»Belarus Exists Where Belarusian Language Is Spoken«

I am on good terms with languages. I finished a linguistic high school, which is why somewhere inside me there’s a linguist who died…

I’m joking! I didn’t go to the Linguistic University and entered the Law Faculty of Belarusian State University instead. But I’ve always had a feeling for language, and prison helped me develop it to a higher level. I had a lot of free time, and I was lucky to be sent to »Vitsba«–a penal colony where they send foreign citizens: for example, foreigners who committed crimes in Belarus or entered the country with a few grams of marijuana. Finding themselves in »Vitsba,« they quite often had books with them. Moreover, books in many different languages were available in the prison library, and I was again lucky enough to be able to read in ten languages while I was there, although I certainly don’t speak all of them fluently.

I read in Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish (which felt natural to me, despite the fact that I had never studied it–it was quite easy to understand), as well as English and German. I studied German a bit at school, but as it was our second foreign language, we didn’t pay much attention to it. It used to be enough for me to say, »Ich heiße Maxim und ich spreche Deutsch nicht«–that got me by in all life situations. But in prison, I took a small German course with an inmate interpreter in the neighboring barracks. Every morning, we had a chance to hold conversations while walking around different local areas, and he also gave me exercises. So, for a couple of months, I enjoyed a daily 15-minute German practice.

Later, in a prison cell, I found myself in the company of Erich Maria Remarque and Franz Kafka, as well as non-German authors translated into German–about 18 to 20 books in total. In English, there were more than 50 books. And then there was this game: whenever I had a chance to get a grammar book or a dictionary in a foreign language, I would study it for a month or so just to understand its structure, parts of speech, and memorize about 90% of the most common words. Then, I would immediately start reading–just like that, without preparation. Usually, it worked well.

My plan was to read as much as possible without going into details. That meant if I understood the general idea of a sentence, I didn’t look up all the new words. I just trained my neural network that way. While reading the first few pages, I would look things up in the dictionary, but by the last 50 pages of a book, I almost never consulted it.

Then I studied a bit of French–mostly written rules, not listening practice. It’s funny: I can’t speak French, nor can I distinguish French words when I hear them spoken, but I can read in French better than in German because I’m more familiar with French grammar and vocabulary, as they are closer to English. Then in Spanish, I read an Abraham Lincoln biography, a strange book about Caribbean rituals… well, that was what I found in the library!… and One Hundred Years of Solitude–I should say that out of the three, it was the hardest. Luckily, I also had the Russian translation to double-check against. In Italian, I read Dante and some poetry, and in Portuguese, a collection of Brazilian anecdotes. But all this stopped in the autumn of 2024, when they burned all the books containing foreign characters and several Belarusian books: Uladzimir Karatkievich, Vasil Bykaŭ, Sviatlana Alexievich, and even the classic Belarusian poet Yanka Kupala, who was said to »write lyrics for Mikhalok.« [an absurd state accusation linking the 20th-century poet to Siarhei Mikhalok, the frontman of the iconic anti-authoritarian punk-rock band Lyapis Trubetskoy–platformB comment]

So, I personally find languages exciting because when you learn a language, you enter a world that isn’t yours, learning new words… Out of curiosity, I also learned Finnish and Norwegian grammar, as well as Arabic and Hebrew scripts. For a while, I kept myself busy with these small and big linguistic discoveries, which I shared daily in notes and letters to my relatives. But I never sent them–they kept disappearing due to my incommunicado status. So all of them, along with my manuscripts, were left behind there.

Languages have a special meaning for me, and I used to dream that when I got free, I would focus on bringing my knowledge of these languages to a high level–moving beyond intuitive reading toward fluent use. And I am sure that in any language–including those you mentioned: the language of law, literature, poetry, and music–you remain the same person. I approach each of them as an instrument of self-expression. I don’t want to be consumed by languages. For example, there is prison slang, or argot, and many people use it daily and start to be driven by the concepts underlying it. I always consciously avoided using it, though you might find some argot words in my writing. My characters speak a semi-normal language with argot elements (about one word out of ten) to highlight something when necessary, but without switching to it completely. Otherwise, the reader would need a specialized dictionary to understand what they are talking about.

