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Results of comparative analysis of the first edition of the poetry book by Natalla Arsenjeva (1927) and its reedition in the book “Between the shores” (1979) is being presented. The questions of the presence/absence of a canonical text, non-authors modifications on different levels of construction of a lyric poetry and deep violation of early poetic principles of the author of “Under the blue sky” are being formulated.
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In the article there is a review of the history of the Belarusian verslibre in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries: from Maxim Bogdanovich and Vatslav Lastovski – the initiators of verslibre experiment in the native poetry – to modern young poets. It is worth mentioning that it was M. Tank who put an emphasis in the Belarusian verslibre on images with national-cultural connotations. Such a feature of the writer’s style has become one of the leading characteristics in his poetry – the tradition of Tank. It is established that the Belarusian verslibre in the 20th and the beginning of 21st centuries fixes this tradition in works by A. Ryasanov and V. Orlov. National connotations are more obvious in other cultures: they can be seen in German poems by A. Ryazanov and works by M. Tank in Russian translations.
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The article deals with peculiarities of the development of Ukrainian and Belarusian children’s literature in the postcolonial period. The research history of children’s literature within the field of comparative studies is analyzed. The evolution of investigation approaches in relation to the children’s literature phenomenon at the end of XX – beginning of XXI century is examined.
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In the article conditions and factors of onthological and aesthetic discourse in the works of a well-known modern Belarusian poet in Poland Ian Czykwin are analyzed. The author validates the question concerning the status of the lyrical hero as a polemical answer to limitations and aggressiveness of an official discourse. She also emphasizes that a discoursive broad-range analysis requires texts written by other representatives of philosophical poetry, which guarantees reflections on the phenomenon and explanations of the specific features of aesthetic strategies used by the author of the Polish-Belarusian border.
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In the article the results of the analysis of the avant-garde and neo avant-garde tendencies in the lyric poetry of Belarusian poet Ales Navrotsky are presented. The transformation of conventional language in literature, techniques of increasing intellectual significance of poetry, and developing wording are also discussed. Very often Navrotsky’s poetry is based on playful approaches, experiments with sounding of poetic texts, additional attention to the rhythmic capabilities of free and accentual verses, nontraditional rhythm formats, internal harmony of words, and attraction to grotesque and absurd.
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According to the analyzed examples the artistic image of Kostyushko has been widely used as a concept by Belarusian poets and translators since the 19th century. They broke with this tradition in Soviet times. The image of the hero functions as a symbol in the cultural and historic discourse of Belarusian poets. The patriotic feelings are of Lithuanian-Belarusian nature without the division into Lithuanian or Belarusian type. The presence of various historical periods on the territory of modern Belarus has been emphasized.
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Belarusian literature of the interwar period reflected such an important issue as the interpretation of scientific and technological progress in an opposition to civilization and culture in theoretical and literary texts. This topic in the article is discussed from the point of view of both actual philosophical context and aesthetic quest. We are talking about the original theoretical development of Belarusian intellectuals of the early twentieth century as well as considerable importance and mastering of foreign experience because 1920s and 1930s witnessed an increased attention to various aspects of the topic in Belarusian humanistic space. This was due both to general tendencies in the European philosophy and art, and to the fact that after the victory of the Russian Revolution of 1917, publications of the 1920s called to create a new type of culture. The analysis of literary and cultural texts of E. Borichevsky, P. Dvarkevich, A. Babareka, T. Klyashtorny and other authors enables to conclude that the context of Belarusian literature and culture of the 1920s and 1930s reflects not only the high aesthetic level of poetry and criticism, but also the desire to comprehend most significant problems of human existence and complicated relations between civilization and culture.
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The paper presents previously unknown manuscript of Vandalin Shukevich which was found at the archive of the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow. The manuscript contains the list of the objects forming an ethnographic collection donated by Shukevich to the museum in 1913. The paper focuses on Belarusian dialectological denominations of these objects and tends to evaluate the importance of the manuscript for further dialectological studies. Also lexical comparative analysis of dialect forms aiming to identify research lacunae of the Northwest dialectological area and to determine the degree of language interferences at the Baltic-Slavic language border was made.
