Zmicier Vishnioŭ
The cultural "zero point" situation, the ongoing severe repression in Belarus against everyone and everything that is not acceptable to the government, and the war were and are associated with a radical professional and biographical break for Vishnioŭ, in view of which he has chosen poetry as the only adequate form of writing at present. The poems included in the publication were written between 2022 and 2023 after Zmicier Vishnioŭs departure from Belarus in Åmål, (Sweden), Schloss Wiepersdorf and Berlin. Vishnioŭ sometimes published individual poems shortly after they had been written in advance on the social media platforms Facebook and vkontakte. He summarised the complete collection of 58 poems under the title Непадпарадкаванне (Refusal of Subordination) to create a volume of poetry.
The title Непадпарадкаванне (engl. insubordination, disobedience) suggests a basic conception of resistance. In the poems collected here, the refusal to subordinate is based on an active "I" that vigilantly explores and transgresses the boundaries of the given (experienced, liveable, bearable, desirable) realities and linguistic spaces. Not wanting to or (not being able to) subordinate oneself is woven into each of the poems, each verse, each line like DNA. Both the original language term and the translated term are associated with bureaucratic language and with the opposites of order and disorder, so that an institutional level of (dis)rules and regulations can also be considered, which are resisted in favour of one's own world (dis)orders. As both terms are not part of a common vocabulary, they act as "stumbling blocks". Reading the poems demands special attentiveness from the reader right from the start.
The poems are divided into 5 sections. The headings "Heroes", "Ships", "Air", "Friends" and "Shadows" form a rough motivic framework for the thematic movements, which range from personal memories of biographical pasts and individual searches, to deep drillings into cultural stratifications and explorations of the state of a repressive state, to somnambulistic wanderings through irritating pictorial landscapes and fairytale-like sceneries. Vishniou's lyrical ego is unstable, lost, disturbed and at the same time self-confident and king of his own and creator of new worlds.
Most of the poems are written in an open, rhymeless form; the attention is thus drawn directly to the images, which rarely stand for themselves. Vishnioŭ's poems live in particular from the very strong images. The more often you read a poem, the more you are challenged to meticulously analyse the images, which often speak for themselves with pinpoint accuracy and yet are not immediately accessible. The further you go down this path of deciphering the images, the more you are rewarded by the release of your own precise imagination and at the same time by immersing yourself in the Belarusian and European linguistic and cultural landscape.
In addition to the images, the poems in the volume thrive on the fascinating dynamics of beat and rhythm, which in Vishnioŭ's case (in the style of the Bum-Bam-Lit movement) are always aimed at (his) expressive poetry performances.
The great quality of the collection of poems lies in the fact that, on the one hand, he explores and expands the language in the spirit of Bum-Bam-Lit, challenging it to decipher images and, on the other hand, is thematically quite political and in part draws on his own experiences, which were characterised by major political upheavals and crises in previous years. The result is a thoroughly differentiated political speech that is otherwise so often lacking.
Zmicier Vishnioŭ (* 1973 in Debrecen, Hungary) is a Belarusian prosaist, poet, performance artist, painter and publisher. He is one of the most influential figures in the independent cultural scene in Belarus and one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Belarusian literature with his prose texts, essays and poems.
Vishnioŭ's texts are created in a dynamic process with his other forms of artistic expression. He is one of the co-founders of the legendary Bum-Bam-Lit artists' movement, which sought to break down the boundaries of literature and synthesise the arts in the 1990s. The Bum-Bam-Lit movement evolved into, among others, the performance group Sondereinheit afrikanischer Brüder (Special Unit of African Brothers), led by Vishnioŭ (the group provoked the official cultural scene with radical actions) and the literary association Schmerzwerk, which he co-founded (which vehemently turned pain into a lyrical agenda). They were all aiming for a renewal of language and art and their liberation from Soviet tradition.
Vishnioŭ's work on language is accompanied by painting. His surrealist, fairytale-like paintings have been exhibited in Belarus and abroad, including at the Kunsthaus Tacheles (Berlin), the Museum of Nonconformist Art (St Petersburg) and most recently at the Schloss Wiepersdorf Cultural Foundation.
Since 2007, he has run the independent publishing house Halijafy together with Michas Bashura. The publishing house is primarily dedicated to literature in Belarusian language with a special focus on debuts and forgotten works of the last century. The publishing house's activities and the sale of books in the publisher's own bookshop were banned by the government authorities in 2022. This was preceded by months of pressure from the Ministry of Information and tax audits - a common method used by the Belarusian authorities to withdraw licences from independent institutions. Vishnioŭ left Belarus in the summer of 2022 and did not return as planned due to threats. Since then, he and his colleagues have been trying to find alternative ways of financing and producing, at least for the book productions that have been left in the process.
Vishnioŭ is the author of numerous books, including the anti-novel Калі прыглядзецца - Марс сіні (If you look closely, Mars is blue, 2018) and Замак пабудаваны з крапівы (The Nettle House, 2010, Engl. by Martina Jakobson 2014 at luxbooks) as well as the poetry collections Штабкавы тамтам (Striped Tamtam, 1998), Фараон у заапарку (Pharaoh at the zoo, 2006), Тамбурны маскіт (Tambourine Mosquito, 2001), the prose volume Трап для сусьліка, альбо Нэкрафілічнае дасьледаваньне аднаго віду грызуноў (Gangway for the Gopher, or The Necrophilic Investigation of a Rodent Species, 2002) and volumes of essays. His latest collection of poems Непадпарадкаванне (Unsubordinated) was published in 2022 and 2023.
No volume of poetry by Zmicier Vishnioŭ has yet been translated into German.
The publication is published by Elif-Verlag, which has mainly dedicated itself to publishing ‘improbable poetry’ since 2011. Elif, run by Dincer Gücyeter, publishes debuts, experimental contemporary poets and classics in new translations. Up to 8 books are published each season, with ‘Ununtergeordnetes’ scheduled for autumn 2025.
The publication is produced in collaboration with the publishing house Lohvinaŭ. This was founded in 2000 as an independent publishing house and specialises primarily in Belarusian-language literature. Lohvinaŭ has authors such as Alhierd Bacharevich, Valiancin Akudovich, Ales Rasanaŭ, Natalka Babina and Artur Klinaŭ under contract. The Lohvinaŭ bookshop was an important venue for events and meetings in Minsk. The publishing house's licence was revoked in 2013 and since then it has been operating in exile in Lithuania as the Lohvinaŭ House of Literature.
Dr. Nina Weller, translator and editor of the volume, is a Slavicist, translator and literary educator and researches cultures of remembrance, literary life and popular cultures in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. She is a co-founder of Stimmen aus Belarus and has published the anthologies Anthologien BELARUS! Das weibliche Gesicht der Revolution (2020) and „Alles ist teurer als ukrainisches Leben”- texts about Westsplaining and the war (2023) and author and editor of academic volumes and texts. She translates from Russian and Belarusian. In the autumn semester she led (together with Iryna Herasimovich) the 4th Belarusian-German ViceVersa Translators' Workshop.
Zmicier Vishnioŭ himself assorted and arranged the poems written between 2021 and 2022 under the title Непадпарадкаванне (Unsubordination). He has already finalised this version of the manuscript together with his lector Iryna Herasimovich. The translation is being finalised in collaboration with Nina Weller (translation) and Iryna Herasimovich (editing). Five poems have already been translated in advance, read in public at various events and some have been printed in event brochures. The sponsors and places of publication of these first translations are named in the book publication.
The translation is supported by the Slavic Department of the University of Zurich.