Arche
Eurozine
Arche
2008-07-31
Abstracts for Arche 6/2008
Political scientist, director of the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies (BISS) Vital Silicki
analyses, in his "To catch up with Europe. The new logic of Lukashenka's transformation", some new trends in the rhetoric of Lukashenka's government. If in the eve of his reign the Belarusian president promised very limited consumptive standards and used as his electoral base some poor populations strata like pensioners, country farm workers etc., than nowadays he declares in populist style that his rule will secure advanced consumption comparable with neighboring nations which have joined recently EU. Meanwhile it may signal that president Lukashenka would want to transfer his electoral core in favor of middle class and other prosperous social groups.
Piotra Rudkowski, a philosopher, logician, and methodology professor at the Vilnius-based European Humanities University (EHU), Lithuania, discusses, in his "How many Belarusian languages will remain until 2008?" the consequences of new orthography regulations of the Belarusian language, which had been adopted by the Belarusian parliament and will be imposed on 1 September 2010. The newly adopted "Law on Rules of Belarusian Orthography and Punctuation" bans publishing, media, education, and other public activity in the "non-Soviet" spelling standard of the Belarusian language, or so called tarashkievitsa, which is used by some independent publishers and media, including Nasha Niva weekly, ARCHE journal, and Radio Liberty Belarusian service web-site. Since that measure is designed for a further shrinking of the Belarusian-language independent press and media publishing, the author suggests that adopting the Soviet-style spelling standard or so the called "Narkamawka" for independent officially registered media is a better option than their squeezing out from public domain and the further marginalization.
The latest text in "Analyses" rubric is the Belarusian translation of Robert Kagan's geopolitical essay "The end of the end of History. Why the twenty-first century will look like the nineteenth", originally posted in The New Republic on 23 April 2008.
Nasha Niva web-site editor-and-chief Andrej Dyńko criticizes, in his "Drama that we are not Russians" colonial biases and pro-Russian sentiments of public speeches and interviews by a famous writer and journalist Sviatlana Aleksijevič. Philosopher, head of the flying university Belarusian Collegium Ales Ancipienka deals in his "Newest history of Belarusian Colonialism" with remnants of Belarus's colonial perceptions and presentations in the modern Belarusian Russia-language intellectual discourse.
Critic Danila Zukowski sorts out, in his "Nobody is prefect," the book Ograbiony naród. Rozmowy z intelektualistami bialoruskimi. Przeprowadzili Malgorzata Nocuń i Andrzej Brzeziecki. Wroclaw: Kolegium Europy Wschodniej im. Jana Nowaka-Jeziorańskiego, 2007 -- 216 st. McGill University (Montreal, Canada) doctorate student Rashed Chowdhury reasons, in his "The leftist populist that earlier didn't exist", two publications on Belarusian political regime and its ruler (Schmidtke, Oliver and Yekelchyk, Serhy (eds.). Europe's last frontier? Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine between Russia and the European Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Parker, Stewart. The last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus. Victoria, B.C.: Trafford Publishing, 2007.) In his opinion the latest one is completely fraudulent and its author is an ordinary charlatan. Historian Ales Paskievič concentrates, in his "Grodno University in captivity of hypocrisy and cynicism," on quasi-historical monograph which has been recently published by Grodno State University The reviewer shows that it was written at the end of 1970 and was published in 2007 almost without any changes. Thus it refers to a such authority in historical science as Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, and as its methodological base serves some Communist ideology prescriptions.
ARCHE also publishes the Belarusian translation of the review by a Harvard University professor Edward L. Keenan, "The long-awaited book and the Bykovskii hypothesis", originally posted in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Vol. 8, 4 (Fall 2007). ?. 817-830. The review is dedicated to the anonymous epic poem "The Lay of Igor's Campaign" written in the Old East Slavic language, and its prominent researcher Alexander Zimin's work. The reviewer raises some questions about the authenticity of the poem, mostly on account of its language, and concludes that it is a forgery, i.e. a recompilation and manipulation of several authentic sources, created at the end of the eighteenth century.
Historian Claire Le Foll examines, in "Between Revolution and Silence", a review written on the request of ARCHE, the book by an Israeli historian Arkadi Zeltser on inter-war Ethnic Relations in the Soviet Union.
Historians Jan Lewandowski from Lublin University and Serhy Yekelchyk from University of Victoria continue a discussion rousing the ARCHE editor in chef Valer Bulhakaw book "Origins of Belarusian nationalism". EHU professor Taciana Čulickaja reviews in her "Belarus: a deviant case of system transformation?" the latest political science literature on Belarus: "Official media discourse and the self-representation of entrepreneurs in Belarus" (Europe-Asia Studies. Vol. 59. No. 8. December 2007. P. 1331-1348) by Manchester University student Galina Miazhevich; "Linkage, leverage, and the post-communist divide" (East European politics and societies. No. 21. 2007. ?. 49-66) by Toronto University professor of political science Lucan A. Way and his colleague Steven Levitsky from Harvard University; and "Between Russia and the EU: Transformational opportunities for Belarus" (Lithuanian foreign policy review. No. 18. 2006. P. 131-156) by Vilnius University political science professor Tomas Janeliunas. EHU professor Ulad Navicki reviews new EHU publication in "Gray zone of stability vicious circle" on the system transformation in Eastern Europe.
Essayist Siarhiej Dubaviec presentes an essay dedicated to his father. Historian Thomas M. Bohn from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in "Resistance" and "Insubordination" in Minsk. Resistive Behavior in The Soviet Union", considers public resistance of some social groups in the post-war Belarus, historian of literature Viktar Zybul in "Myth on Belarusian futurism. 'Belaruskaya Litararurna-Mastatskayja kamuna' in memoirs and documents" traces the Belarusian futurists activity in 1920. Political scientist Dr.Gerhard Simon, from the University of Cologne examines the reasons for successful democratic transformations in Georgia, Serbia, and Ukraine. Participants of Round Table "Eurasian values, European desires" wonder why Belarus is essentially a single nation in Eastern Europe which doesn't want to join the European Union.
This issue is concluded by the Belarusian rendition of "The cult" by the Ukrainian writer Lubko Deresh, an interview with him, as well as a short review by Andranik Antanian of Belarusian translation of the Pippi the Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren.