(Re)Imagining the Capital of the Nation: Artur Klinau's Little Guidebook to the Sun City

Abstract

Abstract:The article investigates Artur Klinau's Little Guidebook to the Sun City in the light of Belarus's political and cultural context. It considers the book as a stratification of three narrative layers: an autobiographical selective remembrance, a nationalist counternarrative that mythologizes places of memory of the pre-Soviet era and constructs the (illusory) idea of a Belarusian historical continuum rooted in central European traditions, and a visualization of Minsk as a hybrid and rhizomatic city. As I argue, the contradictions and tensions characterizing this multilayered structure reflect the aporia of the antagonistic and hegemonic battles over "Belarusianness" and collective and historical memory in post-Soviet Belarus.