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** Shortlisted for Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024 **
** Winner of English PEN Award 2023 **
The 100 tales in The Zekameron are based on the 14th century Decameron, but Znak is closer to Beckett than to Boccaccio. Banality and brutality vie with the human ability to overcome oppression. Znak's stories in different voices chart 100 days in prison in Belarus today. The tone is laconic, ironic; the humour dry. The stories bear witness to resistance and self-assertion and the genuine warmth and appreciation of fellow prisoners.
Born in Minsk in 1981, international lawyer Maxim Znak was arrested in autumn 2020 and sentenced to ten years in prison in 2021. He is in prison in Belarus and is recognised by Amnesty as a prisoner of conscience. Znak wrote these stories from within prison, and they later found their way outside the prison walls.
The stories were sent directly to Jim Dingley who previously translated two books from Belarus for Scotland Street Press. Dingley immediately sent the manuscript to Scotland Street Press. Its arrival was a huge consideration: would its publication endanger Znak's life, or agitate successfully for his release? By September 2021 this brilliant lawyer was already re-sentenced to ten years in a penal colony in the north of Belarus. His wife and sister urged us to go ahead with publication.
** Shortlisted for Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024 **
** Winner of English PEN Award 2023 **
The 100 tales in The Zekameron are based on the 14th century Decameron, but Znak is closer to Beckett than to Boccaccio. Banality and brutality vie with the human ability to overcome oppression. Znak's stories in different voices chart 100 days in prison in Belarus today. The tone is laconic, ironic; the humour dry. The stories bear witness to resistance and self-assertion and the genuine warmth and appreciation of fellow prisoners.
Born in Minsk in 1981, international lawyer Maxim Znak was arrested in autumn 2020 and sentenced to ten years in prison in 2021. He is in prison in Belarus and is recognised by Amnesty as a prisoner of conscience. Znak wrote these stories from within prison, and they later found their way outside the prison walls.
The stories were sent directly to Jim Dingley who previously translated two books from Belarus for Scotland Street Press. Dingley immediately sent the manuscript to Scotland Street Press. Its arrival was a huge consideration: would its publication endanger Znak's life, or agitate successfully for his release? By September 2021 this brilliant lawyer was already re-sentenced to ten years in a penal colony in the north of Belarus. His wife and sister urged us to go ahead with publication.
It's a terse account of painful experience, prison, bewilderment; hugely atmospheric and extremely funny – full of dry wit and small biting observations.
Given the appallingly unjust and brutal treatment of the lawyer and civil rights activist Maxim Znak at the hands of the Belarusian government, one might expect this book to be an embittered denunciation of Alexander Lukashenko and all his works. It is not. Maxim Znak's message is that wry humour and humanity trump the cruel absurdities of the regime [...] These stories, one hundred of them, none longer than three pages, have echoes of early Chekhov, Zoshchenko and Samuel Beckett and, ultimately, of Giovanni Boccaccio and Vernon Kress, who used the punning title for his 1991 novel of the Gulag. The language is racy, witty and colloquial, with an admixture of prison slang, for which Znak himself provided an invaluable glossary. If mention of Belarus is made at all, it is usually in a political context - the last dictatorship in Europe, Putin's puppet state etc. Belarus does, however, have a long and distinguished literary tradition, much of it now exiled. Translations into English are rare, but this publisher and these translators have done much to reduce this deficit.
The fact that this book exists at all should be a miracle. Simply because the stories were smuggled out … The true sensation, however, is the mental achievement the prisoner Maxim Znak was capable of: that in his situation, which could really be called hopeless, he still possesses the internal freedom to create literature.
[Znak] uses the weapons that dictators like Lukashenko detest most: humour, wit, publicity.
