Authors

Discussion

Literary Minsk Online, dissent literary process in Belarus, is carried out in the digital realm since late 1990-s. Shrinking state support and expanding repressions have left litterateurs with online-platforms as nearly the only opportunity to publish and preserve literary texts. Shift in authorial digital subjectivity and blockage and / or irrevocable deletion of dissent Belarusian texts and internet-resources place writers and researchers before the problem of archive.

Given paper is to formulate the circumstances and obstacles of Belarusian online-literature archive, to overview possible theoretical frames in digital humanities at the moment and to substantiate the idea of «transformative archive» (F. El-Tayeb) as one of the options.  

In the Belarusian context the archive itself was hardly ever a body of non-political domain. While the official historical archive of the country wasn’t open to the public and is again governed by KGB’s officer, independent archives financed by foreign funds can not be a reliable source of knowledge too, due to their dependency on political agenda and financial means.

In contemporary non-democratic contexts there is a need of possibility of applying non-institutionalized knowledge in academia. The necessity and possibility of the further institutionalisation of such an archive / transformative is also to be addressed. “Transformative Archive of Literary Minsk Online” does not necessarily put itself “counter-“ the official one, but indeed seeks to transform literal society, the ways of knowing and researching it.

Importance of the given research springs from its problematization and proposing an answer to how the current state of Belarusian online-literature could be preserved and analyzed.