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SIMPLE MOVEMENTS: BELARUSIAN CULTURE IN SEARCH OF A NATION
Maksim Zhbankou
Summary
Protracted paralysis is becoming the norm for the state culture industry. Residual funding (2.4% of the state’s 2013 budget for sport, culture and the media combined) has forced cultural institutions into a trivial role (as opposed to state officialdom and the siloviki) - to maintain “social stability”. Flashy cultural offerings “from above” have transformed communication with the consumer masses into an array of basic loyalty rituals: the regime appears to provide culture, and the people seem to absorb it.
The newly emerged “Belarusian neo-naive” is attempting to bridge the gap between the cultural elite’s laboratory experimentation and real, day-to-day practices, producing national pop-culture products with lowbrow overtones. At the same time, a “third culture” is developing, offering neutral content with no clear political affiliation, and education in mind, rather than ideological mobilisation. Lastly, the cultural war rages on, albeit in a slightly altered format: alongside the usual confrontation between state culture and the rebellious “underground”, divergences are also on the increase within creative communities, and cultural experience is becoming “privatised”.
Trends:
• The irrelevance of traditional national identity models has prompted a spontaneous quest for new formats to cover Belarusian themes, turning to grass-roots traditions and lowbrow language.
• The formerly valiant zeal of post-ideological Belarusian culture is consistently being replaced by softer cultural-education tactics and the promotion of nationally orientated, everyday communication.
• Belarusian non-conformist underground culture is increasingly shifting away from slogans and manifestos towards individual expressions of personal experience.
Taming mediocrity: new games with emptiness
In the blurred field of Belarusian culture, any cultural venture’s success depends on two basic factors. Firstly, the scope of artists’ personal ambition, and their ability to catch the wave of con-
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sumer feeling. Secondly, the sphere of influence and symbolic capital of a “support group” of mostly like-minded cultural activists. The first factor allows content to materialise, the second turns it into an event. Both factors were busy turning junk into gold in 2013.
In actual fact, this surge of “neo-nai've” had been maturing for years: early Lyapis Trubetskoy, Volski and Krambambulya, and Razbitaje sertsapatsana (“A Lad’s Broken Heart”); in film — Kananovich’s Dastisch Fantastisch, and in literature — Prylucki’s Yopyty (“Icksperiments”). Yet only now has defective street-speak finally become trendy. Viktor Martinovich’s crime novel Sphagnum, published concurrently in Belarusian and Russian, met with unprecedented enthusiasm and its first print-run sold out in a matter of days.
Sphagnum’s success is easily explicable: a once pretentious stylist reached out to the people as a “down-to-earth guy”. Viktor Martinovich capitalised on the popular crime theme, adding a little light satire and pure Belarusian lunacy. Twodimensional character masks (a “brawn/brains/poet” criminal trio, a small-town cop, a local stunner with a dipso husband, a Russian hitman) are incorporated into a psychedelic landscape based on trippy local folklore and journalistic sketches from life. Sphagnum is as erratic as advertising, familiar as a local beer, undemanding as Dontsova, and verbose as Tarantino — what more could the people want? It scored highly not thanks to quality writing, but rather because of its mediocrity. Sphagnum does not yearn to be great literature, which is why it hasn’t scared off the general public. Aesthetes will note the importance of “filling cultural niches”, and create a dazzling media-halo.
Zmicier Vajciushkevich also chose to play in the same field. Following the concept-psychedelia of Chary ( “Spells”, 2011) and Wojaczek (2012), he returned with “Belarusian chanson” on his new album Varanok (“The Black Maria”). Although Zmi-cier’s music is rooted in local folk, poetic cabaret and European singer-songwriter traditions, this time he elected to perform Russian criminal-style blat songs in Belarusian. His hopes for commercial success were flawed, however: the Belarusian lyrics in this alien musical format failed to enthuse either lovers of the authentic Russian product or Vajciushkevich’s original fans.
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Laboratory experimenter Sergey Pukst also applied a personal touch to chanson, adopting the persona of boorish chan-sonnier Georgiy Dobro to sing vicious parodies of Russian blat songs. However, very few people grasped his subtle sneering and, commercially, Stas Mikhaylov had more credibility.
Another more sophisticated (but no less controversial) variation on the “lowbrow” theme was Natalka Kharitaniuk’s novel Smierc’ lesbijanki (“Death ofa Lesbian”). This provocative (right from the title) play on classic detective-genre images was designed to import a European pulp fiction matrix into Belarusian culture. Its success was hampered by what should have been its strong point — the author’s educated, utterly refined style. Smierc’... blends the chick lit of Joanna Chmielewska with the intellectual stylishness of Umberto Eco. Agatha Christie chased through the labyrinths of Polotsk by shadows of Nietzsche and Confucius. This seemingly “national” novel is overloaded with references, quotations and allusions. Its constant changes of mood and intonation (often several times per page) deprive the reader of basic, “pop” enjoyment, i.e. accessible doses of pure emotion.
