In June 2018 I had the opportunity to visit Minsk, the capital of Belarus. In a large bookshop in the city centre – beneath the inquisitorial gaze of the ever-present portraits of the dictator Alexander Lukashenko – I asked the bookseller for one of the volumes of Svetlana Alexievich’s collected works. The Russian publisher Vremya had reissued them after the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.
But the newest Russian edition of The Unwomanly Face of War – the Alexievich book I had just translated into Catalan – was not on the shelves. Instead, to my surprise, the bookseller pulled a copy out from under the counter. The complete works of Belarus’s only Nobel laureate were being kept out of sight from Belarusian readers. Her books had to be requested as though they were exclusive items – or worse, forbidden or dangerous goods.
