Viktor Martinovich’s novel “Good Wins” | EUROtoday

“What is it like to know that the text you are writing will never be published?” asks the first-person narrator of Viktor Martinowitsch’s new novel “The Good Wins,” and the reply to that is as optimistic because the title of the novel suggests. Martinowitsch’s hero Matvey is satisfied that anybody who writes for the drawer, “for the grave, for the coffin” will to begin with uncover the liberty that nobody is trying over their shoulder whereas they write. Matwej shouldn’t be really a author, however an actor who has a contract to play supporting roles on the National Academic Art Theater in Minsk. Over the course of three days, he tells how the regime in Belarus has been taking its personal inhabitants hostage for the reason that fraudulent presidential elections in August 2020.

What the writer Martinovich and his character have in widespread is that they don’t go away Belarus as a result of they’re satisfied that they haven’t any place or function in exile and, furthermore, that the phrase “is the most powerful weapon in the universe,” as Matvey as soon as places it in his “Message in a Bottle in the Flow of Time.”

Do phrases assist in opposition to complete surveillance, lawlessness and in opposition to the state terror of an autocrat who describes peaceable demonstrators as “junkies, whores, parasites, rats, Jews with and without money” or as “faggots in a pigeon coop”? Does good win in the long run for those who combat evil with out turning into evil your self? At least that is what the ultimate scene of a play about Joan of Arc that Matwej is rehearsing on the Minsk State Theater claims.

In the encrypted chat of Matvey’s theater troupe, the information was circulating on the time that his former trainer on the artwork academy had additionally disappeared as a result of she was participating in a Zoom dialog that was infiltrated by the Belarusian KGB. Matwej desires to avoid wasting no less than her orphaned cat and efficiently features entry to her devastated house, however is then arbitrarily arrested and spends forty days in jail after a grotesque present trial.

Martinowitsch phases the course that Matwej goes by way of till then as a portrait of a rustic in a state of shock, through which nobody is protected from mistreatment and isolation cells and concern poisons the relationships between folks. In the subway, Matwej meets “LadyDi”, a younger Ukrainian lady who, with “hypnotic power”, declaims poems that discuss concern, love, freedom and loneliness and concerning the “dragon that eats and eats and to which we ourselves feed our friends”. It is only one of many scenes on this novel which are extraordinarily harmful to write down in at the moment’s Belarus and have been inconceivable to publish for years.

Viktor Martinovich is the final writer remaining in Belarus who overtly criticizes the autocrat Lukashenko and has not but been arrested or pushed into exile. Independent publishers and media haven’t existed for a very long time. Martinovich has written eight novels, all of that are banned in his homeland, however surprisingly sufficient are nonetheless revealed in Russia. With “The Good Wins,” the writer, who commutes between Vilnius, the place he teaches political science, and a village not removed from Minsk, additionally offers a solution to the query he’s usually requested about what retains him in a rustic the place he’s threatened with arrest and arbitrary conviction at any time.

The reply he offers in his novel might be not with out controversy, no less than in opposition circles. All of the characters in his novel who select open resistance or flight and exile fare badly. This is particularly true for Polina, who was speculated to tackle the lead function within the long-cancelled play about Joan of Arc. Martinowitsch’s real-life references are apparent, as “Joan of Arc of Minsk” was the title given to a few of the most decided pro-European activists who defended themselves in opposition to state terror.

Among them was Palina Šarėnda-Panasjuk, who has now been launched after 4 years of draconian imprisonment, and who, after leaving for Lithuania, demanded that “under no circumstances should we remain silent” and emphasised that her fundamental job now was “to get the people out who are still there”. Martinowitsch’s Joan of Arc actress Polina, then again, doesn’t survive the regime’s persecution. As a revered actress, she swaps her Minsk property for a awful, overpriced one-room house in Vilnius and now has to drink low cost crimson wine with a screw cap “Made in EU” as an alternative of high-priced Malbec from Argentina.

When the play concerning the martyr Joan of Arc is lastly carried out in a humid, darkish warehouse in Vilnius, the viewers solely exhibits cautious curiosity and a price for the chronically cash-strapped actors is not paid, exile seems to be not value dwelling for Polina.

Viktor Martinovich offers deep insights into the arsenal of technical and bureaucratic weapons of the Lukashenko regime. He talks about present trials and the grotesque propaganda on state tv, concerning the psychological penalties of imprisonment and omnipresent threats, and about nightly conversations in Minsk bars and taxis the place you by no means know whether or not the opposite individual is definitely a snitch.

His story exhibits that it isn’t the offensive combat in opposition to state repression, however fairly on a regular basis interpersonal acts of resistance which are more practical in order that good triumphs in the long run. LadyDi, the militant Ukrainian poet from the Minsk subway, can even pay together with her life for her lively resistance. The tearful purification of a regime propagandist, which Martinovich phases all too melodramatically, or the declare that as a sufferer of violence one can console oneself with the thought that “reality is actually merciful, humane,” are prone to be no less than ambivalent fictions for hundreds of mistreated prisoners in Belarus.

Viktor Martinowitsch: “The good wins”. Novel. Translated from Russian by Thomas Weiler. Verlag Voland & Quist, Berlin 2025. 361 pages, br., €26.