Works by Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and Alexievich disappeared from the school curriculum in Belarus

The Ministry of Education of Belarus excluded the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov and Svetlana Aleksievich from the school curriculum on Russian literature for 11 grades. This was reported by Mediazona.

The changes follow from the curriculum approved on June 21. In the past, the works of Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn were included in the Literature of the Mid-1950s – Early 1990s program in the section on dissident literature.

The previous program assumed that three academic hours were allocated for the study of Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in Ivan Denisovich”, and the list of books for additional reading included Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. Svetlana Aleksievich’s book “The Last Witnesses” has also disappeared from the program “Russian-language literature of Belarus”. She was included in the section “Prose. Man and War ”along with the works of Nikolai Cherginets and Sergei Trakhimenok.

Note that Svetlana Aleksievich is the Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature 2015. In August 2020, a criminal case was opened in Belarus over the creation of the presidium of the coordination council of the Belarusian opposition, which included Aleksievich. The writer became the only member of the presidium who remained free: the rest were detained, forced to leave, or forcibly taken out of the country. In September last year, Aleksievich also left Belarus.