Between Worlds: Belarusian Poetry in Exile
Since 2020, almost all independent cultural figures have left Belarus to escape repression by Lukashenka’s authoritarian regime. Many of them are now working in exile to promote a free Belarus. Poetry has become a powerful form of expression that documents, resists and comforts.
On the night of 29-30 October 1937, 132 members of the Belarusian elite, including many creative artists, were murdered by the Soviet secret police in Minsk. Today, on the Night of the Shot Poets, people around the world honour the memory of the victims of Soviet terror. In Belarus itself, however, the crime – hushed up in Soviet times – has no place in the official culture of remembrance. Since the violent crackdown on the protests against the rigged presidential elections of 2020, it has also been impossible for civil society to organise commemorations, and so the task of remembrance is increasingly shifting into exile. In Berlin, this year’s commemorative event at the Literary Colloquium once again took place under the rubric ‘The Night of Unshot Poems’, a reminder that literary texts can outlive their creators. The list of participants reads like a who’s who of independent Belarusian contemporary culture.
Poetry and protest
Poetry and music – and even verse set to music – had already played an important role in the run-up to the Belarusian presidential elections in 2020. Musicians had performed at countless rallies held by candidates standing against Aliaksandr Lukashenka, Belarus’s authoritarian leader since 1994. They sang about a different, a democratic Belarus and provided a soundtrack for the unfinished Belarusian revolution. Later, in the aftermath of the rigged elections, protest readings and concerts were held in backyards, sparking conversations between neighbours who had barely greeted each other before. This new sense of Belarusian cohesion found its clearest expression in the mass demonstrations that sprang up across the country, only to be brutally crushed on Lukashenka’s orders. As a consequence of the repression, which continues to this day, an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 Belarusians left their homeland, including almost all of the country’s independent cultural elite.
After 2020, any free spaces that had previously existed for independent culture in Belarus vanished. Award-winning novels such as Alhierd Bacharevič’s Dogs of Europe and Sasha Filipenko’s novel The Elephant – due to be published in German translation as Die Elefanten in spring 2026 – were classified as extremist, while others were placed on the list of printed publications ‘which contain information and/or material whose dissemination may harm the national interests of the Republic of Belarus’.[1] The sale or possession of these texts is a criminal offence. Texts published outside the country are therefore all the more important.[2] They include many volumes of poetry, some released in the original Belarusian (or, more rarely, Russian) by publishers in exile such as hochroth Minsk or Skaryna Press, others issued in translation or bilingual editions by other publishing houses. These publications recontextualise the poems, many of which first appeared on social media, and preserve them for future generations while enabling them to reach a wider readership in translation.
Poetry bears witness
Poetry is a way to respond rapidly to events; it captures what has happened, paints a picture in words and makes the seemingly unsayable accessible for others to experience. One of the bleakest and simultaneously most accurate descriptions of the continuously escalating spiral of repression in Belarus can be found in a poem by Taciana Niadbaj:
Detained and released without report
Good it was just three days, not a fine
Good there was no beating
Good it was a fine, not 24 hours
Good it was 24 hours, but at least with a mattress
Good it was 15 days, but not 30
Good there was no beating
Good it was straight 90 days, not criminal
Good it was a criminal case, no beatings
Good it was home chemistry, not chemistry
Good it was chemistry, not years in prison
Good it was 2 or 3 years, not ten
Good it was in SIZA, not in a colony
Good it was a colony of the general regime, not the intensified
Good there were letters, though it was the intensified
Good it was in a colony, not in PKT
Good it was in PKT, not in ŠYZA
Good it was in ŠYZA, but healthy
Beaten up, but at least healthy
Good that he got out, now planning treatment
Still in prison, but at least alive
I pray only that he gets out alive[3]
The narrator repeats the phrase ‘good it …’ like a mantra to show how people become accustomed to the regime’s repression and how attitudes towards it gradually shift. The last line – ‘I pray only that he gets out alive’, added after 2023 – captures the increasingly hopeless situation in Belarusian prisons; since 2020, at least nine political prisoners have died in custody. The impotence that is palpable here is at least partially overcome by the act of writing poetry: instead of remaining silent, the poet bears witness to the crimes of the Belarusian regime and, in so doing, takes a stance against it. The poem thus documents not only the crimes committed under Lukashenka but also, and simultaneously, the ongoing resistance, although these days, it has shifted into exile.
Poetry as a place of refuge
The feeling of being torn between the former homeland and the new life in exile, the homesickness and financial, legal and other uncertainties are recurring themes in contemporary Belarusian poetry. For her book We’ll Return, first published in 2022 and still untranslated into German or English, Hanna Komar distilled 20 interviews with Belarusian emigrants into poetic monologues. The yearning to return home is palpable in many of the texts. One poem consists entirely of a single line of verse, ‘I want to go home’, repeated four times, concluding with the self-critical, perhaps ironic exclamation ‘damned emigrant’. However, the title of the book leaves no room for doubt that the involuntary migrants will return to Belarus one of these days. This too can be read as a symbol of resistance.
The feeling of being torn between worlds is all-pervasive in Julia Cimafiejeva’s volume of collages, titled I Cut Up History and published in 2025. In one of the poems, the narrator peers ‘through the crack of new experience at the alien landscapes all around’, albeit ‘with only one eye’, for ‘the other eye is at rest, closed / in past and homeland’, both out of reach. In another, the poet asks for the ‘instructions’ for the ‘emigrant construction kit’ from which – unlike members of mainstream society – they must ‘reassemble themselves every day’. And yet torn fragments can be used to create something new, as Cimafiejeva convincingly demonstrates in her absurd collages that illustrate the poems. The compositions, created from fragments of paper from various sources, have a comforting quality that resonates with the poems.
Providing solace is a function of poetry that should not be underestimated, as Volha Hapeyeva reflects on in her award-winning essay The Defence of Poetry in Times of Permanent Exile. Here, she recalls how a friend who had been arrested asked her to send her poems to him in prison: ‘this helped him to survive there’. While reading, the individual is no longer alone, and isolation – whether in prison or in exile – is overcome by delving into others’ imagined worlds. Poetry can thus be a source of strength and hope, and as Hapeyeva observes in her own case, it can also be a ‘home’, especially in exile.
[1] The Ministry of Information of the Republic of Belarus decides on these classifications. The two lists can be accessed as Word files via the ‘Documents’ page of the Ministry’s website.
[2] For instance, the 33 Books for Another Belarus project aims to release books – in collaboration with European publishers – that cannot currently be published in Belarus. In addition to the printed editions, the 33 books are also published as e-books so that they remain accessible to readers in Belarus.
[3] The Belarusian original was first published by Nasha Niva in 2023 and is available in print in Taciana Niadbaj, Там, за сцяной (There, behind the wall), Berlin 2024: hochroth Minsk, p. 7. The English translation was produced by John Farndon and Jenya Mironava. My thanks to the poet for kindly allowing the poem to be reproduced here in full.
Nina Frieß is a researcher at ZOiS. Her research interests include Russophone literatures, Belarusian (exile) culture, and children's and youth literature.