Andrei Kureichik’s bold, polyvocal theatrical assemblages capture the frenetic fracturing of the myths  and promises of our new millennia. Whether through invented or verbatim speech, he captures the way  the bombastic political rhetoric seeps into the everyday language of his vast range of characters and  archetypes. With particular attention on the recent renewal of extreme political oppression in Russia  and Belarus, Kureichik deftly stretches the limits of scope and scale to capture the invisible threads that  unite us. By turns caustic and sarcastic, witty and ironic, and shockingly direct, these plays evoke the  horrors of the 21st century while maintaining a belief in our capacity for hope and love.
—Valleri Robinson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Andrei Kureichik ingeniously manages to seize the reader or spectator of his plays by both brain and  heart, intellect and emotion. Through his kaleidoscopic, decentered, at times plotless, at times funny,  view of political turmoil, Kureichik magnifies the deep, ongoing persistence of the Belarusian and  Russian people against autocracy and corruption. Existential and engrossing, the plays in this volume range from testimony of real political prisoners to profound science fiction. They urgently need to be  read and staged in our world today.
—Alisa Ballard Lin, The Ohio State University 

I’m struck by the prophetic coherence of the project. In these darkening days of illiberalism and  demagoguery, Kureichik’s texts are torches, shining a sometimes flickering, a sometimes searing light on  the bewildering, painful, and utterly intimate experience of living for and within a community of  resistance. Kureichik reminds us of the struggle: “How can you imprison an entire nation?” This question  is now pertinent well beyond the initial context of Belarus and informs the thinking of anyone who has  their eye on the current geopolitical chessboard.
—Bryan Brown, University of Exeter, co-director of the  cultural laboratory Maketank 

From exile, Kureichik wrote and disseminated his best-known play, Insulted Belarus, an incendiary work  that dramatized the real-life events of the 2020 protests with horrifying clarity and arresting urgency. In  return for his bravery, Kureichik met with a flurry of international attention and, as he recalls, “a wave of  solidarity that cannot even be described.” His play, Voices of the New Belarus, a verbatim play rendering the testimonies of 17 different victims of state torture and arrests, was greeted with similar global  acclaim in 2022.
—Antonia Langford and Heather Magee, The Moscow Times 

A preface by Andrei Kureichik

ANDREI KUREICHIK is one of the foremost playwrights, screenwriters, and producers in Belarus. His plays  have been performed at the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre and Janka Kupala Theaters in Moscow and  Minsk, as well as numerous theaters throughout the former Soviet Union. After writing Insulted. Belarus and Voices of the New Belarus in response to the contested elections and their brutal aftermath in 2020,  he has gained an international following as a political playwright. 

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