Emigration from Belarus, which has intensified since 2020-21, has its history dating back to the 19th and 20th centuries. Interested in multimediality of today’s writing, and reading it against the backdrop of the re-sovietization of official Minsk and the state’s use of internet technologies to suppress civil society, I’m taking a closer look at Belarusian authors living and working in exile and the ways they narrate their experiences of home and (non-)belonging online.
The gradual intensification of repressions, as well as the long precarious state of Belarusian (independent) publishing houses, only contributed to the formation of the internet in Belarus as a platform for publishing and discussing literature. The internet also allows authors in emigration to stay in touch with their readers in Belarus and other countries.
Such transformative process as migration often evokes authorial reflection on and redefinition of self, various versions of (non-)belonging and home. Moreover, exile is also often conditioned by (un)availability of certain objects, nostalgic longing for things that are no longer there, objects taking on new meaning or evoking memories. Though feelings of home and (non-)belonging are abstract, material reality of emigration / exile nevertheless belongs to particular places and manifests itself through certain things or their absence. Hence, I’m interested in the analysis of digital life writing in exile, and object-oriented authorial narration in these texts. In particular, I analyse Tatsiana Zamirovskaya’s and Valzhyna Mort’s writing across platforms (LiveJournal, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram) in the timeframe of 2010-2024 and examine how thingness and corporeality in online life writing entries are connected to the existential questions of home and (non-)belonging. Research question: What narratives of home and (non-) belonging does exilic digital life writing from Belarus follow and challenge?
Through narrative and discursive analysis of individual digital life writing texts of Tatsiana Zamirovskaya and Valzhyna Mort (Facebook, Instagram, LiveJournal, Telegram), I plan to show and analyse the variety of versions of home and (non-) belonging narrativized in the texts.
Publications from the project
- “Mediale Zwischenwelt. LiveJournal als Refugium für belarussische Stimmen,” Osteuropa 1-3 (2025): 459-462, https://zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/hefte/2025/1-3/mediale-zwischenwelt/.