ABSTRACT
Uladzimir Karatkevich conceives the Belarusian nation as perennially under siege, national identity emerges most powerfully as a mode of becoming, rather than a state of being. Karatkevich was an 'inventor' in both senses of the word: the pioneer of Belarusian historical fiction, who supplied national memory with an imaginative narrative base, but also a creator of artifice and illusion. His fiction engages with the official Soviet mythology that tied Belarusian identity to the grand narrative of Soviet teleology. Laughter is central to Karatkevich, both as an external plot feature and as a matter of narrative style. Karatkevich employs laughter as a mode of articulating a sense of collective identity that is, itself, carnivalesque. His dramatic and novelistic discourse is acutely concerned with the question of Belarusian nationhood, and thus it narrates subversive laughter into the very fabric of collective identity.
