I am dancing

"I Dance" is a sincere and powerful autobiographical story about life in modern Belarus, about trials, fear, and the struggle for the right to be oneself.

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This sincere and witty autobiographical account is only now able to reach Belarusian readers. The author describes the adult concerns of thirty-year-olds in an authoritarian country. The work is primarily about confronting various systems: visa, tax, border, police, violence, traditionalist, etc. And not in an adolescent-punk sense, but existentially. It is a work about the struggle for happiness in contemporary Belarus and Germany, and a little bit in Lithuania and Ukraine.

"I opened and closed 'I Dance' several times, reading it carefully, in snippets. Sometimes I cried, more often I laughed, but most of all there was fear: how much more can she take? What else will fall on Vika's shoulders, she who simply wants to live? It's strange to see a familiar story that happened to all of us through the eyes of another person. This book is a hymn to the right to choose one's own life, because we only have one." (Volha Harbunova)

"For me, this is a powerful and sincere book. It introduced me to young people I didn't get to know at the marches. Back then, they talked about how they pasted flyers at night, and during the day built barricades from trash cans, how they slept without mattresses in Akrestsina prison and breathed chlorine… None of us could imagine that killing them would once again become a job. Look around – there's no end to those who joyfully do this job today. Where do they come from? – you ask. You want to love and dance, and outside your windows – armored vehicles." (Svetlana Alexievich)