Belarus bookshop braves the state to publish Nobel winner's work

Underground publisher says it is risking regulations to translate Svetlana Alexievich’s novels into her home language

Nobel literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich.
Nobel literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich. Photograph: Kay Nietfeld/EPA

Before a group of Belarusian artists and intellectuals chose it as their headquarters, Minsk drinkers would line up outside the run-down building for cheap vodka on tap.

These days the Lohvinau House of Literature is one of the city’s few outlets for local contemporary art. It houses a gallery, a wine bar and a bookshop, and is dedicated to publishing works by authors marginalised by state-run media houses.

One of these is Svetlana Alexievich, the recipient of this year’s Nobel prize for literature. Despite being Belarusian, Alexievich’s books are hard to find in her home country because of her criticism of the authoritarian president, Aleksander Lukashenko.

For the past 15 years, Lohvinau has been the only publisher to print Alexievich’s books in Belarusian, says owner Ihar Lohvinau.

The cultural hub was founded in 2009 as a physical expansion of the publishing house. It has an atmosphere that evokes the salon culture of the communist era, when dissident artists would hold covert expositions for culture-starved intellectuals, including Alexievich herself.

“The concept is to create a platform, especially for young artists, and to organise lectures and debates,” Lohvinau says.

The 500 or so titles arranged on the book shop shelves are a mix of fiction, poetry, art magazines and academic journals. Some works have been smuggled in from abroad or produced by sympathetic local printers. They are distributed through personal networks, passed on tothe offices of opposition political parties and private enthusiasts who sell them from home.

The government does not carry out overt censorship, says bookstore manager Pavol Kastiukevich, but rather relies on bureaucracy and red tape to control the dissemination of controversial literature.

In 2014, a law requiring publishers to obtain a government license for each new title caught Lohvinau by surprise. The publisher continued to print illegally, earning a €60,000 fine. Faced with closure the owners organised a successful online campaign to save the bookshop from financial ruin.

Competing in the state-run system has other obstacles. Printing licenses are state-controlled, and state-run bookshops enjoy special conditions– they don’t pay rent.

A reading at the Lohvinau book shop in Minsk.
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A reading at the Lohvinau book shop in Minsk. Photograph: Lohvinau book shop

State institutions often dictate to the sellers what should be displayed on bookshelves by placing all publications into two categories: “socially significant” and “others”, says Kastiukevich.

The state-owned book trade monopoly Bielkniha (Belarusan book) may forbid the sales of selected titles on “ideological” grounds.

Russian-language books make up about 95% of the market. “Belarus-produced books have no chance, as they’re more expensive and less numerous,” says Kastiukevich.

The situation for independent publishers and booksellers is aggravated by high VAT rates of 20%.

Two years ago, Lohvinau printed 500 copies of Alexievich’s latest novel, Second-hand Time, translated into Belarusian by Valer Stralko and Cichan Carniakievič. Despite the modest print run, her books have not been as popular as expected, Kastiukevich says.

Part of the reason is that Alexievich writes in Russian, which alienates her from a generation of Minsk intellectuals dedicated to resuscitating the Belarusian language.

“Some people are still arrogant towards Russian language itself as being part of ‘Russian world’ and the main means of Putin’s propaganda in the former USSR,” says Kastiukevich.

But for younger readers, publishing Alexevich’s books in Belarusian is symbolically important in a country still trying to overcome national amnesia caused by the centuries of suppression, says bookshop patron Iryna Vidanava, the publisher of an independent Minsk-based cultural magazine and an expert on Belarusian history.

“To me she is like conscience, making you to think about hard issues which you would probably rather forget or ignore. Whether she writes about the war, Chernobyl or Soviet past, a simple human being is in the centre of her books and the difficult dilemmas about good and evil each of us faces.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/19/svetlana-alexievich-nobel-belarus
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