Fiaduta: First, the books of Svetlana Alexievich disappeared, then — those of "foreign agents"

All my life I have read books. According to family legend, I learned to read at three and a half years old. How — "read"? I knew letters and could put them together to form words. Full reading ability came when I was about six. And then my mom took me by the hand and led me through bookstores.

She herself got acquainted with the store managers, introduced me to them and said: "If Sasha comes without me and asks to set aside a book for him, hold it for an hour. Just make sure it's age-appropriate for him."

My weekly shopping budget was three rubles. In those days, that was a lot of money.

When I saw a book I liked in a store and asked them to hold it, I would go to my mom at the tobacco factory. They would call her in the workshop, and one of the foremen — Aunt Lida or Aunt Viera — would come for me, and I would go to the workshop, to my mom, whose hair smelled sweetly of fresh tobacco. Mom would listen to me, give me the necessary amount, and I would go get the book.

Then there were libraries. I was registered at the school library, where Lilia Ilyinichna taught us, among other things, how to rebind "sick" books at home. I went to the "tobacco factory" library, where Lyubov Ivanovna, limping, would lead me to the stacks, to the bookshelves, and I, gasping with happiness, would pull thick volumes from the shelves.

And there was the city children's library. And there was the city adult library named after Makayonak. And there was the university library, and the regional library named after Karski. And there were the National Library ("Leninka") of Belarus and the National Library named after Mažvydas (Lithuania), and the Russian State and National Libraries. And there was the National Library in Warsaw and the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow…

And then I became a reader at the library of correctional colony No. 15 in Mahilioŭ.

There was a strange library there. Some books were in it from the beginning. Some were donated by the city and regional libraries of Mahilioŭ. Something was given away by particularly devout convicts, who received books from home (this was allowed up to a certain point).

And then approximately 10% of the convicts turned out to be either "extremists" or "terrorists," and the number of readers increased many times over.

The cheapest resource in the colony is free time. There's nowhere to put it. Some, violating the internal rules of the colony, use it for sleep. Some watch TV, sincerely hoping that in the news, besides the regular reports from the front — be it the Russian-Ukrainian front or the front of Belarusian field work — something new and unusual will be announced. But once a week, according to the schedule, a crowd of readers marches in friendly formation to the club to manage, within twenty minutes (make do as you can), to grab that very book that will captivate you.

Someone read "cheap" in all senses fantasy or another vampire saga.

Someone else — endless, equally "cheap" detective novels.

But many read classics. Real ones. Dostoevsky was in high demand ("one of us," "also a con"). Remarque was admired ("there's war and love"; "political — it's about emigration here!"; but most importantly — about true male friendship that can withstand anything). There were fans of Bulgakov, Hemingway, Wilde, Stevenson, Vasil Bykaŭ, and Bondarev…

There were also those who got their hands on the poems of Yakub Kolas. People signed up in a queue for Karatkievič.

The youth called me "Uncle Google": I compiled recommendation lists for them, as befits a fully artificial intelligence. Thus, Zweig, Galsworthy, Druon, Goncharov, Leskov, Aleksey M. Tolstoy, and even Gorky appeared in readers' hands.

…And then books began to disappear from the library.

First, the books of Svetlana Alexievich disappeared. There weren't many, mostly early ones — "The Unwomanly Face of War," "Zinky Boys," "Chernobyl Prayer."

Then the books of Russian "foreign agents" disappeared — Akunin, Pelevin, Ulitskaya, Dmitry Bykov (good thing I managed to read his "Orthography" and "Astromava").

Shelves of philosophy and psychology books were confiscated. Victor Frankl's memoirs disappeared (apparently, so that the fate of a psychologist in a concentration camp would not remind us of our own fates). Of course, books in foreign languages vanished; there were even English ones — the same Hemingway, and Arthur Conan Doyle, dating back to Soviet times.

Where they were taken, I still don't know. One of the "knowledgeable" representatives of the convict "nomenclature," the so-called "goats," secretly told me that they are burned in the boiler room of our colony. They aren't even written off — they're just burned.

Books were dying, continuing to warm us.

For some time, I survived by subscribing to magazines. I received "Novy Literaturny Obozreniye" (New Literary Review), "Neprikosnovenny Zapas" (Emergency Reserve), "Voprosy Literatury" (Questions of Literature). I "got hooked" not only several "extremists" from our detachment but also other readers on "Neprikosnovenny Zapas": it was read by a philosopher from Minsk (Article 139, murder), a pimp from Kazan, a veterinarian from the Kirovsky district… But then I was forbidden from subscribing to these magazines. They said that "NLO" and "Neprikosnovenny Zapas" publish foreign agents. I tried to object: "We don't have such a concept in our legislation, and I ordered the subscription through the 'Belpochta' catalog, meaning it should be allowed."

They replied: "Outside — you can, but for you — you cannot."

And in the heat of the moment, they took "Voprosy Literatury" from me as well. So that, presumably, I wouldn't ask anyone unnecessary questions.

But in the library, there stood an orange two-volume set of Viktor Shklovsky, Umberto Eco's "The Role of the Reader." There were also two volumes of Solzhenitsyn's memoirs, gifted to me by Boris P-k, and then by me to the library. And the books of Evgenia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, and Oleg Volkov…

And all our lives — from the Bible and Homer to Glukhovsky and Gandlevsky — stood there, as if waiting for one of the unexpected convict-readers to find oblivion and solace in these books.

And these black letters on the white-yellow, like aged snow, book pages will become a part of our lives.

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