The Colours of the Parallel World

"This choice of a book is likely to surprise a lot of people. It was written by a journalist, blogger and activist of the anarchist movement, and multiple-time political prisoner Mikola Dziadok. As I’m writing this, Mikola is serving another unjust prison sentence—five years in a general-security penal colony under Part 3 of Article 361 (calls for actions aimed at harming the national security of the Republic of Belarus) and Part 1 of Article 295-3 (Illegal actions in relation to combustible items) of the Criminal Code of Belarus. In 2017 The Colours of the Parallel World received the Francišak Aliachnovič Award which is given by PEN Belarus for the best work in any genre in Belarusian or Russian that has been written in prison. In 2010 Mikola and several other anarchists were arrested for an attack on the Russian Embassy in Minsk. Ihar Alinevich, another activist of the movement, also arrested back in 2010, in his book On the Way to Magadan tells in a lot of detail what actually happened there and their motivation behind it. Ihar was the first to have received the Francišak Aliachnovič Award in 2013. At the moment, he is again imprisoned by the illegitimate government in Belarus. In the introduction to The Colours of the Parallel World Mikola wrote: …the authorities have been and are afraid of publicity around anything that is going on in prison dungeons, intentionally making them as secretive as possible. This means that publicity can do them reputational and moral harm. And if we have an opportunity to inflict such harm, we must use it… To tell the truth and expose misdoings is an imperative, a moral duty of every person. Second of all, it’s important to speak about what we’ve seen and felt for documentation, too. Mikola is talking about the prison system from inside, about its brutality and violations of human rights. Tens of thousands of Belarusians have experienced it first-hand since August 2020, and I wonder, if we had read this book earlier, would it have changed us? Would we have stopped all this horror earlier? Or would we, conversely, have been too afraid of being grind by the system to even try? In either way, things haven’t improved by becoming much worse and Mikola’s book must be for now the most detailed description of the experience of a political prisoner in Belarus that we have access to in the English language. Yes, there are a couple other books worth mentioning, which aren’t among these five for various reasons. Out of the Fire by Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl, and Vladimir Kolesnik could have been number one on my list, but one can hardly find its hard copy to read. It was at its time a bestseller. Ales Adamovich started the tradition of documentary writing that Svetlana Alexievich followed. This book is an account of how the punitive Nazi operation during World War II destroyed hundreds of Belarusian villages, sometimes burning alive and killing all their villagers. Like Water, Like Fire: An Anthology of Byelorussian Poetry from 1828 to the Present Day is a collection of Belarusian poetry classics translated by the brilliant Vera Rich (1936-2009). Down Among The Fishes by Natalka Babina was translated by Jim Dingley and published by Glagoslav, but I hadn’t heard about it until I did a research on Belarusian books published in English. Its translator told me that, “it’s taking a bit of a chance, but maybe, just maybe, it will help someone understand a little about Belarus.” And A Large Czesław Miłosz with a dash of Elvis Presley by Tania Skarynkina is worth mentioning too, as one of few contemporary books published in English. Her texts stand out as very original in the Belarusian literature."