ABSTRACT
Ihar Babkou's mode of cosmopolitanism involves an overt conceptualization of Belarus as a postcolonial space. Babkou's novel makes the past ever-present and distant at the same time: the tragedies of Belarusian history are conjured by the words on the page, but the counterfactual dreaminess and intertextual play of the narrative cause endless deferral of remembrance. Unlike the partisan narratives whose critical thrust is directed exclusively at the Soviet discourse about Belarus, the authors share a pragmatic preoccupation with the question of how to remember dialogically, without appropriating the cosmopolitan past for a positive ideology such as nationalism. Babkou's Belarusian historiographical metafiction explores, in particular, the relationship between the Soviet-era co-optation of national identity and post-Soviet Belarusian nationhood, which is ontologically unstable and contested. Babkou and Jan Bakharevich both articulate a concern with the Belarusian past that, perhaps paradoxically, resists the urge to remember: they eschew any attempt to reconstruct Belarusian history.
