Tag: Belarus

Book: German Shenderov, Sergey Tarasov “The Knówer: Bonds of Hell”

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The big discovery of last year for me was Ivan Belov’s Zastupa series; the third book came out just recently, and I’m going to read it as soon as it starts being sold in an ebook version. In my review I praised the first two books a lot, and someone wrote to me that in that case I absolutely had to read another one that came out in the same The Scariest Book series.

That was The Knówer: Bonds of Hell, co-authored by German Shenderov and Sergey Tarasov. Originally, German Shenderov had written only a short story, “Khryashchekhmyl,” which appeared in his short story collection back in 2022. But later he wrote two more stories about the same character, after which Sergey Tarasov joined the series, and together with Shenderov he finished the book—what has now become a novel in stories. And the original “Khryashchekhmyl” became only the first chapter of this book, changing its title to “Atonement.” And already as a novel, the book came out in 2025.

The recommendation—and then the blurb—won me over. The story is set mostly in 1965, in a small Belarusian village, where a local knówer lives and fights evil spirits. Folklore, and on Belarusian soil that’s native to me… I just couldn’t pass it by.

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Book: Alexander Chernukho “Pigs”

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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.

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David Gay “The Tenth Circle: Life, Struggle, and the Destruction of the Minsk Ghetto”

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Right now, when the whole world has turned viciously on Israel, when denying the Holocaust is fashionable and being an antisemite has suddenly become not shameful again, even politically correct, it is a hundred times more important to remind ourselves what real genocide is. At least to oneself, because those unwilling to hear won’t hear anyway.

Books about the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” have always held a special place on my list. Because, as I’ve said many times, for me this is not an empty phrase and not a “Zionist fabrication.” And then, unexpectedly for me, the BAbook publishing house began selling a book I had never heard of before, even though it was first printed back in the USSR. Now, its author, David Guy, has decided to reissue it, in part in response to the October 7 massacre in Israel.

And I’m grateful the book caught my eye, because people know very little about the history of the Minsk Ghetto. The one that’s usually on everyone’s lips is the Warsaw Ghetto, vast, on whose ruins—among other places—the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 fought, only to be crushed by the Nazis when Soviet troops were already not far off. The ghetto itself has been shown more than once in cinema, and Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning The Pianist is almost entirely devoted to the story of one Jew in that ghetto.

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Songs: Plateau, all available songs

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A few weeks ago, I posted about one album of the band Plateau and their appearance on Vyacheslav Butusov’s program. Since the band members kindly gave me permission to upload all of their albums to YouTube, I’ve been gradually doing just that. Now, you can find everything I’ve ever had from them online (including some songs that, as it turns out, hadn’t even been preserved by the musicians themselves).

Below are links to all the playlists, along with a few of my personal comments. And as an illustration for this post, I’ve chosen a studio photo of the band taken in 1998 in Berlin. What makes this session special is that I’m not sure the band ever had another studio shoot like it—and by pure chance, I ended up in the photo too. On that trip, I was filling in for the band’s manager and percussionist, Denis Sikorsky, who unfortunately wasn’t able to go.

And now, the playlists:

