The University Library does not collect a large amount of Belarusian material* but we buy at least a few items every year.  Just in the last couple of weeks we have received two new books in Belarusian but not from Belarus – these are diaspora publications by dissidents that have been printed in Poland.  *You can read more about our Belarusian collections in this 2015 blog post.

The first is Peratrus u muzėi : apavi︠a︡danʹni, a collection of short stories by the author Alʹherd Bakharėvich.  Bakharėvich has lived outside Belarus in the wake of Lukashenko’s crackdown on protests following the highly contested 2020 elections: a crackdown on dissident voices that continues to this day and now covers those who disagree with Belarus’ role in the ongoing full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine launched in 2022.

Bakharėvich’s most famous work, Sabaki Ėŭropy (The dogs of Europe), came out in 2017.  A Belarusian prize-winner when it first appeared, it is now banned in the country and it and its author labelled as extremist.  Our earliest print copy is in fact a 2020 Russian translation (Sobaki Evropy) which we also have electronically.  Our copy of the novel in its original Belarusian dates from 2022.  No longer acceptable in Belarus at that point, this copy of  Sabaki Ėŭropy was published in Czechia.

The iDiscover catalogue has not yet updated our record for Peratrus u muzėi, so the mistaken assumption by whichever library provided the basic record we used as an order-level record that it was published in Minsk still shows today – it was of course not published anywhere in Belarus and in fact produced in Poland.

For readers without Belarusian or Russian, the UL currently has one English translation of Bakharėvich’s work, of his novel Alindarka’s children : (things will be bad).

The same Poland-based Belarusian publisher also published our other new Belarusian arrival.  Bel-chyrvona-bely : st︠s︡i︠a︡h, nat︠s︡yi︠a︡, idėntychnast︠s︡ʹ (White-red-white : flag, nation, identity) is a 304-page collective monograph without the individual authors named; only the book’s Ukrainian editor’s name is given.  As readers who have seen footage of Belarusian protests might remember, one of the symbols of protest has been the use of the old Belarusian flag which has three horizontal stripes in white, red, and white again.  The book looks at the history of the flag, which included use under Nazi occupation but now reflects a desire for a post-Lukashenko, democratic state.

We will continue to buy a selection of diaspora dissident Belarusian publications.  Coming to us through the Legal Deposit system are the fantastic books published by the recently established Skaryna Press in London, some in English and some in Belarusian.  The catalogue records currently in iDiscover for these arrivals are not up to scratch (many and maybe all these titles will have arrived during the British Library’s ongoing outage, with the normal record-sharing system for Legal Deposit libraries still down) but I’ll be talking to my colleagues in Cambridge about making sure that our Slavonic team receive and catalogue new Skaryna Press books and deal with the records for the ones already here.

You can also read more about the works of the man who the Press is named after in this 2017 blog post: https://languagecollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/2017/09/30/frantsysk-skaryna-and-500-years-of-belarusian-printing-the-september-2017-slavonic-items-of-the-month/

Mel Bach