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The article focuses on Julius Margolin’s life and memoirs. Margolin was born in Pinsk, survived the Sovietization of Poland, and then spent five years in Soviet gulags. He witnessed the cruel history and functioning of the Soviet regime. The analysis is made on the basis of Margolin’s work Journey to the Land of the Ze-Ka, in which he wanted to show to the world the truth about the Soviet totalitarian system. In that way he intended to fight for freedom of millions of people and for human rights.
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This article analyses the phenomenon of the Belarusian Literature Association “Belavezha” in Poland. The organisation was founded in 1958 on the wave of Belarusian revival processes in the Białystok region. The works of Belarusian writers, Polish citizens, in which the themes of Belarusian and Polish reality, culture and history are reflected, make analyses difficult for Polish and Belarusian literary scholars. The research perspective is an important factor in the classification of the works of “Białowieża people”, which is included in the Kresy (regional or borderland) literature. The article notes that the research perspective is an important factor in the classification of the work of “Białowieża people”.It is emphasized that discrepancies between the Polish and Belarusian understanding of the nature of the work of BLA “Belavezha” members are natural, although the works of the inhabitants of the Białystok region cannot be depleted by comparison with only one national literature and inscribed in the literature of the Borderlands or the region. Heterogeneous and borderland “Białowieża” literature originates from Belarusian roots and to a large extent belongs to the Belarusian context and heritage, and is generally a natural phase in the development of Belarusian literature.
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In this article we investigate male magic in the Romantic prose of the European periphery. We focus our attention on the examples from the works of Spanish writer Gustavo Adolfo B´ecquer and his Belarusian colleague Jan Barszczewski. In the previous research, we determined three main archetypes of national origin that appear in the prose of Romantic writers: the stranger, the wizard and the musician. Using the data we aim at conducting a comparative analysis which will help to determine the way magical male characters are used by G. A. B´ecquer and J. Barszczewski.We are interested in two perspectives, i.e. narrative characteristics and semantic connotations of archetypes and their role in prose. Thus, our article explains the peculiarities of the archetypes in the writers’ prose and allows for future comparative and historical studies.
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The author of the article discusses the stages in creating aesthetics and poetics in small and miniature lyric forms in Belarusian and foreign literature from antiquity to modern times. On the basis of literature of various periods the author analyzes such forms as “vacuum poetry”, texts with the reduction of formally significant components, texts with one word/sign repeated once or several times, udeterone, or single-liner, monopoem.
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Belarusian literature witnessed artistic renewal of a novel between 1990–1995. “I” as a dominant aesthetic strategy was used by Heinrich Dalidovich and Taisa Bondar. “Westerners” – the novel with one character and “Victims” – the novel with many characters discuss many questions, present the authors’ increased interest in an individual in difficult historical circumstances. Writers explore the past and the present of their characters in moral and social conditions, emphasize national content of philosophical context.
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The article is devoted to Belarusian war prose in the 20th century which portraits a German who has been presented as an enemy, a nonconformist rejecting official ideology, and an ethnic German outside Germany. Specific common features that characterize works written by Z. Biadulia, A. Harodnia, C. Hartny,M. Harecki, E. Samujlionok with A. Adamoviˇc, V. Byka˘u, L. Dajnieka, I. ˇCyhryna˘u heritage have been revealed. A tendency to abandon a simplified image of a German as an enemy popular in the 1940s–50s has been pointed out.
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The article describes and analyzes an artistic context of valuable objects in famous texts of ancient Belarusian literature (16th century – the first half of the 17th century) from the perspective of art studies and antiquarian practice. According to the author valuable objects in famous books of ancient Belarusian literature comprise gold and silver coins, pearl and precious stones, inlaid cult objects and weapons, exotic plants and animals, antiquarian books, coats of arms, musical instruments, imported fabrics and luxurious interiors. In the artistic context all above-mentioned objects are symbols of beauty ideals and diversity of the Renaissance and early Baroque in Europe.
