«MINSK IS A NAME FOR EMPTINESS ...»: THE MYTH OF BELARUSIAN CITY IN THE PROSE WORKS BY ALGIERD BACHAREVIČ

Abstract

The works of a modern Belarusian writer Algierd Bacharevič are closely connected with the study of the boundaries of national identity, attempts to revise national hierarchies, and playing on the field of the official Belarusian power. The characters of his novels live within the Minsk Ring Road or settle down, due to various circumstances, in regional centers. Center and periphery often change places, forcing the reader to think in terms of «provinciality». In relation to the metropolises in East or West, the capital of Belarus which lays claim to being the Belarusian cultural center looks like a place where nothing happens, and any changes come up against the archaic «stoicism» of local residents. The (post)post-Soviet Minsk in the writer's novels is deprived of a historically grounded national myth. The latter is being replaced by the myth of the city of frozen time where the characters are doomed to a torturous life among the rests of old ideology and the monuments of the past era. Building on the sometimes paradoxical denial of Minsk's role in shaping the modern identity of Belarusian people and therefore describing the city as a disharmonious system from which his characters want to escape in one way or another, the author nevertheless attempts to describe this «emptiness» by filling it with meanings and giving this lacuna a «name». The alienation in the urbanistic novels by Bacharevič is thus affected not only by the reminiscences of the Soviet era which the author witnessed personally, but also by the nationalism-centered narrative of modern Belarus which, in the eyes of an uninvolved observer, turns into a zone of cultural exclusion.