The Sun City of Dream / 2006

The book “Minsk. The Sun City of Dreams” was written special for Suhrkamp Verlag (Berlin) in 2006. Than it was published on Belarusian in Logvinau publishing house in Minsk (2008). Translated on Polish, Sweden, Hungarian, Russian.

The book is a part of Klinau’s concept Minsk as a Sun City of Dream.

“This essay combines features of a travel guide with autobiographical elements. It is a walk through the Sun City, the center of the Belarusian capital, with its palaces from the 30s to the 50s of the 20th century in the style of “Stalin Empire”, as well as their considerably less representative backyards. A reader could know the basics of Belarusian history from its beginnings in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the period on the Soviet era to the present. During its history Minsk was many times destroyed including in the Second World War, so that is hardly get some of the old Minsk:

“This fact that Minsk became The Sity of Sun was not a whim of history. The city, which had started its history as a cemetery – with the bloody shores of Njamiha river – became the graveyard for dead cities. The city was once catholic, orthodox, sometimes Jewish, sometimes baroque, once a provincial town, a Soviet city, once an imperial city in its history. After each death, the city was not in continuation of the tradition again, but became a completely different city, which had nothing in common with the previous one, neither the aesthetics nor in the everyday world or the mythology of its people”. Artur Klinau: Minsk, Sun City of Dreams, p.95

On German the text was translated by Volker Weichsel. The work’s title is a reference to La città del Sole by the Italian philosopher and Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella.

German press on “Minsk. The Sun City of Dreams”:

Anyone who wants to understand the country and its people, come to Klinau book is not over, that’s already become a classic”.

– Ingo Petz, Deutschlandfunk

“With its autobiographical diary from Minsk Klinau could do the important thing which literature could do: he could name with a bright child’s voice the nudity of the emperor. It’s not only artistic acumen, but also a good deal of moral courage: because Alexander Lukashenko will come to his bitter end with lonely, naked and cold happiness”.

– Ulrich M. Schmid, Neue Zürcher Zeitung [8]

The source // de.wikipedia.org

2013 — “Путеводитель по городу Солнца”, AD Marginum publishing house, Moscow, Russian
2012 — “Minszk, az álmok napvárosa” (Kairosz), Pálfalvi Lajos esszé, Hungary
2011 — “Minsk, drommar nas solstag”, Ersatz, Stockholm, Sweden
2008 — “Przewodnik po Miescie Slonca”, wydawnictwo Czarne, Wolowiec, Poland
2008 — “Малая падарожная кніжка па горадзе СОНца”, Logvinau publishing house, Minsk, Belarus
2006 — “Minsk. Sonnenstadt der Traume”, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, Germany

Артур Клінаў книги