Alexander Lukashuk, October 15, 1998, in TOL
Belarus's leading writer evokes the plight of his nation
A truck carrying seven men gets stuck while navigating its way down a muddy forest road. One by one, each of the passengers disembarks and takes a turn at trying to dig the vehicle out of the mire. In doing so, each man becomes an unwitting accomplice to his own demise, for the truck's place of origin is the garage of the notorious secret police, the NKVD, and its destination is the killing field of the
Kuropaty forest on the outskirts of Minsk. The seven passengers are the doomed human cargo of a transport bound for execution.
The personal stories of these seven very different men, their thoughts and insights, the dialogues and conflicts that erupt among them during this fateful journey, are the subject of "Fine Yellow Sand," one of 18 short stories written by Vasil Bykau and recently collected in a single volume titled The Wall.
Bykau is by far the most renowned of contemporary Belarusian writers. His works have been translated into more than 50 languages. Until recently, publishing houses in Belarus would print several hundred thousand copies of any new work written by Bykau.
But for the past several years, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has repeatedly denounced Bykau, a man who has come to be regarded not only as a brilliant author but as the moral leader of the democratic opposition. The Wall was to have been published three years ago by the state publishing house Mastatskaya Litaratura. Since then the house has deleted Bykau from its list of publishable authors.
After Mastatskaya Litaratura refused to publish The Wall, the independent publishing firm Nasha Niva launched its campaign for "the people's book." This campaign generated the finances necessary to publish Bykau's collection by soliciting advance orders directly from the public. The Wall finally saw print at the beginning of this year.
In the short story from which the collection takes its name, a prisoner methodically widens a tiny crack in the wall of his cell, day after day, month after month, year after year. He escapes from the cell only to find himself in the prison yard, which is surrounded by an insurmountable wall.
Such is the situation for many artists in today's Belarus, where the relationship between artists and the government is very similar to the one that existed in Soviet times. In July, Lukashenka agreed to a formal meeting with approximately 30 members of Belarus's Union of Writers. Representatives of the Union's board of directors addressed the leader of the nation with various complaints and appeals for assistance; some made impassioned pleas in defense of the Belarusian language.
But the president himself did most of the talking. First, Lukashenka declared that all those present were raised on the same ideals; he modestly conceded, however, that he was perhaps incapable of shedding those ideals as quickly as certain members of the literary world. Then the president tried to convince the assembled men of Belarusian letters that the vast majority of the republic's population did not want to read books written in their own language. At the conclusion of the meeting, Lukashenka promised to award stipends to the ten most talented of the 30 writers present. He seemed to take considerable pleasure in the uncomfortable silence that ensued following this obvious attempt at baiting the writers.
This was not the first time Lukashenka employed such tactics. At the beginning of his term, Lukashenka ordered the president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences to submit a list of the 100 most talented people in Belarus. As the majority of Belarusian academics worked for the Soviet military-industrial complex, they are far more accustomed to following orders than to enjoying the free thinking usually associated with their status. The chief academician soon dutifully submitted the requested list.
Since then, members of the academy have not uttered a word in defense of the constitution, freedom of the press, or democracy. When prominent researcher Yurii Khadyka was jailed in 1996 and conducted a 25-day prison hunger strike, academic groups the world over, from New York to Japan, registered their outrage and demanded his release. The Belarusian Academy of Sciences, Khadyka's very employer, was mute.
During the Soviet Union's perestroika period, writers' unions were considered an important political force. This was particularly true in Belarus--and for far longer than anywhere else. Unlike analogous organizations in other former Soviet republics and socialist countries, the Union of Writers of Belarus never evolved into a purely professional organization; it always wielded a certain amount of political authority. Once Lukashenka took power, however, this role quickly evaporated, as the president brooked no rivalry. Lukashenka's administration took control of all state publishing houses, deciding which books to publish and how much to pay the authors. Suddenly, Belarusian writers were divested of both the economic and ideological independence they had enjoyed up to the early 1990s. Last year, the president's administration took control of the union headquarters. The union is now merely a tenant at the House of Writers, where it is forced to seek permission even for something as routine as holding a readers' conference.