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The latest phase of Vol'ha Hapeeva's career, whose prose and poetic work has won numerous prizes, especially in German-speaking countries, includes writings from 2019-2021, in which the author, describing in prose her childhood in Soviet Belarus, gives life to an imaginative metaphysical detective story. Her verses, which are intimately personal in their reflection of the author's deep-rooted feminist convictions against the stubbornly patriarchal character of the society in which she lives, have also matured over time, to the point that they have earned her a place of honour among the leading contemporary Belarusian poets.
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A distinctive feature of the Belarusian literary process of the 19th century is the parallel presence of authorial and anonymous works. In the corpus of artistic texts of this period there are more than a hundred anonymous works. We know the names and surnames of many writers who allegedly wrote in Belarusian, but to our time no Belarusian works have survived. The subject of this study is the life and creative vicissitudes of Yulian Liaskouski (1826–1889), as well as hypotheses regarding the possible involvement of the poet in the creation of the poem Zahraj, zahraj, chłopcze mały... (Play, Play, Boy Small...) and propaganda texts for the people from the early 1860s. The article, based on the analysis of printed and handwritten materials, proves that Yulian Liaskouski, who most often performed under the pseudonyms Y. Korabicz, Marcin Mizera, and Mroczek, used not only Polish, but also Belarusian in his works. It is very likely that the poems Ziemielka maja… (My land…) and Pad dudu (Sing the Bagpipe Pad), published by him as folk ones in the article Słówko o pieśni (A Word about Song) (1882), belong to him. However, the most significant evidence in favour of the fact that Y. Liaskouski has written some works in Belarusian is the statement of Adam Honori Kirkor, in which a well-known Vilnius editor and publisher includes the poet and publicist Yulian Mroczek among the most famous Belarusian writers of the middle of the 19th century – Vincent Dunin-Marcinkewicz, Arciom Viaryha-Dareuski, Uladislau Syrakomlia, Vikentij K.
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In the years 1922–1936 in the Belarusian Soviet republic there were four official languages: Belarusian, Yiddish, Polish and Russian. There were educational institutions, theatres, print publishing houses and literary organizations of national minorities, including Latvian and Lithuanian. Russian-speaking authors who started in the circles of workers’ correspondents (rabkors) and literary studios, by 1926 formed the group “Zvenya” (“Links”), from which in 1927 the group “Minsky Pereval” (“Minsk Pass”) was separated. In the studies devoted to the Belarusian-Russian literary interrelations and the history of Russian-language literature in Belarus, the activities of this group are not presented. The article fills this gap and offers new aspects for considering the problem of Belarusian-Russian relations and non-Belarusianlanguage literature in Belarus. Despite a significant number of studies, both problems remain relevant. The material of the article controverts the ideologically biased position that considers Belarus as an indigenous part of the “Russian world”, and at the same time proposes a popular one in literary studies in relation to the period of the 16th–19th centuries (sometimes also the 20th century) the concept of “multilingual literature of Belarus”. The article traces the stages of the institutionalized existence of Russian-speaking group in the Belarusian literary space, from contradictory relations with the influential association “Maladniak” (“Saplings”) to the establishment of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934). It was used the archival documents, publications of Russian-language authors of the 1920s and early 1930s, and the verbatim report of the First Congress of Soviet Writers. The group was not realized as a collective project because in the “multinational Soviet literature” built since the mid-1920s there was no place for extraterritorial Russian-language literature as national minority literature.
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The article is devoted to the protests after the falsified presidential elections in Belarus in 2020 on the example of a collection of stories by Alhierd Bakharevich “A Police Search in the Museum”. Particular attention is paid to the creation of heroes, as well as the entanglement of the individual in history. The characters are divided into two groups: ordinary people who, despite their fear, decided to participate in demonstrations, and people struggling with the hardships of everyday existence, who, despite their lack of political involvement, become the subject of interest of representatives of the authoritarian power. The collection of stories, published in 2023, introduces a new direction in contemporary Belarusian prose related to protests. The analyzed work has not yet been the subject of in-depth reflection in literary studies. A traditional comparative analysis was used, where the decisive criterion was the positioning in relation to the role of executioner – victim. The aim of the article is to point out that the heroes of social protests were ordinary people who were pushed into action by their disagreement over the open violation of freedom of choice and the inability to decide on their fate, or the brutality of the representatives of the authorities. In the stories, there are characters expressing both individual and collective experience. The created characters and their adventures are therefore a literary record of events related to the post-election protests and everyday existence. The analysis proved that in the image of the protests, special attention was paid to a man and the role of history in his life. The characters created are ordinary people, representatives of various professions and social classes. These are not individuals whose character traits would make them stand out from society. These are average people who are unable to accept the actions of the authorities any longer. The past is largely absent, as it is only marginally remembered. Such an approach allows us to emphasize the role of ongoing events and indicates that they determine a person’s life.
