McMillin, Arnold Breaking with Tradition: Belarusian Short Prose in the Early Twenty-First Century (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 770 many suicides in the GDR were politically motivated) disqualified ‘real suicides in the GDR as a realistic theme for East German literature’ (p. 6). Rather, it simply disproved one distorted interpretation of suicide. Many examples of fictional writings on suicide with realistic ambitions, such as Volker Braun’s Die Unvollendete Geschichte and Gunter Görlich’s Eine Anzeige in der Zeitung, are still awaiting comprehensive interpretation. Perhaps a more rewarding project would be to combine analysis of genuinely literary techniques with (in the words of Blankenship) ‘simple exercises in literary realism’ (p. 9). I look forward to that. UCL SSEES Udo Grashoff McMillin, Arnold. Breaking with Tradition: Belarusian Short Prose in the Early Twenty-First Century. Publications of the MHRA, 20. Modern Humanities Research Association, Cambridge, 2018. vii + 74 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £16.50: €18.50: $21.99. The Summary of this book is a good place to begin. ‘There can be no easy summary of a work describing young writers at the beginning of their careers, many with much to offer in future’ (p. 67). In fact there cannot be what would amount to a summary of the summaries of which the book consists, other than what is already in the title. This is reminiscent of what Gore Vidal said of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: ‘Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.’ So the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ assume importance over the ‘what’. But ‘what’ is the starting point: mention of over fifty young writers and what they have written, involving a brief account of one, or occasionally more, examples of their short prose. The term covers miniatures, short stories as ordinarily understood, novellas and essays. The ‘how’ is a carefully constructed edifice of introduction, six chapters and summary. In the introduction the author stresses that this work is ‘in many ways a sequel’ (p. vii) to his previous publication, Spring Shoots: Young Belarusian Poets in the Early Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2015). The chapters are entitled ‘Love, Sex and Loneliness’, ‘The World and Its Inhabitants’, ‘Religion, Superstition, Philosophy and Fantasy’, ‘Leadership, the Country and Squalor’, ‘Writing about Language and the Nature of Its Use’ and ‘History’. A sequence can be observed in these titles, from topics that are common to all humanity (chapters 1–3) to subjects that are more specific to Belarus (chapters 4–6). Looking more closely, we can see that one of those chapters links the near REVIEWS 771 quarter century of rule by President Lukašenka with the state of the country, and another that examines writers’ concerns for the language in which they choose to write. Each chapter opens with an appropriate quotation from Shakespeare, and several other quotations occur throughout the text. Comparison between certain of the short prose pieces cited and works of English literature can also be found. One particularly striking example concerns Andrej Adamovič’s story Taŭścila i Liešč (The Fat Man and the Bream, p. 18), where the obsession with catching a bream is aptly likened to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The marlin of Hemingway’s story becomes under Belarusian conditions a bream which is hunted during a fishing expedition that involves a great deal of drinking; the hero, when the fish has been caught, pukes all over it (p. 45). The treatment of the Adamovič story offers another pointer to the ‘how’ — whenever necessary Prof. McMillin deals with the same story in more than one chapter in the book and devotes more space to stories that he probably considers important by writers who may have ‘much to offer in future’ (p. vii). In those instances where the author’s accounts are short, there is often enough detail to ensure that readers can sense nuances that go way beyond a short summary. Take for example Alieś Jemialianaŭ-Šylovič, who in a story writes ‘I equate freedom with stability’ (p. 29). For a reader in Belarus the word ‘stability’ has a special connotation: it is frequently repeated by representatives of the regime. Another instance occurs in the...