Description

The book “Poems to Freedom” collects poetic works written under conditions of imprisonment, forced labor, camps, exile, and while awaiting rehabilitation or a criminal case review. Chronologically, the texts span a nearly 150-year period of continuous tradition and the forced development of Belarusian prison poetry: from the Philomath era of the 1820s, when Adam Mickiewicz and Jan Czeczot were imprisoned in Vilnius, to the camp lyrics of Vasil Suprun and Larysa Heniyush, sentenced shortly after the end of World War II.

The poems included in the book reflect the emotional state of political prisoner poets, their dreams and aspirations, and their life principles, but above all — the inner freedom so often lacked by writers on the other side of the barred window.