Viktor Martinovich published a book in English

Photo from Viktor Martinovich's Facebook page

To communicate those subtle changes in the landscape of the soul that happen to us when we read a good book or gaze at an old alley.

Art — one of the few justifications for humanity's existence; art, which Nietzsche called the only counterweight to the horror of being, has become an excuse for babbling. “What did the author want to say?” “What childhood traumas did the artist experience?” — ridiculous questions when confronting a miracle. Something essential remains outside the brackets. Or perhaps even — the most essential thing. Something from Giorgio Agamben's "The Bonfire and the Story."

So initially, my Fulbright project was dedicated to searching for the language of humanities (the language of humanitarian knowledge). This book was meant (risked?) to become exclusively theoretical. But after a series of conversations with colleagues at Hunter College in New York, I realized that the best way to declare arts as a new language of humanities is not to press with arguments, but to set an example.

I needed to find a story — one so well-known to me that I am made of it.

This book is about my great-grandfather Amelyan, first — an orderly in the tsarist army, then a miller, then — a peasant under German occupation. A man who was shot by the Nazis in 1943 in such a way that when I first read Bykaŭ’s “Sotnikov”, I thought Vasyl Uladzimiravich knew something about Amelyan.

The tragedy involved other people and even visited my childhood. The story of the Belarusian peasant Amelyan is told here through the works of Raphael, Chagall, Sandro Botticelli, Caspar David Friedrich, Stanisław Żukowski, Chaim Soutine. There is no better way to tell the story of the Schutzmannschaft raid on the village of Barbarova than through the screaming tree, painted by Soutine in 1943 in the park of a similar village near Champigny-sur-Veude, where he was hiding from the Nazis.

Reconstructing what remained in the family about Amelyan, whom I never saw but from whom I descend (autoethnography in the book's title is about that), I faced the fact that I had to explain too much to an English-speaking reader. Because everything is completely unclear unless you yourself were born near these decaying houses and under-stove nooks, ideal for hiding someone condemned to death.

The word 'oblivion' in the book's title is also about that. About roofs that don't last long enough for you to recognize a village you haven't been to in ten years. And therefore, any story about Belarus requires a metanarrative — a story that includes other stories. And that's why it's sometimes funny to read non-local English-speaking experts who think we are simple because we live simply," Viktor Martinovich wrote.

“The book was published by Oxford-based Routledge and costs like a Rolls-Royce wing,” he added.

The book presentation will take place on January 15 in Vilnius at the Crystal Lounge Imperial Hotel & Restaurant (Subačiaus g. 2-6), starting at 6 PM.

Viktor Martinovich is a writer, journalist, and lecturer. Author of the books "Paranoia", "Cold Paradise", "Sphagnum", "Language", "Lake of Joy", "Revolution", "Night".

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