ABSTRACT
The Second World War was no less central to Belarusian literature of the late Soviet period than it was to official historiography. Amongst Soviet-era Belarus's many war writers, Vasil' Bykau stood out in particular for his cosmopolitan outlook on the violence of the mid-twentieth century. The myth of the partisan republic masked the reality of war, thereby displacing trauma: in its striving to delimit the contours of public memory by presenting Belarusians as Soviet heroes, official memory only deferred the painful process of coming to terms with the disasters of the wartime past. In Bykau's earlier works, the war is conceived as a grave trauma, in contravention of official mythmaking – a position that accuses the state, but only of memory distortion; in Znak biady, the core political system of the Soviet socialism is implicated in the catastrophe of the war.
