Dissent on the Belarusian Literary Front

Abstract

Dissent on the Belarusian Literary Front Barbara Martin Tatsiana Astrouskaya, Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus (1968–1988): Intelligentsia, Samizdat, and Nonconformist Discourses. 232 pp., illus. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2019. ISBN-13 978-3447111881. €48.00. In recent years, the historiography of Soviet dissent has undergone a clear renewal and deideologization. Emancipation from Manichean Cold War era tropes of moral opposition to communism has allowed historians to enlarge their focus to manifestations of cultural dissent, study dissident cultures, but also explore the gray areas between the official and unofficial fields. Geographically, however, the focus is only beginning to shift from Moscow and Leningrad to the Russian peripheries and other Soviet republics. Belarus, with its image of political loyalty to Moscow, seems an unlikely place to look for manifestations of dissent or nonconformism. Yet, as Tatsiana Astrouskaya demonstrates in her study, the Belarusian intelligentsia found ways to voice its concerns over the status of its national language and history in both censored and uncensored publications. Far from delivering heroic narratives about Soviet dissidents, Astrouskaya brings to the reader's attention a case study characterized both by its liminality and peripherality. As the author underlines, "it is probably more challenging for the case of Belarus than in any other to merely divide intellectuals into two rival camps of nonconformists and collaborators, fighters and trimmers, Communist Party functionaries and opponents of the Party's monopoly, advocates of Russification and those who were 'nationally conscious'" (2). Using Homi Bhabha's concept of "third space," she writes that Belarusian intelligentsia "meandered between dissent and conformity, between self-printing and the state publishing houses" (11). While Belarusian writers were well-integrated into the Soviet system, mastered its codes, and knew how to navigate its hierarchies, they could also use this knowledge to circumvent accepted norms and introduce nonconformist ideas into censored print. Moreover, [End Page 650] authors who benefited from the privileges attached to the status of Soviet writer could also circulate their uncensored writings in samizdat. While such scholars as Ann Komaromi or Sergei Oushakine have explored the blurred boundary between official and unofficial fields, Astrouskaya shows that nationalist cultural discourse could also occupy this "third space."1 The notion of peripherality is no less important for Astrouskaya. It conditions the type of cultural dissent that is central to her study: discourses produced by the nationally conscious intelligentsia, set in opposition to the more universal democratic and moral opposition of Soviet human-rights activists in Moscow. Although she does not elaborate on this thesis, the author suggests that Russification was a product of "cultural colonization by Russian and Soviet imperialism" (116). Hence at the periphery, the task of national liberation superseded the more universal struggle for freedom that characterized dissent in the Russian capitals. Moreover, she emphasizes, the Belarusian intelligentsia was also marginal in so far as its national language and culture were always located at the crossroads of the Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Jewish, and Ukrainian worlds. Historically, Belarusian nationalists often took part in other national projects, only to realize that they did not fit, and incorporated these different perspectives into their own national project. Peripherality also imposed additional hurdles on Belarusian dissenters, such as the lack of access to channels of dissemination of their uncensored writings across the Iron Curtain and more limited access to samizdat from the capital. In addition, the lack of a significant Belarusian diaspora in the West, coupled with a lesser interest from Western radio stations, explain the relative paucity of Belarusian tamizdat. Being a borderland area, Belarus was also under stricter political control than more central areas of the Soviet Union. Astrouskaya states from the outset that she concentrates on "the intelligentsia that understood itself as national, wrote and published predominantly in the Belarusian language and perceived itself as deeply rooted in Belarusian tradition" (4), with a closer focus on "the writers' community and nonconformism" (8). The authors she considers, however, were variously integrated into the system, ranging from the acclaimed writer Vasyl´ Bykaŭ, who received the status of People's Writer of Belarus in 1980, to the poet Larysa Heniush, incarcerated in the Stalin era and with very few works that made their way into censored print. Astrouskaya convincingly shows...