Breaking With Tradition

This survey of young Belarusian prose is in many ways a sequel to Spring Shoots. It follows the same pattern of thematically arranged chapters, but makes less attempt to treat writers in only one chapter, preferring to allow some writers’ works to appear in several different parts of the book. The scope is only short prose (apaviadańni, apovieści), and, once again, debut writers rub shoulders with those of greater experience. The aim of the book is to show some of the variety and imagination that young prose writers bring to their work, and to illustrate a pragmatic selection of some of the topics in which they are interested. Naturally, some of the themes are far from country-specific (Love and sex; People and animals; Religion and philosophy) whilst others are highly relevant to contemporary Belarus (Leadership and the country; Writing; and History), although all literature written in an oppressed and neglected language is in itself very important for the development of national culture and consciousness.