  1. Альбом “Tabula Rasa” 1996 года, отреставрированный ребятами в 1998 году. В качестве бонусов в нём есть несколько треков в изначальной версии.
  2. Альбом “Нити жизней” 1998 года, им я уже делился в прошлом посте
  3. Концертная запись 1998 года, где прозвучали все песни альбома “Нити жизней”, а также большинство более ранних
  4. Три песни с того самого Питерского концерта “Бибигония” 2000 года с Вячеславом Бутусовым
  5. Альбом “Точка” 2002 года
  6. Все синглы группы, выходившие отдельно после альбома “Нити жизней”. Часть из них вошла позднее в альбом “Точка”. Здесь я отдельно выделю несколько песен:
    • В той самой поездке в Германию в августе 1998 года группу записала сингл совместно с немецким музыкантом Sherman Noir, которому очень понравилась их песня “Он не уснул” из последнего альбома. Он буквально на месте написал свои слова к той же мелодии, и в одну ночь был сделан совместный сингл “Он не уснул / Turn Back the Time“, который позднее ротировался на немецком радио, насколько мне известно. Нежно люблю до сих пор.
    • “Нова радасць” — это не собственная песня группы, а аранжировка. Но я её очень люблю. Тем более, что именно её ребята пели акапельно в качестве подарка на нашей свадьбе
  1. Album “Tabula Rasa” (1996) – restored by the band in 1998. Includes several tracks in their original versions as bonus material.
  2. Album “Niti Zhizney” (Threads of Lives) (1998) – already shared in a previous post.
  3. Live recording from 1998, featuring the full Niti Zhizney album, along with most of the earlier songs.
  4. Three songs from the legendary 2000 concert “Bibigonia” by Vyacheslav Butusov in St. Petersburg, featuring Plateau.
  5. Album “Tochka” (The Dot) (2002)
  6. All singles released after Niti Zhizney – some of them were later included in the Tochka album. I’d like to highlight a few tracks in particular:
    • During that same trip to Germany in August 1998, the band recorded a single with German musician Sherman Noir, who was deeply impressed by their song “On ne usnul” (“He Didn’t Fall Asleep”) from their latest album. He immediately wrote his own lyrics to the same melody, and overnight they recorded a bilingual single, “On ne usnul / Turn Back the Time“, which—so I’ve heard—even got airplay on German radio. I still have a soft spot for it.
    • “Nova radasts“ (New Joy) – not an original song by the band, but an arrangement. I love it dearly, especially because the guys sang it a cappella as a gift at our wedding.

Book: Ihar Sluchak “10 Centuries of Statehood and Discrimination of the Belarusian Language”

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Ihar Sluchak is a Belarusian lawyer and an active advocate for the Belarusian language. For many years, he has dedicated himself to preventing the language from disappearing and being undeservedly discriminated against in favor of Russian in the Republic of Belarus. Despite the seemingly hopeless nature of such a mission in the current circumstances, Ihar has managed to defend the rights of his native language. For this, he is strongly disliked by many Belarusian officials and propagandists, it’s worth noting.

Holding a Master of Laws, Ihar Sluchak devoted his dissertation precisely to the history of the Belarusian language. Later, he reworked it slightly and published it as this book: “10 стагоддзяў дзяржаўнасцi i дыскрымiнацыi беларускай мовы” (in English, “10 Centuries of Statehood and Discrimination Against the Belarusian Language”).

The uniqueness of the Belarusian language lies in the fact that it is formally the first state language of the Republic of Belarus. For a time after the collapse of the USSR, it was the only state language; later, Russian was added. However, the actual situation with the language is dire. It has been systematically suppressed for many centuries, and the Soviet era (along with most of the post-Soviet years) is not an exception but rather a direct example of this trend. The majority of the country’s population speaks a form of “trasianka”—a mixture of Belarusian and Russian, often with elements of Ukrainian and Polish, depending on the region’s proximity to a particular border. In Minsk, you are far more likely to hear Russian, while in other cities, even the Russian spoken often includes Belarusian words or carries the accent and nuances of Belarusian pronunciation.

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Songs: Tantsy Minus “Step by Step” & “With the Free Wind”

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I am very bad at keeping track of new music releases, even from bands I love. Perhaps there is a service that notifies you when a “new album from a band on your list has been released” — that would be wonderful.

As a result, I usually check for new releases only occasionally, especially before a trip, because I enjoy sitting on a plane, putting on my headphones, closing my eyes, and detaching myself from all the hustle and bustle around me.

This time, for the trip, I decided to load the latest albums of the band Tantsy Minus, which I have loved since their mega-success in 1999. Since then, a few of their songs have remained in my playlist, including my favorite Polovinka from their very first studio album. Vyacheslav Petkun, the band’s leader, has a very unique, raspy voice. But as his career has shown, he is also an extremely talented singer. After all, it was his voice, with its raspiness, that was chosen for the role in the musical Notre Dame de Paris, where the legendary Garou performs in the original. Yet Petkun sang wonderfully in the Russian version too, which I did not expect from him at all.

