Banned in Belarus: On Alhierd Baharevich's "Dogs of Europe"
Alhierd Baharevich | Dogs of Europe | Vremya | 2019 | 768 Pages
On and after June 9th, 2022, the worldwide press leaped to report that Russian president Vladimir Putin had compared himself to Peter the Great in a speech on the emperor's 350th birthday. Just like Peter, Putin contended, he was merely “returning” Russian territories to their homeland with his savage war in Ukraine. Alhierd Baharevich, author of Dogs of Europe, must have been unsurprised, for near the end of his huge multi-strand narrative, a character describes Putin as a “collector of Russian lands,” an epithet originally given to czar Ivan III. The passage is as perspicacious as it is concise. Of course, Putin’s penchant for hearkening back to the good old days of monarchic imperialism has long been well-known, but Baharevich had nonetheless beautifully and pithily encapsulated the essence of the whole phenomenon in this, the book’s only reference to the president. Yes, “collector of Russian lands” is the legacy Vlad has always been hell-bent on securing.
This is but one example of the Belarusian writer’s deep insight into the Zeitgeist, constantly in evidence in this novel—if “novel” is even the right term for this bulging, Pulp Fiction melange of storylines, “author’s notes,” and occasional poems. One of the most significant works of Belarusian dissident literature in recent years, this extravagant volume portrays the present and future of its country, as well as Russia and Western Europe, through the lens of dystopia (at times) and with striking prescience (more often than not). Another well-nigh prophetic element is Dogs of Europe’s plot point of a great war that occurs around 2025 and raises a sort of new Iron Curtain between an expanded Russian empire and the West. Not bad for a book that first left presses in 2017. Then, in May of 2022, it became the first work of fiction to be banned as “extremist” in Belarus—even though one would be hard pressed to find much explicit extremism in its pages. (Then again, sales of George Orwell’s 1984 have also been prohibited in Russia’s nominally independent neighbor.)
Baharevich’s creation is mostly known, if at all, to anglophone audiences through its play-adaptation, which is quite a shame. The novel’s page count, though varying by edition, enters the neighborhood of 1000—ergo, no adaptation of it for the stage can be expected to cover all its content. Its scope is similarly vast, spotlighting various—six or so, depending on one’s way of counting—stories from approximately the present to about 2050. The different plots are unified by themes of civil decay, loss of identity, and descent into tyranny, but hardly ever relate directly to each other, lending the whole construction a very apposite chaotic feel. In the present day, a resident of Minsk invents his own language and finds himself embroiled in power struggles within the tiny community that forms around it. In 2050, a nerdy teenager in a backwater village in what used to be Belarus and is now part of a Russian empire meets his first foreigner, a spy who parachuted into a nearby forest. The only direct connection to the first story is that the spy is briefly shown using the same artificial idiom to encode her communications. She turns out to be an android, and the sub-plot ends indeterminately during her fight with a robotic Russian officer. The youth also momentarily leafs through a narrative about an old folk healer that appears in full later in The Dogs of Europe, thus establishing the only connection between it and this second story. When that narrative is related, it is interrupted midway by a first-person account of how it was supposedly written. Is the narrator in this section supposed to be identical to the author of the whole book? Probably not, since the narrator of a later story describes a chance encounter he had with Baharevich. The authorial meta-narrative seems to take place in the 2010s again. Back in 2050, a German official seeks to retrace the steps of a nameless Belarusian poet who somehow escaped the expanded Russia and was found dead in a Berlin hotel. One of the sub-plots follows a man’s efforts to complete a business transaction for his mother by delivering a paper bag whose contents are never revealed to people whose intentions and identities are never revealed. Superficially, the whole thing is, in a word, odd.
