Belarusian writer and poet. Was born in 1975. Author of many novels and essay collections. In 2018 he published a novel Dogs of Europe. It was translated into Russian by Bacharevich himself and was on the short list of the Russian literary prize Big Book. In 2020, The Belarus Free Theater made a theatrical adaptation of the novel. The second Belarusian edition, printed in Lithuania, has been arrested at the border by the Belarusian customs service. Since April 2021, the book has been examined by the authorities for the expression of extremism in it. He received the Book of the Year literary prize in Belarus twice and was the winner of the second Jerzy Giedroyc Prize awarded for the best book of prose in the Belarusian language for four times. He is the member of the Intellectual Club of Svetlana Aleksievich in Minsk (2019). Together with his wife, poet Julia Cimafiejeva, he took an active part in the 2020 protests in Belarus against the falsification of the presidential elections and the dictatorship.
RESISTANCE
Max Vasmer
The famous linguist
Went to work
Always with two briefcases
One briefcase in each hand
So that neither of them
Could be raised in a greeting
Known as Hitlergruss.
Neither the right nor the left one.
It was probably in 1941
In the east and the south
The students of Mr. Vasmer
Practiced Slavic languages
Under field conditions far from Berlin
Pardon,
Professor Fasmer apologized
When meeting his colleagues
In the streets or corridors
Filled with smoke as it used to be
Common at universities.
An they greeted him in a new language
Of the new Europe
The newest language of gestures
The language of the victors
There were so many cities in their hands
And only one briefcase.
One people.
One empire
And Fuerer —also one.
Lonely and invincible.
But there were two briefcases
in the professor’s hands
Always two.
That was the resistance
Of the linguist Max Fasmer,
The man without hands.
It shined
In the cowed Berlin
In the field of Slavic studies.
Then blackouts began.
Translated by Jaroslaw Anders