world: belarus | From the Heart of Europe

Belarus is a landlocked state in Eastern Europe, with Poland to the west, Russia to the east, Ukraine to the south and Lithuania to the north. It was part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union before becoming independent in 1991. It was also the home of a large Jewish population before the Second World War, when most of them were murdered and most of the survivors emigrated to Israel. Since 1996 it has been ruled by the authoritarian Aleksandr Lukashenka, though it is generally believed that the real winner of the most recent presidential election was Sviatlana Tsihanouskaya, who I had the pleasure of working with a few years ago.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Belarus.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Bielski Brothers	Peter Duffy	3,795	613	258
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko	Scott Stambach	4,891	297	679
Defiance: The Bielski Partisans	Nechama Tec	2,215	553	173
The Slaughterman’s Daughter	Yaniv Iczkovits	2,637	170	279
Red Crosses	Sasha Filipenko	1,790	64	203
Gingerbread	Robert Dinsdale	972	77	133
King Stakh’s Wild Hunt	Uladzimir Karatkievič	1,289	44	128
Бывший сын	Sasha Filipenko	1,263	29	135

With a somewhat heavy heart I have disqualified several books by the great Svetlana Aleksievich, notably Voices from Chernobyl, which I think is not quite sufficiently in Belarus to qualify, superb book though it is.

This week’s winner – as was the case in 2015 when I first crunched these numbers – is a book about the Jewish leaders of a partisan group waging war against the German occupiers from the woods. So is the third book on the list.

The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is about two teenagers with special needs in a Belarusian hospital, and has sparked fierce warfare on Goodreads which you do not need to read for yourself.

The Slaughterman’s Daughter is an adventure novel of Tsarist times.

Red Crosses has an old woman telling the story of her long life, mostly in Belarus as far as I can tell.

Gingerbread and King Stakh’s Wild Hunt are both fantasy novels – a genre that kept popping up as I did my research here.

Бывший сын, “The Ex-Son”, doesn’t seem to have been translated into English. The protagonist wakes up after ten years in a coma to find that Minsk is both the same and different. Those who have read it rave about it.

The top Belarusian woman writer is of course Svetlana Aleksievich, but the other who scored in my research was Jeva Viežnaviec / Eva Vezhnavets, whose What Now, Mr Wolf? is coming out in English translation next month.

This is the last European country for a while, after a run of quite a lot in the 9-11 million population range (nine of the last twelve countries I have covered). Next up are Laos, Turkmenistan, Libya and Kyrgyzstan.

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Tag Archives: world: belarus

The best known books set in each country: Belarus