On November 17, in Warsaw, the Jury of the Jerzy Gedroyc Award, consisting of Ullyana Verina, Syarhei Dubauets, Sviatlana Kurs, Andrey Khadanovich, and Tsikhan Chernyakevich, awarded the first place to Syarhei Ablameika's book "Unknown Minsk.

The story of the disappearance", which was published in 2021 in the "Library of Freedom.

21st century".

In answers to Svoboda's questions, Siarhei Ablameyka shares his impressions of the victory and reflects on the consequences of this year's jury decision for Belarus and Belarusian culture.

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The Gedroyt award ceremony in Warsaw on November 17, 2022

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0:000:03:150:00

- When you left Prague for Warsaw for the Gedroyc award ceremony, you said that there is nothing to hope for - the book is important and worthwhile, but the genre is far from Gedroyc standards.

This is not even "pop science", but actually a scientific monograph.

Was there still a spark of hope?

- Hope always lives in a person.

When the book was nominated, and later even made it to the list of finalists, something stirred somewhere deep in the soul.

But I definitely did not expect the first place.

I thought maybe I would be the third, like last year with the book about Kalinowski.

It seemed to me that the victory would be given to Vladimir Nyaklyaev, and I told him about it, by the way, two days before the ceremony.

Last year I was not at the ceremony and followed the ceremony online.

Although the organizers invited me to come even then.

I received the same invitation this year.

But this year, I found out that none of the six is ​​planning to come, and I thought that it is not so far from Prague to Warsaw, let at least one of the finalists be present.

— And how did you perceive the information about the winner voiced by Svetlana Kurs?

- This is a separate story.

At the ceremony, I sat next to Pavel Beragovich and Andrey Yanushkevich.

When Svetlana Kurs said that the winning book had 525 pages, I told my neighbors that it was Nyaklyaev.

I didn't remember how many pages were in his book, but I knew for sure that mine had less than 500. But it turned out that Svetlana was reading the book in PDF format, the pages were counted together with the photo collage, and there were exactly 525 of them. After a minute, Svetlana remembered the girl in a white beret, and I understood everything.

The book contains a photograph of my mother's family in 1936 in Minsk, on which my 20-year-old grandmother is sitting in a white beret.

I consider the speech of Svetlana Kurs to be an excellent artistic text and I am going to take it.

Her words about the "book of love", about the love for Minsk and the grandson's love for his grandmother overturned my perception of reality at that moment.

Suddenly, instead of the knee hall of the Warsaw University with the Gedroyts mask in the center, I found myself on the old Nemiza with my grandmother and parents... For the next hour, my eyes became wet again and again.

I couldn't help but faint from the memory and sentiment.

I suddenly realized that with the victory in the Gedroyts Prize, my dream of seeing the restored Old Town could become the dream of many.

This emotion was not easy to experience and not easy to tame...

Member of the jury of the Gedroyts Sviatlan Kurs and Siarhei Ablameyka award ceremony, Warsaw, November 17, 2022

- And what can you say now about the jury's decision?

- Perhaps this is the most unusual decision of the Gedroyt jury for all eleven seasons of the award's existence.

These five Belarusian intellectuals did the deed.

The act is not because they gave the first place to Syarhei Ablameik, but because they gave it to THIS book, exactly SUCH a book, exactly a book about THIS.

In the two weeks that have passed since the ceremony, three of the five members of the jury have spoken in print.

It turned out that the decision was made unanimously.

Svetlana Kurs in an interview with the website reform.

by reported that the five considered my history book to be a tremendous foundational essay.

I felt it myself.

Writing the book and framing it as a monograph, I saw that my style was different from a scientific monograph.

There was a lot of personal content in the text.

By the way, I said this at the ceremony.

The book really has a lot of essay writing, a lot of the author's simple language, there are my conversations with witnesses, many quotes not only from historical documents, but also from artistic texts with my subjective and even emotional assessments.

One of the scientific reviewers, Polish historian and professor Dorota Michaluk said, by the way, that for the first time in her life she read a historical monograph as a detective.

So the jury did a really highly professional job, recognized the type of book and put it in the context in which it was born.

In fact, the jury's decision means that I wrote something like the Minsk Gulag Archipelago.

- Is it good or bad?

- It's hard for me to say.

I wrote the book as a monograph.

When I finished it around 2013-2014, I saw that it was a good work and decided to defend part of it as a thesis.

This delayed the publication of the book for several years.

But the supervisor of the thesis, Professor Yury Garbinski and three reviewers, Professors Dorota Mikhaliuk, Roman Yurkovsky and Zakhar Shybeka, and later the scientific council of the Faculty of History of the University of Bialystok recognized the text as scientific.

There is no arguing either.

Later, the book was reworked again, received a new structure and was published in two volumes (heavily shortened, by the way).

