Agenda

Contemporary Belarusian poetry can be understood as a space where languages, historical memories, and identity constructions intersect and often come into tension, reflecting the country’s complex past and present. Both long-standing historical traumas and more recent events, such as the 2020 protests, deeply shape current poetic production, turning poetry into a form of resistance, testimony, and an attempt to search for ultimate meaning. By focusing on key authors and texts, the discussion explores the relationship between Belarusian, Russian, and other languages and writing systems used in Belarusian poetry, while also highlighting the political and cultural contexts that influence recent poetic practices.
The talk is delivered by Giulia De Florio, Associate Professor at the University of Parma. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian children’s literature, Soviet singer-songwriters, translation, and contemporary Russophone poetry. She edited "Terra sorella" (2021) by Dmitrii Strotsev and co-edited the anthology "Il mondo è finito e noi invece no" (2024), dedicated to contemporary Belarusian poetry. She is also President of Memorial Italia, part of the Memorial network—awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022—which works on preserving the memory of Soviet repression and promoting human rights in the post-Soviet space.