — no one wanted to take on the burial of Goliaths. Eventually, the right person was found, and 15 tonnes of books are still lying in his cellars to this day.

“They are simply rotting there. More than 200 titles! Roman Cymbieraŭ was prepared to buy out a large part of our stock, and the Swiss University was prepared to buy it out too! And all that was needed was a single invoice. But the liquidators did not even do that — a paradoxical situation. I do not think I shall ever have access to those books again. The only thing I hope for is that they will not be pulped or burned,” says Višnioŭ.

Before finding himself on the wrong side of the law, Višnioŭ spent many years publishing and selling books in the centre of Minsk. And he knew he was being watched — no one, in truth, made any effort to conceal it. The first bookshop of the Goliaths publishing house opened on Valhahradskaja Street. Višnioŭ recalls that a great deal of money was invested in the refurbishment of the premises at the time, and they got into debt, but the bookshop was closed after just one month of operation.

“It was closed immediately after the launch of Alaksandr Łukašuk’s book The Return of the Nationalist. People in suits, ties, and earpieces turned up to the launch. They did not merely fail to conceal their presence — they were practically filing a live report from the scene. And immediately after that, the entire building on Valhahradskaja Street, where our bookshop was located, was stripped of its commercial premises status. That meant no one could conduct trade in that building any longer, and we too were forced to leave.”

They moved to the very centre of Minsk — to the Trajeckaje Pradmiescie district. The opening was a lively affair, with a performance, and people said at the time that Goliaths had “unsealed the Pradmiescie.” However, the bookshop did not last long there either. This time, the reason was not people with earpieces and jackets, but the high rent. After closing, they did not go far from Trajeckaje. Instead, they moved the bookshop to the “Na Niamizie” shopping centre, where it operated until the Ministry of Information's call.

When the officials finally reached Višnioŭ by telephone, he was in Europe — he had gone there on a literary fellowship. Meanwhile, the publisher Andrej Januškievič was in custody. He had been detained in May, the day after the opening of the "Knihaŭka" bookshop in the centre of Minsk. During the search that followed, around 250 copies of books were confiscated. Given these circumstances, what on earth was Januškievič counting on when he opened a bookshop in 2021?

“An additional point on the cultural map of the capital of Belarus — what is wrong with that?” Januškievič answers us, sitting in the bookshop of the same name, but now in Warsaw. “All the books we managed to sell at ‘Knihaŭka’ had previously been sold freely in our office and online shop.”

This is the very same Januškievič, thanks to whom Harry Potter, Dune, The Witcher, The Lord of the Rings, and many other bestselling books from around the world can be read in Belarusian. The Belarusian-language Harry Potter even found a place on the most prominent shelves of state bookshops before 2020, but after that year, such visibility changed.

“For a long time, the state pretended that we simply did not exist. Officials were busy with their own affairs, while we quietly got on with publishing books. It did not particularly interest them, as long as we did not swim too far past certain censorship buoys. This meant that, despite operating in an unfree and undemocratic country, there was still a sense of freedom among publishers like me,” recalls Januškievič.

However, things began to change as the state showed hostility toward Januškievič in various ways. In 2021, a thousand copies of Alhierd Bacharevič’s “Dogs of Europe” were confiscated from the publishing house at customs. That same year, state bookshops began refusing to work with his publishing house. They settled for what had been sold and returned what had not — that is, they behaved in a civilised manner — but they made it clear that he was now a publisher non grata. By March 2022, Januškievič was asked to vacate his office.

“I thought it was simply the whim of some official,” says the publisher. "At the time, I did not yet understand the consequences of Russian aggression in Ukraine; however, it soon became clear these consequences had a profound effect on Belarus's domestic politics. Furthermore, I did not realise that these were not random grievances directed at individual publishers—the attack was systematic.”

“Now [for the Belarusian authorities] publishing books in the Belarusian language is already a political matter. And yet I always avoided any quasi-ideological aura in my work. I publish books in Belarusian because I am Belarusian. Go and ask a Polish publisher why he publishes books in the Polish language. What would his reaction be? He would probably ask you a rhetorical question: in what other language am I supposed to publish them?”

In 2022, Januškievič left Belarus and now publishes books in Belarusian in Poland. As his Warsaw flat became too small for packing and unpacking print runs, he decided to open a bookshop, naming it just as he had intended in Minsk — “Knihaŭka.”

Over the course of three years — his first, then his second, and his third — he continued to publish. Only recently did officials declare him a member of a mysterious extremist coalition of book publishers. The Kamunikat foundation was also included in this so-called “criminal” coalition alongside Januškievič.

“We would have printed it and been shut down. We did not print it, and they were shut down anyway.”

“It is simply absurd,” says the founder of the Kamunikat foundation, Jarosław Iwaniuk, when we ask him to comment on his “membership” of an extremist formation of book publishers.