But let us return to the new albums. At first, I was not particularly impressed by what I heard; some lyrics even left me puzzled. However, I finally got to the last two songs from the album 8. And this is where it truly struck a chord with me.

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Songs: Dai Darogu! “The Extremist” & “The Coffin on Wheels”

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I’ve never been a fan of the band Dai Darogu!, but when they released the music video for The Extremist, it was so good that I immediately added the song to my playlist. On the one hand, the lyrics seem like “this is absurd, it can’t possibly be true.” But on the other hand, unfortunately, it’s pure truth. All these supposedly “absurd” topics in reality cost the lives of political prisoners in Belarus, whose fate we sometimes don’t know for not just months, but even years. Recently, they finally showed Maria Kalesnikava alive, while people had already stopped believing she was still alive.

By the way, to take the absurdity to an even higher level, in February 2023, a court in Belarus officially declared both the music video and the song The Extremist as “extremist.”

Since the song is in Russian, below is its literal translation.

If you haven’t seen or heard The Extremist, I highly recommend it:

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Songs: Andrius Klimka & Wargaming

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At one point, I was in charge of the audio design service department at Wargaming and even got to participate in a field recording of real tanks in Jordan. Officially, I was in charge of the entire trip, but in reality, I was mostly getting in everyone’s way 😉

A bit later, we decided to restructure the team, but I still maintained (and continue to maintain) good relationships with many of the guys. I remember when a new guy, Andrey, joined the Minsk team—now widely known as Andrius Klimka, the creator of many iconic tracks from the game World of Tanks as well as its promo videos.

Andrey truly crafted some legendary tracks, and a couple of them have found a permanent place in my playlist. Those are the ones I want to share today.

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Book: Alexey Dudarev “Dialog”

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Alexey Dudarev is a Belarusian playwright and screenwriter. My first encounter with his work (or at least what I thought was my first) happened during my final years of school, as his play Riadovyie (“The Rank and File”) was part of the Belarusian literature curriculum. Our school library handed out the book Dialog, which included this play among others. I read a lot during my school years, but I was cautious about unfamiliar authors, especially those who were part of the required reading list. However, the Belarusian literature curriculum often included real gems. Many years later, I couldn’t recall the details of Riadovyie, but I was left with warm feelings about it, as it had been a pleasant surprise.

Later on, I learned that Alexey Dudarev’s plays weren’t only famous in the BSSR; they were also performed in many theaters across the USSR, including the Maxim Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater in Leningrad and the Central Academic Theater of the Soviet Army, among others. These performances featured actors who were well-known throughout the Soviet Union, including from films.

It wasn’t until even later that I found out Dudarev wrote the script for one of my favorite films, which nearly every Belarusian knows—Belye Rosy (“White Dew”). This simple yet profound story about the final days of a village being displaced to make way for the city’s expansion is filled with both humor and the drama of family relationships, as well as reflections on what is truly important in life. And what a cast—Nikolai Karachentsov, Vsevolod Sanaev, Stanislav Sadalsky, Galina Polskikh, Boris Novikov, and many others.

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Songs: Naviband “Mama”

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The Belarusian band Naviband is preparing to release a new album, and in the meantime, they continue to release singles. About a month ago, they released a new song called “Mama”. It’s a very melodic, gentle, and somewhat unconventional lullaby (at least that’s how it seems to me). It immediately grabs your attention. I highly recommend giving it a listen:

Naviband — Mama

Yesterday, I suggested that the song feels so familiar because I can clearly hear musical interweavings with the song “Kalykhanka” (which is Belarusian for “lullaby”). This song was used as the theme music for the show of the same name from my childhood (the Belarusian equivalent of the Soviet “Good Night, Little Ones”). It’s not plagiarism, but there is definitely a connection, whether intentional or not.

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