Equally overburdened was Artur Klinau’s latest opus Shklatara (“Bottles and Jars”). Klinau’s novel kept to his earlier, picaresque course while deliberately lowering the bar: his previous novel, Shalom, could aspire to being a conceptual pamphlet, whereas the new Shklatara was merely a satirical novel. In “gutter” press style, Klinau superficially recounts the real circumstances of his divorce, mixed in with personal anecdotes and chunks of his shelved Belarusfilm script for Shliakhtich Zavalnia (“Zavalnia the Nobleman”).
Assimilating grass-roots cultural forms makes a major gesture towards the local audience, yet such an approach is potentially damaging to quality.
Far from the fight:
the “third culture” as a covert mainstream
In the Belarusian cultural field, so full of showy projects (be they pro-state or protest), the most brilliant initiatives of 2013 went against the rules, or lived according to their own. Their goal was
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not to fight, but to construct new meanings. Their path was one of individual participation, not public acclaim.
In 2013, Maks Korzh, the brightest Belarusian pop breakthrough in recent years, released his second album Zhif v kayf (“Livingon a Buzz”). Korzh speaks for the “un-conscious” majority, converting the “humdrum” into poetry with no posing or histrionics. A successful commercial artist with a Moscow work permit and lyrics of almost Mikhalkovian “sincerity”, Maks entirely fits the requirements of his audience — the semi-educated noughties generation, for whom Saturday barbecues rank higher than national identity. Korzh is truly relevant, and has made his own way without presidential backing or TV talent shows.
The “third culture” relies not on slogans, but universal subjects and recognisable content. At the 2013 BulbaMovie festival in Warsaw, the top prize went unanimously to Maria Ma-tusevich’s animated short Fokus (“The Trick”) — the wonderful parable of a rabbit carefully tidying up his cosy little world, until he is hauled out of a magician’s top hat by the ears. A wordless film that says it all.
Another “post-barricade” writing tactic was demonstrated by the band BosaeSonca (“BarefootSun”), with two simultaneous album releases last year — the electric Zalaty (“Golden”) and acousticAdpus’ci(“LetGo”). Influenced by both Belarusian singer-songwriting traditions and foreign folk-rock, these young musicians craft soundscapes apparently devoid of “chartabi-lity”. However, they do manage to turn flag-waving, weapon-brandishing “Belarusianness” into a natural experience of here and now reality.
Cultural education strategies are also evolving. “Partisan schools” of the past are now transforming into public entertainment, combining education and enjoyment. This was the basis for Sergey Budkin’s Tuzin: niemaulia (“Dozen: Infant”) project, three Belarusian silent films with soundtracks by contemporary musicians. This is cultural education, an introduction to the alternative music scene, and a club event, all rolled into one.
Katya Kibalchich’s Mova ci Kava (“Language or Coffee”) project works in a similar way — a free, mass Belarusian-lan-guage-teaching experiment which invariably attracts several hundred participants. Meanwhile, Dziciachaja zaMova, Hleb
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Labadzenka’s language book for children, also took a step towards unofficial education. New cultural strategies not only disseminate knowledge, they also build a unique communication space — a zone for the creation of dynamic, shared cultural environments, free from decrees, rulings and directives.
The “third culture” has given rise to new intellectual, creative works. Released almost at the same time as Klinau’s Shklatara, Ihar Babkou’s book Khvilinka (“Moment”) is in many ways a borderline text. It is evidently the author’s intellectual autobiography encrypted into a series of short stories featuring allegorical characters. It is a sentimental farewell to the nationalist/ romanticist era of the 1990s, yet also a harsh condemnation of the period. And, finally, it is prose constantly digressing into poetry, as well as poetry that acts as an intellectual puzzle. Khvilinka operates outside of existing conventions, defining possible avenues for the development of Belarusian thought.
“Third culture” projects still have no support from state bodies, but it is superfluous, since a system of decentralised private initiatives has in fact formed — not a new global mythology, but separate models of life in the cultural field. With its current “soft” orientation and strong creative potential, the “third culture” could potentially become a Belarusian mainstream but, as yet, it is uncalled for in its retro-orientated, bureaucratised homeland.
