A music journalist and columnist writing about provincial Belarus suddenly decides to write a novel — and that novel is just as suddenly published and attracts a fair amount of attention. That’s Alexander Chernukho. I had never read his work before: I’ve almost never been interested in music criticism, and Belarusian online media had long since dropped out of my field of view altogether — especially after 2020, when many outlets simply ceased to exist.
As for what the state calls “official media,” it’s hard to describe that as journalism at all. In fact, according to the author himself, those very official outlets became one of the triggers that pushed him to write his satirical novel Pigs. Because how can you not laugh at what they print and broadcast? Though at its core, the book is first and foremost a response to Alexander’s own emotional experience of the events of 2020 in Belarus — just expressed in the form of a comic-satirical novel. After all, it’s well known that the best remedy for anger, bitterness, and melancholy is laughter.
So what is the book about? In a provincial district of an unnamed country (one that looks suspiciously like a certain place — the names even sound familiar, I swear I’ve heard of a village like Kochanovo somewhere), an “emergency” of local proportions suddenly breaks out: pigs at a pig farm start dying en masse, and pork disappears from store shelves. People get nervous, so the authorities fight the panic in the only way they know how: it’s all the West’s doing, pork isn’t even a necessary everyday product, anyone who loves shkvarki (cracklings) and a shot of vodka is an enemy of the people, and any rallies “in defense of pig farming” must be dispersed as ideologically alien to the nation.
In fact, this short paragraph basically captures the entire plot. After that, what really matters is the cast of characters Chernukho creates — and the way they set off a chain reaction of “saving the nation,” both to calm the people down and, God forbid, to keep the higher-ups from learning about any local problems.
As the author himself says, the book doesn’t really have a single main character. He considers the real protagonist to be the district’s residents themselves, thrown into a situation where they can no longer simply live as they used to — because what’s at stake is nothing less than the nation’s supposedly fundamental way of life. And the portraits of officials at various levels are so instantly recognizable that the satire genuinely helps you calm your nerves and believe that, yes, we’ll survive this kind of people too.
Because, as we remember, the entire book is a response to the social uprising of 2020, which was crushed by force — and which, among other things, is often said to have been partly triggered by the authorities’ equally inadequate behavior during the COVID epidemic (the president himself mentioned “shkvarka and a shot of vodka” more than once).
There’s no real point in retelling the plot, because it’s far more interesting to watch how the authorities’ supposedly logical, time-tested methods suddenly start to fail — all because people have simply lost access to pork. Repression, media harassment, hasty replacements of local officials, followed by mass public festivities meant to “calm everyone down,” drive the narrative toward a catharsis of absurdity — one that would feel purely absurd if it weren’t so painfully recognizable.
Yet even here, things end more or less well for the district and its residents. Which allows you to turn the final page, sit with the aftertaste for a moment, and decide that, somehow, everything will still turn out fine.
Alexander originally wrote the book in Russian, but a Belarusian-language edition was later published by the Yanushkevich publishing house.
To sum up: one of the best books I’ve read recently. Written in a sharp, biting, yet very light style. Highly recommended.
My rating: 4.5/5