Last month's meeting with the president effectively wiped out any moral authority the union may have retained. The integrity of Belarusian literature remained untarnished, however, as Bykau--the soul of the literary community--did not attend the meeting.
Bykau has been called everything from the Belarusian Solzhenitsyn, to the conscience of the nation, to the most profound writer of European existentialism alive today. None of these tributes seem to have any impact on the 74-year-old author and president of the Belarus Pen Center. Bykau's novels were mutilated by Soviet censorship; his texts were disseminated by samizdat; his every word and deed was monitored by KGB chairman Yurii Andropov. But even Soviet authorities could not ignore Bykau's talent and popularity. While the state had the KGB spy on Bykau, it also awarded him with the highest national honors. Bykau's name was even reportedly submitted for consideration for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
A monument in western Ukraine commemorating the fallen heroes of 1944 erroneously bears the name of Lieutenant Vasil Bykau. The writer in fact survived after being wounded in battle and saw the war come to an end while stationed in Austria. Bykau's personal war as a writer of truth battling against the hypocrisy of the state was just beginning, however. His short stories, which brought Bykau his greatest fame, also earned him the enmity of Soviet authorities, who had little regard for truth, be it about the war or any other subject. Bykau's stories about the war were not the routine jingoistic tales of vanquishing the enemy or saving the motherland; they were simple but eloquent musings about man in the midst of the hellish, incomprehensible madness of the trenches.
Although Bykau's earliest work is often compared to that of Erich Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, he in fact took realism a step further. Bykau's protagonists live in a world where defeat is inevitable. While Hemingway's old man loses his battle with the sea, he at least gains the respect of others; in individual dignity, at least, there is victory. For Bykau, the only victory possible is the simple victory of death.
Pessimism was anathema in the former Soviet Union, and critics branded Bykau's work pessimistic so often that the author himself was forced to respond. "It is the absolute right of the artist to determine his central theme. Every birth bears the mark of death. Final defeat is encoded genetically even on the cellular level," he said.
In one of his last interviews, academician Andrei Sakharov said he was rereading Bykau's works because they had a profoundly moving effect on him. As a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Gorbachev was often known to express his appreciation and deep respect for the famed Belarusian writer. Bykau's work received the Vatican's award for humanity. At the other end of the spectrum of Bykau's admirers was popular underground novelist Venedikt Yerofeev, author of the poem "Moscow-Petushki," who named Bykau as his favorite living author.
In his writings, Bykau succeeds in identifying one of the core moral truths of the modern world--that at the end of the millennium, man is as impotent in the face of cruelty as he was 2,000 years ago. The slaughter in Rwanda happened only three years ago; the Balkans are still bleeding.
"I'm afraid that we do not properly understand the changes that are taking place at the end of the century," Bykau told Transitions. "Not only is the cultural paradigm changing, but perhaps also the paradigm of the entire modern civilization."
Albert Camus once said that man only begins to seek the meaning of life when he is threatened by death. Yet Bykau points out that even after a calamity as threatening to man's survival as Chornobyl, many continue to resist looking inward.
It is in the post-Chornobyl period that Bykau's latest, as-yet unpublished novel, The Wolf's Hole, takes place. An embittered young soldier deserts the army where he was mercilessly abused and finds refuge in the polluted, radioactive Chornobyl zone, where the mere act of breathing or drinking water may result in death. Not so long ago, such a macabre place seemed to exist only in the realm of science fiction; today the deadly perimeters of Chornobyl's reach are clearly defined on the map of Belarus. And within these boundaries live simple people with simple needs--food, water, shelter. Simple also is the fate these hapless inhabitants of a poisoned land will undoubtedly share.
What, after all, can be simpler than death?
Alexander Lukashuk, former editor in chief of Belarus Publishers in Minsk, was a member of the Belarus Parliamentary Committee on Political Repression from 1990 to 1995. He works for the Belarusian Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague.
This article was first published by Transitions Online (TOL) at www.tol.cz. TOL is a nonprofit Internet magazine and media development organization based in Prague and with branch offices in Moscow, Sarajevo, and London. TOL produces timely, original news and analysis, covering all 28 countries in the post-communist region through its network of local journalists and editors."
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