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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.
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Beginning with attempts to deny or repress the very idea of Belarusian history, this article is devoted the use of historical themes by three generations of Belarusian writers, with the youngest first and ending with three from the middle generation who, as a rule, do not show the influence of their elders on themselves, nor do they seem greatly to influence the younger writers. All ages, however, are engaged in the same struggle to counter the anti-historical ideas propagated by the leadership of their country, and the younger writers bring a sometimes unusual, indeed iconoclastic, approach to this important task.
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Jan Lajčiak (1875–1918) and Ihnat Kanchevsky (1896–1923, pseudonym Ihnat Abdziralovich) wrote works charac- terising elements of the Slovak and Belarusian cultural space around the same time. The environment in which Slovaks and Belarusians lived at that time was conducive to multilingualism and direct contact with other nationalities, contact with which left traces in the character of the national culture. Lajčiak, in his sociological and philosophical essay Slova- kia and Culture (1921), takes a broad view of the cultural values of Slovaks and Slovakia and tries to anchor them in the value system of cultural thinking in general, so he creates a comparison with the cultural aspects of other communities, in which each nation has to take its own active position, but also emphasises the importance of culture for the individual, not only for the national community. Ihnat Kanchevsky‘s essay The Eternal Road (1921) is described as a genre of lite- rary-philosophical lament, which embodies the national-identifying features of the Belarusians and at the same time is a text defining a different quality of national consciousness (in comparison with the previous contemporary, mostly rural to insitic texts). The link between the texts, which motivates their analysis and subsequent comparison, is the emphasis of both authors on cultural-identifying elements such as the idea of the struggle for language as an integral part of cul- ture, and, above all, the emphasis on art as an important and necessary factor of cultural life and cultural development.
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Britain is largely ignorant about Belarusianlanguage and literature, having heard only ofMinsk, Chernobyl and Lukashenka. Attempts toinform the public about this country began in themiddle of the 20th century through the lecturesand publications of the Anglo-Belarusian (thenByelorussian) Society. This limited successhas been continued to the present day, withbooks, conferences and various meetings of theSociety. Informing the wider public, however, isas challenging now as it was over half a centuryearlier
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Literary translation is one of the most importanttools for cultures to interact and infl uenceone another. It is even more essential intoday’s Belarus, as it serves as an aid to thepopularisation of the Belarusian language andliterature. Nevertheless, translating literary textspresents a particular array of challenges. Thisarticle analyses Ryhor Baradulin’s Spanish-Belarusian translation strategies (addition ofrhymes, grammatical adaptation, fi delity toforeign elements) based on three examples fromFederico García Lorca’s works with varyingtarget-text results.
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The formation of the cultural identity of individual nations did not follow the same pattern because the broad spectrum of events and stimuli that determine culture and identity ensures that cultural diversity is shaped not only by geographical, political, and social conditions but also by accepting these conditions and accepting oneself in these conditions. This aspect allows us to address the multi-layered cultural features of the Belarusian cultural complex based on literary texts reflecting the defining periods of the constitution of Belarusian individuality. The starting point is the phenomenon of the so-called tuteishasts (local affiliation), which appears in Belarusian literature (and culture in a broader sense) as an attitude guaranteeing a safe position between foreign ideologies and their influence. Existing and own interpretative findings are confronted with theories about the importance of ethnicity and the national identity of modern nations. We perceive self-identification as the specific essence of national identity. The awareness of belonging to a particular culture and accepting the environment’s expectations is part of the group identity, a combination of personality and group. Its feature is the sharing of specific social and cultural characteristics. It is gradually being built, developed, and best identified in contact with foreign culture, which allows us to use literary texts as a basis for interpretative explanations of the foundations of national identity in the Belarusian context.
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