Description

WINNER OF ENGLISH PEN AWARD 2023

SHORTLISTED FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE 2024

‘How did these stories get into your hands? They flew, as if painted by Marc Chagall, through prison walls, borders, and languages.’ – Valzhyna Mort

‘It’s a terse account of painful experience, prison, bewilderment; hugely atmospheric and extremely funny – full of dry wit and small biting observations.’ – Anna Vaught

100 stories written from prison in Belarus with ‘echoes of early Chekhov, Zoshchenko and Samuel Beckett’ (Michael Pursglove). Despite its bleak context, this is a fundamentally optimistic book, engaging comically, yet honestly, with what it means to be human. Translated from the Russian by Jim and Ella Dingley. With an introduction by ‘risen star of the international poetry world’ Valzhyna Mort.

Publisher Review

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. - Michael Pursglove 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. - Cornelia Geissler, Berliner Zeitung [Znak] uses the weapons that dictators like Lukashenko detest most: humour, wit, publicity. - Jens Uthoff, taz.die tageszeitung It's a terse account of painful experience, prison, bewilderment; hugely atmospheric and extremely funny - full of dry wit and small biting observations. - Anna Vaught