Description
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.
(Hanna Komar, Poet)