We meet Iwaniuk in Białystok. Unlike our other interlocutors, he has never lived in Belarus. Jarosław Iwaniuk is a representative of the Belarusian national minority in Poland. He was born here, in the Podlaskie region, calls himself a Belarusian, speaks pure Belarusian, has been involved in distributing Belarusian books for over 20 years, and propaganda likes to call him an ethnic Pole.

“They once showed photos of me from Facebook in which I was photographed wearing a T-shirt with the Pahonia emblem. My friends laughed at me — of course, no one wears T-shirts like that except ethnic Poles!”

The website of the Kamunikat online library, which Iwaniuk created 25 years ago, hosts more than 70,000 publications: books and archives of Belarusian periodicals spanning more than a century. All of it can be downloaded for free. Dissertations have even been written based on Kamunikat materials.

For many years, the online library operated under the slogan “Save the forest — read books at Kamunikat.org.” The forest was being saved until 2021, when Uładzimir Niakliajeŭ came to Iwaniuk and brought him the novel Hey Ben Hinnom. His book had been refused by other publishing houses at that point.

“The other independent publishing houses that were still operating in Belarus decided: if we print it, we will be shut down. They did not print it, and they were shut down anyway, and the people were arrested.

I did not spend even five minutes thinking about whether to publish this book. How I was going to sell and distribute it, I thought about later. Since then, we have published more than 70 titles of Belarusian books — historical, children’s, and literary works.

Unfortunately, the project has proved to be a viable one. Unfortunately, because all these books ought to be coming out in Belarus. And I am sorry that they are being published outside Belarus, that their print runs are being distributed outside the country, that so many people who need these books have left the country.”

We ask Iwaniuk to reflect on what he published that led to both Kamunikat and to his personal inclusion in the mysterious “extremist formation.” Iwaniuk reflects without any pleasure. He says he does not even want to think about it.

The Gutenberg Publisher publishing house was declared a separate extremist formation as far back as February. Valancina Barbara Andrejeva is, in some measure, consoled by the new status: she says Gutenberg Publishers has too few achievements to have earned it — the publishing house has only been operating for three years.

“When we left Belarus several years ago, we had an understanding that the situation would develop in roughly this way. But over the years of working in emigration, we began to forget why we had left.”

“At some point, even offhand comments from Polish people no longer seemed so foolish: why are you, a Belarusian publishing house, working here and not in Belarus? Thoughts began to arise: perhaps, indeed… But now we can see that they simply had not got round to us yet. And now — they have.”

All three “extremist” publishing houses say that they sold virtually no books in Belarus. It is true that it is not entirely clear how to count those who ordered books to Polish addresses and simply carried them home in their suitcases. There will now be fewer such orders.

“But of the total volume of orders, approximately 2 per cent were placed directly from Belarus. So, to speak of any kind of danger that we posed to the Belarusian authorities is simply laughable,” says Andrejeva with conviction.

Januškievič agrees:

“Two things stopped people: the high cost of delivery and the simple fact that a book in the Belarusian language sent from abroad could cause problems.”

So why the additional repression? Iwaniuk believes that the state simply needs a constant enemy, and when there are no real enemies, it invents one to keep everyone in a state of fear.

Pavieł Ancipaŭ has a simpler explanation:

“I think that when they were studying at their KGB schools, they were told that the Soviet Union collapsed because of Solzhenitsyn. Or something along those lines. There was no internet; subversive activity was carried out through books photocopied or typed on carbon copies. And so, having been trained at this old KGB school, they remembered that a book is dangerous. But to what degree is a book dangerous now?”

“Well, what is the most popular banned Belarusian book? Possibly ‘Dogs of Europe’ by Alhierd Bacharevič. If it had not been banned from sale in Belarus, what would have happened?” reflects Ancipaŭ.

It is no longer possible to check — Andrej Januškievič had the entire print run of Dogs of Europe confiscated directly at customs back in 2021.

Arriving Somewhere, Doing Something

In general, all Belarusian independent writers and publishing houses are left with no choice but to leave Belarus, to arrive somewhere, and to get on with doing things there. But how long will the enthusiasm of readers in the diaspora last?

In Januškievič’s warehouse, 600 copies of the Belarusian translation of “The Autumn of the Patriarch” by Gabriel García Márquez lie. In three years of working in Poland, only 400 have been sold. The translation rights expire in the summer — what is to be done? They are reducing prices and writing to the media — yet the books are still not selling.

“Perhaps the people who are interested in this book have simply run out?” reflects Januškievič.

Or take another example. When Januškievič announced that the publishing house had acquired the rights to translate Stephen King, it became a sensation. Potential readers on social media were thrilled. The publishing house decided that the first print run should be 4,000 copies, with additional copies to be printed later.