I’ve become pretty adept at reading people’s faces and deciphering their emotions. I also had a chance to study a few books dedicated to the topic, namely by Paul Ekman–there was a whole collection of his works in the prison library. But while reading, I realized I was already using some of those techniques. When you’re locked in a cell with, for instance, a murderer who has killed several people, that skill is a matter of survival. You have to be very careful in reading facial expressions and not let the situation get out of control. Anyone with prison experience learns this skill, whether they want to or not.

Right now, Belarusian is the language closest to me. While in prison, I wrote several books: three in Belarusian, one in English, and the rest in Russian. Now I write exclusively in Belarusian. It isn’t as fluent as my Russian yet, but I definitely see improvement and rarely look up words in a dictionary. It’s amazing to watch this linguistic landscape shift.

Right now I’m working on a novel–a puzzle-novel–where many things are left unsaid directly, and I purposefully leave silence as room for the reader’s creativity. It’s important to me to let the reader do their own work and search for explanations. So I would say that in this new book, silence plays the primary role.

As for Zekameron and The Colonists, silence there comes at the end of each short story, leaving space to reflect on what has just happened and what consequences it might entail. I think having that space is vital.

Indeed, Zekameron was my homage to Boccaccio, and beyond the structural resemblance, my book was also written during a time of plague–a different kind, the plague of political repression and a changing ideological landscape in the country. Just like in the Decameron, there are 100 stories. Interestingly, in the second book, The Colonists, there are 72, which is another reference to these Decameron-rooted traditions.

As for listeners, in prison you sometimes don’t have any at all; your listeners are concrete walls, and you simply tell stories to yourself. Another difference is that in Boccaccio’s work, the young women and men tell stories to each other, and as they do, they can modify them, add details, or offer commentary. In Zekameron, all the stories are told by an anonymous third-person narrator. It is always a generic »he,« without any personal details–no name, age, or occupation. You don’t know any of them personally, but perhaps, after reading each one-page story, you learn something much more important about him. So on the one hand, it’s a collective »he,« and on the other, it’s a different individual every time. That distinction makes the structure fundamentally different.

All of them are in a detention center. They share the same situation–they are detainees, not yet convicted criminals. So they all hold on to the hope of leaving that place free, even if there are no grounds for such hope. In other ways, they can be very different. It’s not an autobiography, though sometimes the stories reflect things that actually happened to me, which the reader can easily spot.

Limbo is actually a good comparison. The difference, however, is that they don’t have the option of going to paradise–only to hell. They just don’t know which circle they’ll be sent to, and sometimes that circle begins right there in limbo. Where they are isn’t a safe place; they could end up waiting there their whole lives, and this life is so unusual that they have to adapt to it. And they do adapt, until it seems normal–only the reader knows it isn’t. But for the people in these stories, everything around them comes to seem quite ordinary: getting used to the absence of basic necessities, living crammed together in a small room. I try to recreate this atmosphere through both the plots and small speaking details.

Details matter a lot to me: one small detail can explain an entire situation. But to understand this aspect of my prose, I need to give a bit of context. First of all, I didn’t have much paper for writing, so I decided to limit each story to a single page in my notebook. That’s how this concise style emerged. The description of the detention center is scattered across all one hundred stories. It’s like dismantling the prison into a hundred pieces and then reassembling the overall image piece by piece, detail by detail, story by story. I think it worked. The technical limitation stripped away all unnecessary elements–much like in sculpting.