The various first-person narrators one encounters in Dogs of Europe are made fascinating by the uncertainty and levels of detachment that surround them. Alhierd Baharevich himself has lived in Germany for six years and reminds me of the kind of Russian one often meets in Berlin’s streets: very Russian (or, in this case, Belarusian) yet very at home in this foreign Teutonic land. Like those semi-assimilated immigrants, Baharevich casually transliterates German colloquialisms for features of Berlin life (“S-Bahn,” “Ku’damm”) into Cyrillic characters (“эсбан,” “кудамм”). He peppers his prose with snatches of English and even Spanish, and otherwise puts on a worldly, cosmopolitan display (the work’s title itself is taken from a poem by Englishman W. H. Auden). Yet at the same time, various narrators who are hinted to represent the author to some degree—for instance, they are all 40 years old—have deeply provincial streaks, and seem to look at Minsk as other look at New York City:. The novel appears to be saying that one can never relinquish one’s roots completely. In a work that delights in toying with stereotypes, the message, it seems, is: “You can take the Belarusian out of Belarus, but you can’t take Belarus out of the Belarusian.”
Dogs of Europe is popular in Belarus, and was the first foreign work ever shortlisted for the Russian “Big Book” prose prize. Yet, I would contend, it is of especial value to Western viewers. Why? Because it’s a sliver of a foreign world. Since he is writing, in many ways, about his native Belarus, Baharevich leans into the stereotypes about the country—that Belarusians are an agrarian people, are obsessed with stability and tradition, are isolated from the globalized world in their quiet pocket of autocracy—with a flair. Case in point: one of the book’s intersecting storylines follows an ancient crone, much sought after as a folk healer, who lives in a cabin in a forest before being spirited away to a small island which a dissident group has fashioned into a kind of alternative Belarus. Though the real country is at this point still independent, these defectors, frustrated by stagnation and a lack of political options, have modeled their insular community after the primal utopia in an ultranationalist myth of the Belarusian nation’s origins. The author does a marvelous job at letting the reader see life through this old weald-dweller’s eyes: her love of time-tested methods, her appreciation of simplicity, her naïve way of dealing with people as individuals and not interchangeable entities dehumanized by anonymity and mass politics. However, Baharevich slightly overshoots the mark in conveying this message: the old woman seems to have lost the ability to speak from lack of practice, having essentially lived inside her own head for decades, yet this is treated as charming because she is at one with nature and outside the tumult of conventional life. As another item of regional character, a recurring trope is the philistine father, a product of an uncultured society, who may want the best for his son but cannot understand his artistic inclinations, tendency to daydream, and/or lack of interest in the opposite sex.
Despite its chaotic structure, Dogs of Europe feels very twentieth-century. Although postmodernism’s big names inhabited that century, their postmodern attitudes have arguably grown more prevalent in society and art since: ironic aloofness, subjectivism regarding morals and even reality, a sense that uncertainty about basic truths (which, it is believed, are only veils for power anyway) is natural, ostentatious mixing of styles for its own sake, and so on. This piece of literature, on the contrary, takes no postmodernist pleasure in deconstructing identities and mixing elements from different traditions. Rather, the chaos it presents, in both its plot and composition, is made to feel taxing, dangerous, an unfortunate product of history. When the old crone is kidnapped from her cabin in the woods, nothing good comes of it—for her, at least. One character has bumbled through life with no clear purpose, going through a series of jobs followed by layoffs, and feels trapped and powerless at 40. Futuristic androids, indistinguishable from humans to the naked eye, are invented—and, instead of making life better, are only ever shown used as superhuman reconnaissance agents. In Germany, digitalization and the erosion of social standards all but drive books to extinction and create an atomized, callous society. While the book’s bizarre, untraditional form suggest postmodernism at first glance, its soul is much more modernist: the characters are flesh-and-blood humans, not semiotic signs, struggling to adapt to the brave new industrial world of big cities, fast-paced lives, the economic rat race, ever-looming control by high-tech government, loss of community, et cetera—all without throwing out such pre-industrial notions as human nature and knowable truth in postmodernism’s cavalier fashion.
