Alhierd Bacharevič (b. 1975) is a Belarusian writer and translator, and one of the leading novelists in Belarus. Shortly after the outbreak of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Bacharevič wrote an open letter in support of Ukraine, after which the Belarusian regime launched a campaign against him: he was labelled an “extremist writer”, and in July 2022 the remaining copies of his 2017 novel Dogs of Europe (Сабакі Эўропы) were ploughed into a field by tractor. This 900-page, widely acclaimed dystopia (or, one might say, a description of the present) explores the language of power and the power of language, and portrays Belarus as an island of Europe and Europe as Belarus’s dream. Bacharevič’s monumental work is both a socio-political insight into life in Belarus and a genre-rich poetic homage to European literary history – its title alludes to W. H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of T. S. Eliot” – as well as to all of Europe’s smaller languages and cultures. He began his literary career in the 1990s as part of the avant-garde literary and artistic group Bum-Bam-Lit, and has also translated into Belarusian works by, among others, Franz Kafka and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
Alhierd Bacharevič
