Description

“The Long Way Home” is the autobiography of the most important Belarusian writer of the 20th century, which at the beginning tastes sweetly of pears from a village orchard near Vitsebsk. The rural idyll quickly gives way to the cataclysms that struck Belarus in the last century: collectivization, Soviet purges, and the devastating struggle against Nazi invaders.

Dramatic war experiences cast a shadow over the rest of the writer’s life, but they also brought him world fame. The closer the narrative gets to the present, the less willingly the author writes about himself and the more he focuses on others.

We owe him portraits of the most important figures of Soviet literature, a glimpse behind the scenes of Communist censorship practiced by the hands of his own colleagues, and knowledge of the flickering flame of the Belarusian national revival in the late eighties.

Despite all the blows of fate, “The Long Way Home” is imbued with a conviction in the universal beauty of Belarusian culture and its deserved place in Europe.