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The article is devoted to the problems of penetration of Western Europe romanticism (German in particular) into Poland and Belarus as a result of which the whole aesthetic and artistic paradigm of Belarusian-Polish literary borderland is gradually changing, opening new horizons for verbal art. One of the features of the functioning of this paradigm is its relatively smooth transition from the classic model to the romantic model, which was largely facilitated by the political situation, uniting both the Classicists and the Romanticists in an effort to regain the lost independence of their homeland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Thus, in the process of dialogue, and in the confrontation between representatives of classicism and romanticism, the idea of freedom becomes a key one. It formed the main vectors of development of the Belarusian-Polish literary borderland in the aesthetic space of the 19th century.
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In the article we investigate the usage of both motifs and formal particularities of popular naturalistic legends in the prose of romantic writers from European periphery, especially in books written by Spanish prose writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Belarusian prose writer Jan Barˇsˇce˘uski. We determine similarities and differences between various forms of popular prose (fairy tales, fables and legends) and investigate the influence of legends on the prose of the romantic period and the reasons for its dominance in the given genre. Based on these principles, we analyze specific examples of time and space elements of the narration in mythology and folklore, as well as the main features of the usage of the aforementioned elements by romantic writers. The article therefore uncovers the role of naturalistic legends in the formation of the literary systems of romantic period, which opens new perspectives for European comparative and literary studies.
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The article analyses Zamyatin’s novel We (1921) and Hihiewicz’s story Martian Journey (1990). Zamyatin is considered to be the father of the anti-utopian genre, and We became a source of inspiration for many writers, including George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Hihiewicz, in his works, repeatedly portrayed the society of the future, completely subordinated to the system of state power. Similar issues and kinds of narration are the main features that link both analysed works. However, the transformation of Zamyatin’s protagonist is only temporary, as a consequence of which he returns to the initial situation, to the life absolutely subordinated to the state power. On the other hand, Hihiewicz’s protagonists solve existential problems by choosing between life in captivity and death.
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The article analyses the biographical and creative path of Znicz, the Belarusian poet, philosopher and conservatory graduate. His poems consistently express spiritual search, which is characterized by the author’s dominant theocentric worldview (in 1996 Aleh Biembiel took the monastic vows of Zhyrovichy Monastery). Znicz’s poetry continues the excellent tradition of his great predecessors – ascetics and penitents. His poetry reveals the pursuit of reconciliation on the basis of unquestionable millennium-old Christian values with the fundamental values of the nation state, especially within the understanding of the concept of patriotism.
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The article concerns the presence of animals in folk magical texts, their treatment and place in society. The author states that regardless of the language of zamowa or medical text, many of them mention plants when treating. Many of them also require their use. The plants themselves were often collected at a specific time, blessed during various religious holidays (usually on August 15), and dried and stored in designated places. They very used in the event of illness of people, as well as domestic animals (most often cows, horses, less often pigs, sheep or goats, and exceptionally chickens). People believed that plants were also helpful in diseases caused by evil forces, witches and milk witches.
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The article discusses the life and creative path of Constance Bouylo under the influence of its social mythologization. The role of the poetry collection “Mound Flower” and the poem “I love” in the creative biography of the author has been determined. It tells about the poetess’s friendship with Yanka Kupala, Vladislava Frantsevna Lutsevich, Nina Taras. The influence of the biography on the changes of the artistic paradigm, the creative method, the picture of the world and, in general, the art world of Constance Buylo have been analyzed. The author of the article presents the processes of socialization, ideologization, mythologization, schematization in the writing of poetry.
