This diary was written in Belarus between 2021 and 2022. Publishing it became increasingly difficult and dangerous with each passing year, as the situation continued to escalate after the revolution was crushed and at the same time less and less news was reaching the outside world. The author was faced with the choice of either censoring the diary himself or publishing it under a pseudonym. Self-censorship was out of the question, and a pseudonym that one does not choose voluntarily restricts more than it liberates. So it was decided to make the impossibility of naming the author visible: the place where the name should be remains empty. This ellipsis can also be read as representing the authorship of many other Belarusians. The revolution, emigration, and the destruction of networks are important themes in this diary, but they are not the only ones.
Issues such as love, relationships with parents, self-esteem, and personal integrity do not disappear in the revolution, but become even more virulent. When the decision to stay in Belarus is dismissed as immature, when you live as a homosexual in a country where there is no place for this identity in public space, when your closest friends are summoned for interrogation, then many of the existential questions arise anew and differently. The diary entries reveal the struggle for spaces of freedom where movement is still possible, spaces of freedom in a frozen situation where every movement can be dangerous. Writing the diary becomes a life-sustaining movement.
The text will be published anonymously.
Мяне няма (Belarusian: I do not exist) is a Belarusian publishing house in exile in Warsaw.
The book was published on August 4, 2025.