War is war: powerful gestures, personal scores
The patent lack of political will to reform or to launch economic transformation has turned the Belarusian cultural space into a freeze-frame, where movement is optional due to the current state of affairs — flashy reproductions of the officially sanctioned canon, coupled with token resistance from protest culture. This confrontation cannot be described as a systematic cultural war, since neither a unified state culture, nor a coherent “freedom culture” have emerged in recent times. In a stagnating regime, struggle leads to an alternating sequence of ritualistic actions, each fated to entrench the status quo rather than improve the state of affairs. A society’s relative stability is directly proportional to the relative conflicts within its culture.
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A characteristic example of fight clubs giving way to fencing matches was the conflict between the two main “national projects” of the year: the unofficially distributed and rebellious Zhyvie Belarus! ( “Viva Belarus!”, dir. Krzysztof Lukaszewicz) and the state-produced Avel’ (“Abel”) (dir. William Devital), which rated highly even though shooting only began late in the year. Both films are set in a fictitious country. Zhyvie Belarus!is a set of bleak propaganda stereotypes: a poor country, Chernobyl, freaks in power, omnipotent secret services, army “hazing”, popular resistance, brutal riot police, and “conscious” rock’n’roll as a flag of freedom. This protest cine-comic — made by a Polish crew and based on opposition activist Franak Viachorka’s military-service diaries — claimed to tell “the truth about Belarus” but effectively became just another propaganda poster.
Judging by an online version of the script, the state-funded Avel’ is a wholly different fairytale about a beautiful country with a strong president, giant BelAZ trucks, high-rise skylines, heroic riot police, and the wholesome pop group Siabry (“Friends”). It also delves into the global war on terror, brotherly love, and the advantages of gentle evolution over reckless revolution. Both films deal in media stereotypes. Both were made with resources enlisted from abroad: Zhyvie Belarus!received European Union support, Avel’ features Hollywood-style shots, and they were both designed to have greater public impact outside of Belarus.
Various other “militant” action to bolster the existing cultural order seemed equally ineffectual. The latest Belarus Press Photo album was unexpectedly branded an “extremist publication” and the case was sent to the courts. They ordered the confiscation and destruction of 41 copies, while independent publishers Logvinov lost their licence for producing the book. Although never specified officially, the existence of reported “blacklists” of undesirable musicians still remains unclear: sporadic club concerts by Neuro Dubel and Volski (with an unspoken ban on performances by Vajciushkevich and Lyapis Trubetskoy still in force) can hardly be called full rehabilitation.
In the decentralised world of “post-ideological” culture, first-person speech is conspicuous. The malicious, flamboyant disc Dovol’na (“Happy”) by Anastasiya Shpakovskaya and Naka is an entire song cycle; a meticulous, harsh diagnosis of the “na-
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tionwide hangover” of post-electoral days, through a lens of personal experience and individual destiny. Meanwhile, NRM’s first release without Volski, DPBCh (“CUL8R”) is another example ofpersonal scores being settled with an era. This time, a belated farewell to the wave of pro-nationalist zeal of the 1990s, which ebbed into the despondency of [Lukashenko’s] fourth term.
On one hand, it’s fine: the cultural war is no longer a “Party duty”, it has become the artists’ personal quest. On the other, it’s problematic: the artists’ personal torments are becoming less and less intelligible to the general public, who prefer clear messages and simple signals.
Conclusion
The evolution of the cultural situation in 2013 allows one to assert that trends underlined in previous reviews have been consolidated and intensified. State-managed culture is still a “garish sideshow” which serves to stifle other cultural initiatives. Mutual exhaustion of the leading actors in this confrontation of ideology and aesthetics (the state culture industry versus “protest culture”) is irreversibly turning into various imitative demonstrations, derivative in style and reactionary in content. Both sides of the ideological conflict are playing up to their sponsors’ inert expectations by selling them the same old symbolic pro- or anti-regime stereotypes.
In the context of this “clash of paper dragons” — and irrespective of its intensity — the “third culture” is transforming into a domain of fragmented national self-determination. “Be-larusianness” is becoming trendy. Its saleability has risen steeply, creating serious demand for locally-produced pulp novels. Reading home-grown books is now as fashionable as listening to Serebryanaya Svadba (“Silver Wedding”) and flicking through local glossy magazines.
Last year saw independent artists breaking through, while this year saw their active expansion into “lowbrow” genres and styles. One can anticipate genuine dual power in the future: alongside the sensationalist, administrative, bureaucratic state culture system and the sham “underground”, a quasi-market-based, post-ideological cultural sphere will finally arise — a new prototype culture for a post-Lukashenko nation.