“Fortunately, we did start with two thousand rather than four,” says Januškievič. “Two years have now passed since the sales launch, and we have not yet sold even the first thousand. You are flying about in romantic ideas: there is a hunger for books, there is a world-famous author, there is a desire to read in one’s native language… But when it comes to practice, everything turns out to be different from what you imagined.”

Recently, Januškievič made the news, but not in the way he had hoped. The publisher was dismayed that the media wrote about the engagement of popular blogger Alaksandr Ivulin but said nothing about the publication of a book about the war in Ukraine by Polish writer Szczepan Twardoch, translated into Belarusian. Januškievič shared his frustration on Instagram. Saša Ivulin came, bought Twardoch’s book, was photographed with it, and posted about it on social media. The media then wrote about that.

Such a mechanism of support is, of course, better than what the Belarusian state has chosen, but it is still insufficient. There is simply no money for proper marketing — and not only at Januškievič’s. There is especially no money for lavish marketing.

Sometimes writers come to Gutenberg Publishers with a rider: I want this many meet-and-greets, participation in such-and-such book fairs, and a lavish advertising campaign to boot.

“All of this is a great deal of work, and it costs a great deal of money. We do not have our own money for such work. We did not fall from the Moon, and there is no gold mine on that Moon. We arrived in Poland as ordinary people, with nothing but a pile of bags, and you cannot pay for presentations and reader meet-and-greets with a frying pan,” says Valancina Andrejeva.

“Money” is Andrej Januškievič’s first answer to the question of what Belarusian literature is lacking. But then he changes his mind and says, "an audience." Thousands of readers, the ability to reach the entire Belarusian audience, not just diaspora activists.

“One wants to work in a normal market. To expand the audience, to broaden the range. We publish 20 titles a year, but we need 200. People want other genres, other works, and it is the publisher’s job to give them that choice. Go into Polish bookshops — they are full of science fiction, romance, non-fiction!”

It is not only Januškievič who dreams of the day he will be able to work in a normal market. But the founder of “Kamunikat,” Jarosław Iwaniuk, is certain: publishing Belarusian books abroad is not a business.

“During the Warsaw Book Fair, one former Polish émigré said to me: ' These books will remain relevant for another two generations of Belarusians. But after that, if the situation in Belarus does not change and you are unable to return, assimilation processes will begin. Sadly, they cannot be stopped. It was the same with the Poles who fled to the West first after the Second World War, then in the 1960s. And so, publishing books in emigration is not a business.”

Cross the border — and suddenly everyone starts reading?

But there are no pessimists at Gutenberg Publishers. They generally take the view that the repression against publishing houses was carried out solely because it is unpleasant for the authorities to look at successful Belarusians with their beautiful books.

“Perhaps what is dangerous for the authorities is the very fact that one can be happy and content with one’s life?” reflects Andrejeva.

And the officials do notice beautiful books, even if they put them on a watchlist. Višnioŭ, for example, says that the Ministry of Information praised Goliaths’ books for many years before closing the publishing house. And Januškievič’s books were still on display in the most prominent positions at Minsk’s “Svietač” bookshop as recently as 2019. Both publishers acknowledge that working with state bookshops was never easy.

“Belkniga is simply a monster that does not actually work with books — and especially not with books from Belarusian independent publishing houses. At the very least, it is not systematic work,” says Višnioŭ. “Books were always displayed poorly, in some incomprehensible places, in corners. We did not work only with them, and there is something to compare it with. Working with Oz.by, for instance, was easy — they were always requesting additional deliveries, and there was a well-oiled mechanism in place.”

But the advantage of “Belkniga” shops is that they are spread across the entire country, so through them it would have been possible to reach even small towns. It would have been possible — but the actual figures are disheartening.

But perhaps the figures are disheartening not because the books are displayed incorrectly, but because these books are simply not needed by anyone? However, if that theory were correct, Belarusians would differ not only from the Poles, whose bookshops are crammed with Polish literature of every genre, but also from their other neighbours. Ancipaŭ gives an example: in Latvia, with a population of fewer than 2 million people, bestsellers are published in print runs of 17,000 copies.

“Seventeen thousand for this audience of two million! And in Belarus, with a population of 10 million, a book that sold at least 7,000 copies was considered a bestseller,” says Ancipaŭ. “And all this is simply because Latvia has a free market, and a publisher can easily distribute his books to all the shops, to all the libraries. In Belarus, that was never easy. So, it is strange to say that there is no reader in Belarus. Then, where does the reader come from in Latvia? You cross the border — and suddenly everyone starts reading?”

On the day his own book was declared extremist, Ancipaŭ told us: if he manages to sell a few more copies now, he will consider such a gesture from the authorities to be state support.

“Perhaps this is the only mechanism of support for the Belarusian book that the state can offer me.”

With the support of Russian Language News Exchange