Book one, for example, lost 120 pages.

In the second book, I decided, among other things, not to publish the chapter on the falsification of pictures and their dates.

Maybe I'll post it separately sometime.

- You talk about the jury's decision as if you see some special meaning and significance in it.

- Of course.

In my speech at the awarding ceremony, I said that I am generally pessimistic about the influence of books on people, and I once concluded for myself that if at least five readers of your book start to think the way you do, your goal has been achieved and you wrote the book for a reason.

So the victory of SUCH a book, a book about THIS, legitimizes and embeds the theme of the need to restore the Old Town in Minsk and the historical centers of our Belarusian cities in the minds of the Belarusian intellectual elite and even Belarusian politicians.

Several opposition politicians congratulated me on my victory.

Congratulating, they said that under the future democratic government in Belarus, the Old Town in Minsk will definitely be restored.

I couldn't even hope for that.

This is really a victory!

The Old Town enters not only the Belarusian intellectual field, but also politics.

And all this is the result of the decision of this great five Belarusian intellectuals - Ullyana Verina, Syarhei Dubauts, Svyatlana Kurs, Andrey Khadanovich and Tsikhan Chernyakevich.

Many thanks to them for this.

And a special big thank you to the editor of the book, Alexander Lukashuk.

I can't imagine where he found so much strength in himself - twice (!) to thoroughly edit the entire thousand pages of both books.

It was our titanic cooperation for two years.

- Why did you start writing this book?

Was it a sentiment, a childhood memory or some conscious decision?

- All together.

It is both personal and public.

This is the choice and will of the Belarusian intellectual.

I missed Vilnius in Minsk.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we took girls on dates to Vilnius, showed them Ostrava Gate and Zamkava Street, Gediminas Mountain, and sat for a long time on the banks of the Vialla or in the famous bistro on Zamkava Street, where inexpensive sausages were sold.

And it hurt that our Minsk was so mutilated and mutilated, so Soviet and so cold.

The width and scope of its streets and squares contradicted the historical modesty of our urban environment.

But I knew from my childhood that there was an Old Town in Minsk, and I even remembered a piece of it - old Nyamiga.

And since the second half of the 80s, when I was a student in the "Talaka" group defending the remains of historical Minsk, it was clear to me that we must return what was.

Otherwise, our culture and our people will develop inferiorly.

We had to take possession again in the centers of our cities of material evidence of the civilizational affiliation of Belarus to Europe.

But many people, even in the Belarusian-speaking environment, treated my dream with skepticism and even criticism.

They said, why rebuild, why demolish what has already been built.

Let's just mark the tracks of the old streets, plant trees there, ban new construction and let's remember and commemorate our old Minsk in this way.

I had to convince the skeptics and educate the uneducated.

And how can it be done?

Just write a book.

I took up this in 2006.

But even before that there was one immediate push.

At the beginning of 2005, after the first "feats" of the "Minsk Heritage" society founded by the Minsk City Executive Committee, I realized where the situation was headed, and out of desperation wrote the essay "The Beloved City", where I spoke about the destruction of Minsk during and after the war, and where I described Minsk in my dreams, as it could be after the total restoration and regeneration of the Old Town with the Castle, Fish and Low Markets and the entire network of old streets and alleys.

This Old Town, by the way, would be not much smaller than Vilnius.

The essay was published in two issues of "Nasha Niva" in the spring of 2005 and became very popular.

Later it was included in my book of travel prose "Nostalgia".

And then I was told that people gave each other read copies of "Nasha Niva" with that essay, some clippings with the text of the essay were even pasted on pieces of cardboard.

Director Andrey Kudinenko told me an interesting story.

That year, he was traveling from Krakow to Warsaw, asking for a free seat on a Belarusian tourist bus.

And so, as soon as the bus left Krakow, people began to ask the tour guide to continue reading some text from the newspaper "Nasha Niva" into the microphone.

It turned out that they were asking for the second part of the essay "The Beloved City", because the tour guide read them to Krakow.

Ryhor Baradulin liked that essay very much, and it was he, during his visit to Prague at the end of March 2005, who strongly advised me to publish it as a separate pamphlet.

I thought that it would be worthwhile to illustrate the book with something, I started looking at the pictures and realized that there is something to think about.

So the immediate work on the new book began.

Therefore, by the way, the first version of its name was: "Beloved city."

Return".

I was going to return the Old Town to the Menchuks, at least virtually, in the intellectual space.

I seem to have succeeded.

Historical Minsk defeated the Soviet one.

So far so intellectual.

I wish we all see him in reality.

- Where would you start to restore the Old Town?

- Of course, you need to start from Kazmodyamyanovska Street.

Nothing has yet been built on the site of those quarters on the slope from Svoboda Square to 8 March Square.

You can download the book here (PDF) (EPUB).