The Zekameron

In a world shrunk down to the size of a prison cell, every detail becomes important: the cockroach doing its job, the mousetrap that can be used to kill time, the strange rhythms of the collective snoring heard by the insomniac.

Maxim Znak, a brilliant lawyer and prominent member of the Belarusian opposition movement, was arrested in autumn 2020 and sentenced to ten years in prison in September 2021. In The Zekameron (from »zek«, the Russian abbreviation for prisoner), which he wrote during his first year in prison, he proves to be a gifted writer – pointedly, ironically and with astonishing humour, he tells of his new everyday life in one hundred »mini stories«. His stories bear witness to resistance and self-assertion, to going mad quietly and loudly.

»An excellent narrator is at work here who won’t let the circumstances, about which the reader learns a lot, almost casually, get him down.« Helmut Mayer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»100 highly concentrated texts in which Maxim Znak courageously rises up against the Lukashenko regime and continues the resistance in language.« Sylke Gruhnwald, NZZ am Sonntag

»... once, Znak dreams of a reader out there. At least one reader of the letters they all write here and of which they do not know whether they will ever arrive. At least one reader seems certain: the censor. Znak imagines him as the ideal reader, who keeps all the prisoners’ wonderful letters in a special place. ... We wish this book the whole world as its censor.« Volker Weidermann, Die Zeit

»... all together, the [stories] form a unique literary document of the Belarusian resistance.« Karl-Markus Gauss, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»It is ... encouraging to read how Znak does not let himself be beaten down even in prison, how he uses the weapons that dictators like Lukashenko detest most: humour, wit, publicity.« Jens Uthoff, taz. die tageszeitung

»The fact that this book exists at all should be a miracle. Simply because the stories were smuggled out … The true sensation, however, is the mental achievement the prisoner Maxim Znak was capable of: that in his situation, which could really be called hopeless, he still possesses the internal freedom to create literature.« Cornelia Geissler, Berliner Zeitung