The formal basis for the meeting was the republishing of Vladimir Orlov's book "The Order of the White Mouse" by the Kamunikat.org Foundation in Bialystok (with the support of the "Skarina" community).

The book was published for the first time in Minsk in 2003, by the publishing house "Fiction".

Now the time has come when Belarusian books start to go abroad more and more often.

For many Belarusian writers, this is the only chance to see their book in print.

Vladimir Orlov is well known for the fact that he tells a lot of funny and instructive stories from his life and experience as a writer at his author's meetings.

He did not let those present at the meeting in Prague.

About the history of the first edition of the Order of the White Mouse, he told, among other things, the following:

"Six years before the publication of this book, I was fired from the publishing house "Fiction" with the wording "fired for publishing historical and other questionable literature".

But for my 50th birthday, they decided to give me a present and offered to publish a book.

I was warned: the book will have a curator at the Ministry of Information.

And then one day a young editor calls me and says that the curator did not like the place in the title story where the king, meeting with the writer, mentions that "the royal army in the 16th century completely defeated the horde of our sworn friend Grand Duke Ivan."

This name, the editor tells me, according to the curator, will harm the integration of Belarus and Russia - you need to give him a written answer.

I dictated to her the answer to the curator, whose name I do not know: "Yes, I agree with you,

that this name might break the integration.

Therefore, I propose to replace Ivan with Vavan."

She passed it on, and it passed - Vavan appeared in the book."

And about the artistic decoration of the first edition of "The Order of the White Mouse", the writer shared a funny story:

"The book was decorated with drawings by the artist Aleksey Marochkin.

At the last moment before it was published, a man burst into the editorial office and said more or less the following: "For Orlov's book, our eggs will be opened anyway, and here Marachkin drew a man with eggs and Lukashenka with a mustache."

After this, the mustache on the vicious image was twisted upwards, and the changed man's genitals were cut off.

Then I told this story to a correspondent from "Izvestia", who printed an article called "Censorship cut off organs".

In addition to the title story, the book "Order of the White Mouse" contains the cycle "Polatsky Tales", the story "Masha and the Bears" and "Siberian Tale", "Landscape with the smell of menthol" and "Genius loci".

Life circumstances were such that almost all of these works were translated into Polish either by me, my wife, or by other translators for the publications that I contributed and edited.

Vladimir Orlov mentioned a funny translation episode in connection with the Polotsk story "Fish and Others", which tells how one restless boy cut out with a blade the letters "r" and "r" from all the posters announcing the "USSR Academic Rowing Championship" in the city ".

And so my translator Yan Maksimyuk, the writer said not without satisfaction, made the Polish "zawody w skakaniu do wody" from that championship, from which the boy Riba cut out the letter "s".

The meeting with Vladimir Orlova in Prague ended with the author's reading of the essay "Independence is..." and an autograph session.

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  • Jan Maksimyuk

    Journalist of Radio Svaboda

    Editor of the community "Only about literature" on Facebook 

    maksymiukj@rferl.org

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