The novel’s overriding theme is the individual’s struggle to cope with the problems of modern life, from disorder and anomie on one hand to high-tech tyranny on the other. They do so in various ways. One boy dreams about flying away on a goose, another grows obsessed with the details of an obscure poet’s life. Yet the most interesting coping strategy occurs in the first story of the bunch. Here, the main character is the aforementioned washed-up 40-year-old. Desperate to achieve at least some power and accomplishment, he invents a language—a constructed language, or “conlang,” like Esperanto—and, gradually joined by three young enthusiasts of his creation, revels in his superior status as its originator. After emotions grow heated in their little circle, the project ends poorly, but the conlang appears in later plots in the book (an appendix even provides a grammar and basic vocabulary). In keeping with the general last-century, modernist feel, this storyline reminded me of Wyndham Lewis’s 1918 novel Tarr. The two share a disposition one could call “pathetically Nietzschean.” Whereas the bohemian artists in Tarr channel their unfulfilled will to power into dueling and ramblingly philosophizing to each other, the protagonist of Dogs of Europe’s first story channels his into creating a language spoken by nobody, around which a devoted community forms more accidentally than by design. Baharevich and Lewis even use technology in similar ways, employing it to highlight the uncertainty of modern life generated by large-scale processes uncontrolled by individuals - economic vicissitudes, advancements in machinery, and so forth. In Tarr, the pivotal killing happens not deliberately, but because a handgun goes off accidentally. In Dogs of Europe, despite the imperial conquests that happen between sub-plots, the closest thing to warfare that is explicitly described is a battle between robots that are nigh-invincible when compared to humans. Faced with this showdown he cannot affect, the protagonist of the moment flees, and the reader never gets even the satisfaction of knowing the fight’s outcome. The sense of helplessness in the face of an indifferent technology is profound.
In light of the aforesaid prohibition of the novel, a discussion of the book’s politics is in order. In fact, the book is remarkably moderate.Though intentionally playing with tropes of the utopian and dystopian genre, such as the fictional society set on an island, it is never polemical. When extremism makes an appearance, it and its representatives—from Belarusian neo-Nazis to a homophobic reactionary who admires the supposed grandeur of imperial power with childish wonder to an indolent communist whose managerial ineptitude has crippled his inherited business—are invariably cast in a negative light.
Perhaps the parts that most angered the censors were the ones set in the year 2050, by which time Belarus is shown to have been absorbed into an expansionist Russia. In fact, the Belarusians in these stories no longer know of a separate Belarusian language or remember a country by that name—they call themselves Russians. This is the portion of the novel for which it is best known, and with good reason. Given Russia’s plentiful attempts to pressure its neighbor into closer cooperation, which have even led Belarus’ dictator Lukashenko to rebrand himself as a nationalist in recent years, speculation has abounded that an annexation may be on the horizon.
As mentioned, Dogs of Europe has a disorganized feel to it by design. One may be excused for avoiding the book on that basis alone, but this is a masterly, captivating, and original—in thought as well as presentation—opus. The characters all feel like real people in a real world, and the book is strongest when portraying life in Belarus and sounding the general Zeitgeist, a special talent of the author’s. One of the best of these moments appears in the first story, as the luckless conlang creator recalls his childhood. As a boy, he introduced his playmates to a new form of escapism wherein they would play at building competing civilizations of paper figurines. Anticipating what was to come, he would create incomplete but extensive languages for his paper peoples, but could never persuade his friends to undergo the same effort, as they were more interested in pitting the figurines against each other in war. As a result, while their nations nominally had their own languages, in practice they always spoke Russian. “Reminds one of something, doesn’t it?” he asks, a not-so-subtle reference to interethnic relations in the Soviet Union. This is Baharevich at his finest and, in a way, a confluence of the book’s main themes. The awkward teenager’s struggle to fit in within an unfriendly society pushes him to seek escape in play. However, his travails also parallel the whole nation’s partial loss of identity. To top it off, the finer human impulses of creativity and artistry are drowned out by violent and warlike ones. The book, then, despite its focus on Belarus, carries messages relevant to all modern humanity. It shows how the overwhelming scale and unpredictability of modern life, from fast-evolving technology to the uncertainties of the labor market, is a burden on our still all-too-human nature largely unchanged from that of our feudal forebears. This conflict drives some to frustration and despair, others into the collective identities of authoritarianism—fascist, pseudo-czarist, or otherwise. Perhaps the novel is saying that, like the harried city folk who seek out the wizened folk healer, we should somehow balance our dizzying contemporary lifestyles with spells of calm and simple human rapport. As Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his essay “Friendship,” “Let us be silent,—so we may hear the whisper of the gods.”