Shipping class: Economy

Alicia and her brother Avi are imprisoned in a camp on the edge of a forest where children are trained to forget their language through therapy, coercion, drugs, and larynx surgery. The Leid (or Belarusian language) is considered a sickness to be cured and replaced by the only pure form of language, the Lingo (Russian). A contemporary Hansel and Gretel adventure, the children escape into the forest and end up in even greater danger…    A feat of translation, Bacharevic’s story is brilliantly rendered into English and Scots from Russian and Belarusian.

Review
“Bacharevic’s rich, provocative novel offers a kaleidoscopic picture of language as fairy-tale forest, as Gulag, as monument, as tomb, as everlasting life.”―The New York Times

‘What we get is a book that is both a translation and a collage―an independent, multilingual literary work. It is an ingenious response to the novel’s polyphony and a tribute to the Scottish language that echoes the tribute Bacharevič pays to the Belarusian tongue.’―New York Review of Books

“Readers will be stirred by Bacharevič’s ardent, earnest devotion.”―Publishers Weekly

‘You can take this book on many levels, from the philosophical and psychological analysis of what it does to a nation and a people to remove, control and suppress its mother tongue, to an exciting tale of two runaway children in a forest trying to survive on blueberries and avoid the threatening adults along their way.’―The Scotsman

‘Kafkaesque and with elements of cyberpunk. Alhierd Bacharevic is the foremost figure of today’s Belarusian literature.’―New Eastern European

‘Bacharevic hits you in the eye with the truth, and it hurts.’―Maria Martysevich

About the Author
 Alhierd Bacharevič grew up in a linguistically-torn country. Despite growing up speaking Russian, Bacharevič rebelled by speaking and writing in Belarusian. In the 1990’s he was the founder and vocalist of the first Belarusian language punk band, Pravakacyja (‘Provocation’).  He is now an award winning author and his works have been translated into French, German, Czech, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian.

Brought up in post-industrial Lanarkshire, Petra Reid did Law at Edinburgh University and worked as a solicitor in general practice, and more recently as a welfare rights adviser. She studied Fine Art while raising a family and developed her interest in poetry through Dada. She does site specific performances at one-off events. She has wandered the east coast of Scotland with a west coast accent for forty years. This is her only qualification for feeding other authors’ works through the mincer of Scots, or at least her version of what may, after all, be a dialect without army or navy. 

Jim Dingley is a respected translator and expert in European languages and studies, with associations with Imperial College London and University College London. He has a lifetime’s worth of experience translating Belarusian into English.

Winner of English PEN Award 2023. Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024.

‘How did these stories get into your hands? They flew, as if painted by Marc Chagall, through prison walls, borders, and languages.’ – Valzhyna Mort
‘It’s a terse account of painful experience, prison, bewilderment; hugely atmospheric and extremely funny – full of dry wit and small biting observations.’ – Anna Vaught

100 stories written from prison in Belarus with ‘echoes of early Chekhov, Zoshchenko and Samuel Beckett’ (Michael Pursglove). Despite its bleak context, this is a fundamentally optimistic book, engaging comically, yet honestly, with what it means to be human. Translated from the Russian by Jim and Ella Dingley. With an introduction by ‘risen star of the international poetry world’ Valzhyna Mort.

Review
Maxim Znak’s message is that wry humour and humanity trump the cruel absurdities of the regime […] These stories, one hundred of them, none longer than three pages, have echoes of early Chekhov, Zoshchenko and Samuel Beckett and, ultimately, of Giovanni Boccaccio and Vernon Kress, who used the punning title for his 1991 novel of the Gulag.
– Michael Pursglove

The fact that this book exists at all should be a miracle. Simply because the stories were smuggled out … The true sensation, however, is the mental achievement the prisoner Maxim Znak was capable of: that in his situation, which could really be called hopeless, he still possesses the internal freedom to create literature.
– Cornelia Geissler, Berliner Zeitung

[Znak] uses the weapons that dictators like Lukashenko detest most: humour, wit, publicity.
– Jens Uthoff, taz.die tageszeitung

It’s a terse account of painful experience, prison, bewilderment; hugely atmospheric and extremely funny – full of dry wit and small biting observations.
– Anna Vaught

About the Author
Born in Minsk in 1981, Maxim Znak is an international lawyer from Belarus. After the presidential election of August 2020, he gathered hard evidence of the many violations of the electoral process and sought to take legal action by ensuring that the election results were reviewed by an independent body. Maxim Znak was arrested on 9 September 2020 and held in Remand Prison no. 1 in Minsk until 26 December 2021. This prison has the shocking reputation of being the only one in Europe where the death penalty is still being carried out. It was here that Znak wrote his stories, which later found themselves outside the prison walls.
Once outside, the stories were sent directly to Jim Dingley who previously translated two books from Belarus for Scotland Street Press. Dingley immediately sent the manuscript to Scotland Street Press. Its arrival was a huge consideration: would its publication endanger Znak’s life, or agitate successfully for his release? By September 2021 this brilliant lawyer was already re-sentenced to ten years in a penal colony in the North of Belarus. His wife and sister urged to go ahead with publication.
Valzhyna Mort was born in the same city and same year as Znak. She is a poet who writes in English and Belarusian. Her most recent volume of poetry, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, was published to great critical acclaim in 2020. She is the recipient of many international literary awards. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English, Cornell University, Ithaca NY.