Go Alone | Boris Petrovich

Go Alone, or January of Life / Boris Petrovich

…Yes, it was 1993. I am 33 years old. An age when you think: that’s it… Life has been lived. Teachings have not been created. There are no students.

Despair is unworldly.

Someone didn’t live to be that old. They got stronger. They shot themselves. They died, in a word… But they left a reminder of themselves. A mark. A legacy… They removed it. They remained… And we remember them, we know them, and even study them. At school. At university. And so – not in vain… And here – hopelessness. Complete. And all dreams go to waste. In dull, disgusting, fruitless work, for the sake of that same piece of daily bread… And that’s all.

How to live on? How?!

And you have to live. If not for yourself, then for the sake of the one you (so thoughtlessly, recklessly!)
This world has let go.

Biography

Boris Petrovich was born in 1959 in the village of Veliky Bor in the Khoyniki district of the Gomel region. He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Belarusian State University in 1984. He worked in the regional and republican press “Gomelskaya Pravda”, “Zvyazda”, “Literature and Art”, and the magazine “Polymya”. Since 1990 – executive secretary of the weekly “Literature and Art”.

When in 2002 the Belarusian authorities decided to take a hard line against the creative intelligentsia, state-owned literary and art publications were merged into a holding company with a rigidly structured management system and a clear ideological orientation – loyalty to the actions of President Alexander Lukashenko – a large number of writers were forced to leave their jobs. Boris Petrovich did the same.

In 2002, he founded and became the editor-in-chief of the new literary magazine “Dzeyaslov”, which in a relatively short time managed to gain popularity and fame in the country, becoming the most authoritative independent literary and artistic publication in Belarus. The most famous writers in the country, as well as promising young authors, united around “Dzeyaslov”, which made it possible to fully reflect the modern literary process.

In December 2011, Boris Petrovich was elected Chairman of the Council of the Public Organization “Union of Belarusian Writers” – the oldest creative organization in Belarus, which unites more than 450 members. As a series curator and editor, he published more than 60 books by Belarusian authors in the series “Writer’s Bookstore” (among them nominees and laureates of the Giedroyc Prize “Time to Collect Bones” by V. Kazko, “Woman and Leopard” by T. Borisik, etc.), as well as more than a dozen books in the library of the journal “Dzeyaslov”.

From the autobiography:

I made my debut late. At 29. My first book was published at 33. Journalistic work did not let me go. The agricultural department of “Gomelskaya Pravda” exhausted my brains. Besides, I myself was not in a great hurry with publications, although such opportunities existed. And who knows, if Sergei Dubovets, having moved from Gomel to Minsk, had not taken my stories and published one in “Krynitsa” and the other in the collection “Tuteyshikh”, I would not have dared to publish them at all. Well, as the saying goes, he who started – he who did not start anymore. Later, taking advantage of his “official position”, he published his “Dreams” in “LiMe” – as they say now, microprose, miniatures written on the border of reality and sleep, when I came home from work tired and let my head run wild: I wrote what I wanted, and how I wanted. Next came the short stories “Delusions”, “Unnecessary Things”, “Frescos”, “Pilipiki”. What was previously perceived as creative searches, experimentation, “avant-garde” compared to the Belarusian literature of the time, no longer looks like that today, because the younger generation has moved on.