The well-known Russian historian Tamara Eidelman, who has recently become very interested in Belarus and its history, bought a book by Belarusian journalist and public figure Nasta Rahatko and wrote a very positive review of it.
I bought Nasta Rahatko's book «Nasi z Saboj» (Carry With You) primarily because lately I've been very interested in everything related to Belarus, its culture, history, and people. When I was recording a lecture series about Belarus, I felt that my historical education—which isn't bad at all—had a huge gap, and now I constantly want to fill it.
But as soon as I read a few pages, I realized that I would devour this book—not just for educational purposes, but because I couldn't tear myself away from it. We were driving in the car, and at every traffic light, I opened the book and read another bit. I got home in the evening—and had already finished reading it.
Then I started thinking about how strangely everything turns out. It seemed like I had very little in common with the author of this book. Nasta Rahatko is half my age. We have completely different biographies—she was born in Novorossiysk into a military family, spent her childhood in Ukraine, then moved to Belarus, worked as a journalist, and then was responsible for communications in Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya's office. After that, she left and founded a strategic communications agency in Warsaw—these are completely incomprehensible words to me.
And yet, while reading the book, I held back tears several times and constantly felt that this book was for me and, in many ways, about me.
This is not an autobiography, nor a story about the life of the Belarusian opposition, nor a history of protest. It consists of twelve chapters plus a conclusion. And each chapter is a separate story about something very important to the author. They are engaging, entertaining, sad, shocking. They are very well written. As Nasta writes in the finale: «Of course, I told everything as it was, and of course, I made everything up». This mix of reality and fantasy—and, very importantly, with irony—yields excellent results.
As I understand it, not only did many characters in the book recognize themselves in it, but they are clearly recognizable to many. I, however, don't recognize anyone, but that only makes it better. You read this book not as a story about specific people, but simply as a story about people.
About how relationships form and break, about how horrifying it is to learn that a war has begun, about breaking ties with relatives and the inability to give up love for them, about the weariness of constantly having to divide the world into «us» and «them,» about the horror of parting with friends. About the realization that the Western world doesn't care about any of us at all, about the feeling of emptiness and overcoming that feeling, about the striving to find new meanings.
And this book, for all its irony and even ostentation, despite describing the life of a person from a completely different generation than mine, with a different character, a different fate—it suddenly turns out to be very necessary and wonderfully warm. Excuse the word so overused by book reviewers—poignant.
On the book's cover is a photograph of bare breasts—evidently, Nasta Rahatko's own. In an interview, she says that she perceives her novellas as tattoos that reproduce the events that have left a mark on her life—sometimes sad, sometimes bright.
I have never had a single tattoo in my life, and it never occurred to me to get one. But I read the book, admiring the author's level of openness, her ability to look at the most traumatic events with a smile, and most importantly—her ability to preserve a living soul, no matter how many scars it carries.
The passport has expired, and a new one cannot be obtained outside Belarus. A loved one was declared a terrorist and sentenced—fortunately, in absentia—to twenty years. It's impossible to free any grandmother from the grip of propaganda. It's impossible to save the world. How to live in such circumstances?
And so, when you read Nasta Rahatko's book, you realize that you can live even in a situation where immediate and quick salvation of the world hasn't happened. But if you manage to preserve yourself and your soul, even if covered with endless tattoos, then life continues.
Read «Nasi z Saboj» (Carry With You)—you will laugh and cry, and upon finishing, you will feel that it's easier to breathe.
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