The story of Andrei Kureichyk is a good reflection of the story of Belarus itself. The playwright turned political activist, who has been in exile since 2020, believes that the idea of an independent and free Belarus cannot be abandoned. His most recent project, Voices of the New Belarus, serve as testimony to this belief.

Once or twice a week, throughout April and May 2023, the Belarusian playwright, filmmaker and political activist Andrei Kureichyk walked down several flights of creaky stairs into the dusty basement of a building in New Haven, Connecticut. The basement, belonging to Yale University’s School of Drama, had been converted a number of years earlier into a recording studio, and Kureichyk was joined by an audio engineer in training as well as a different voice actor each visit. Some were student or professional actors; some were intellectuals or professors. They had been recruited for Kureichyk’s project Voices of the New Belarus, a multimedia adaption of his play of the same title.

Despite contentious differences in memory, Polish-Ukrainian relations have remained close and notably strong in important national moments. This reflects two aspects of Polish society: a generation of youth acclimated to supporting Ukrainian sovereignty with compassion, and a national memory politics which allows humanitarianism, but only when it fits into a politically suitable narrative.

In 2003 the Polish philosopher and historian of ideas Leszek Kołakowski gave a speech at the American Library of Congress titled, “What the Past is For”. Kołakowski believed that history serves not to predict the future nor to gain technical advice on how to deal with the present, but to discover the values constitutive of human identities. He told his listeners that “to say that [the events of the past] do not matter to our lives would be almost as silly as saying that it would not matter to me if I were suddenly to erase from my memory my own past personal life … The history of past generations is our history, and we need to know it in order to be aware of our identity; in the same sense in which my own memory builds my personal identity, makes me a human subject.”