Take that collective image of »he,« for instance: I now realize it was the only way to write about prison. Initially, I thought about using fictional names because I was trying to pass the stories through censorship. I had to be careful, because any name would be treated as that of a real person, and the censors wouldn’t let the text through. Since I couldn’t reveal details about my cellmates, I switched to »he,« and soon realized it was natural to refer to all of us that way–because to the censors, we were all the same anonymous »he.«

The same applies to the one-page constraint. I initially introduced it to keep all the stories in a single notebook, back when I still had plenty of paper. But then that constraint began to dictate the entire style: the dialogue, the word choices (for instance, I never introduced dialogue with »he said« or »he replied«), succinct descriptions, and the plot itself. Sometimes I would be writing a story and notice I only had four lines left, so I’d end it abruptly. In a few stories, you’ll see longer descriptive opening sentences, a climax, and a sharp ending–that usually means I failed to plan my writing space properly! I never edited or drafted the texts; I wrote straight from my head, so the draft was the final version.

When I started writing The Colonists, I suddenly faced a new challenge: I had all the notebook space I wanted. I could write as many pages as I liked. The first story I wrote was about six pages long, and I felt something was wrong–I wanted to return to the shorter format, but I couldn’t keep it to 1,500 characters anymore. So I made a compromise with myself and doubled the length. The stories in The Colonists are twice as long as those in Zekameron, but they’re still short.

In prison, I tried to read as many new books as possible rather than reread old ones. I only reread the ones that had impressed me the most, discovering new layers of meaning. The book that supported me most during those years–and my favorite in Belarusian literature–is Uladzimir Karatkievich’s famous novel Ears of Rye Under Your Sickle (Каласы пад сярпом тваім). I kept returning to it as a source of strength, enjoying the narrative while looking for clues about what Karatkievich intended for the second volume. I even kept a separate notebook with predictions and quotes tracing the plot’s potential development. Later, I found an epilogue to the novel–a short story titled »Blue-Blue« (Сіняя-сіняя)–which shows what happened to the main characters and reveals the author’s intent to leave his protagonist’s ultimate fate open as he gets carried away by historical events.

As for the second part of your question–books my perspective on has worsened… After 2022, while reading Russian classics like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov (which were always easy to get in prison), I noticed something I had never seen in them before: an imperial code and a narrative centered on the Russian Empire. For a long time, we somehow overlooked this. In historical books concerning Russia, I noticed how the issues of Crimea and the Caucasus were framed, instilling in readers the perception that these regions are natural military targets for Russia.

In his foreword to Dudka Bіałaruskaja, a poetry collection published in 1892, Francišak Bahuševič wrote that Belarus exists where the Belarusian language is spoken. He was describing a geographical area, but in the 21st century, the world is larger and the Belarusian language has spread much farther. We find Belarusians in America, Australia, Europe, and Russia, and it depends on us where we find Belarus under these conditions. I’ve visited many Belarusian communities, and I notice that people preserve Belarusian traditions more actively in Munich than in Minsk, for example. It might sound paradoxical, but exile and emigration can actually strengthen one’s sense of Belarusian identity, drawing people back to their heritage and language.

Of course, geography matters immensely–we can’t replace our blue lakes with any others. Our native landscapes, cities, and the people living there will always hold a special place for us. But as for everything else–language, memory, traditions, culture–we can preserve it outside the country. We can do everything to popularize it and make it stronger, because that is what’s needed to save the country. Those living in Belarus right now don’t have the freedom to do that.

What I also want to say to Belarusians and others in exile is that we shouldn’t lose hope. Just like my characters in Zekameron who manage to keep their humor and irony in difficult situations, we need to maintain that attitude to survive. Survive with a smile, and don’t give in to despair–despair doesn’t help. I’ve been there, and I know things only get worse if you allow yourself to fall into despair.

And as for being in exile: I know it’s hard, but we need to see it as an opportunity not a punishment. Just imagine being in a country where you can’t express yourself out of fear of arrest, forced into self-censorship, without any of the opportunities available to us here. Although I love Belarus and want to return, being here and having the ability to speak and write is vital. I hope that remains true not just for me, but for others as well. And I’m determined to keep on going.