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The problem of studying characteristics of the art of the totalitarian period remains relevant for several reasons. The first reason is the insufficient research of significant and very interesting material in the whole post-Soviet space in general and in Belarusian literary criticism in particular, the second one is a comprehensive understanding of the literary process of the 1920s and 1930s and the poet’s artistic achievements in the light of new research regarding interdisciplinary discourse that needs to be carried out. The object of the research is represented, first of all, by the works on propaganda. It is especially important to analyze them in the legacy of significant authors, one of whom is Jeugenij Pflaumbaum. In general, his work has been little studied. In J. Pflaumbaum’s works of 1928–1931, the archetypes of the hero, the father, the mother and the enemy (H. Gunther), typical of the art of new or socialist realism, are displayed.
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The article studies similarities and differences in Adam Mitskevich’s and Jan Barshchevski’s methods and creative approaches. Special attention is paid to folklorism in the writers’ works. The author of the article conducts a comparative analysis of Jan Barshchevski’s poem Sierota (The Orphan) and the collection of stories Szlachcic Zawalnia, czyli Białoruś w fantastycznych opowiadaniach (Nobleman Zawalnia, or Belarus in Fantastic Stories) to the poem Dziady (Forefathers) by Adam Mickiewicz. An undoubtedly successful innovation of Jan Barshchevski was the transfer of romantic folklorism into prose. This allowed the writer to create vivid and exciting pictures of life and moral world of Belarusians. The article is devoted to the 170th anniversary of Jan Barshchevski’s farewell ceremony.
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n the poem “Son na kurganye” by Yanka Kupala the author uses symbolic form and content (dream, night dream) in order to present the existence of man from the perspective of his entitled fate and hostility of existential space. The author of the article directs his attention to the presence of poet’s social predictions for Belarusians. Symbolic form and content, conventionality of artistic form and its elements (mysticism, recurrence, analogy of events, etc.), semantic code, problems, combination of the past, present and future in the space of dream-code have been analyzed. In order to reinforce conclusions about the conceptual way of artistic presentation of reality in Y. Kupala’s oeuvre, the author compares the poem “Son na kurganye” to other poems (“Razlad”, “Son”, “Syabroutsam na doli”, “Prystal k žit’..”, “Prarok”, “Uwies da dna”, “Viečarynka”, “Adviečnaya piesnya”, “Kurgan”, “Yana i ya”, tragycomedy “Tuteyšija”).
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The paper explores poems by Russian and Belarusian authors written during World War I and directly related to this historical phenomenon. The presence of a common “mission” – that of overcoming death and destruction – induces the author to combine these texts into a megatext. Problems related to the creation and existence of supertext formations have become a priority of research in modern literary studies. The range of such polytextual unities is gradually expanding and has been acquiring a tradition of scholarly description. In this regard, the question of whether to consider the text(s) of World War I as a megatext is a legitimate one and requires an answer. A megatext ought to be understood as a synthetic supersaturated text that preserves traces of an “extra-textual substrate”. The megatext of World War I, from our point of view, is a complex semiotic formation of a mythopoetic nature. An analysis of the poetry of this period (1914–1915) reveals a similarity between the texts of authors that belong to different literary trends and schools as well as to different national literatures. This similarity can be explained by the influence of a common “mission”, and this is why the poems reproduce the same model of the world. This model of the world can be investigated through motives; among them the author of the paper indicates images of fire, including the world conflagration, in combination with images of food. The unifying principle behind these images can be identified as the motif of palingenesis, which indicates the substrate mythologem of rebirth or resurrection. The peculiarity of “life-and-death” issue in the megatext of the World War I is that the “eternal return” and rebirth lead not to a renewal, but to a circular movement between deaths: after dying in the universal conflagration, the world is not reborn, as could be expected. Cyclical by its nature, the mythological plot finds its realisation in this megatext in the form of a cumulative chain.
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The analysis of literature evidences of the Great Patriotic War is closely connected with the consideration of the category of space. The war scenery represents not only the model of geographical space but has the symbolic status acting as the place of memory. The aim of the present article is the research of memory sceneries presented in the first two books of the Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. In the works of Belarusian writer the space, war and memory act in different configurations, creating complicated and multi-level system where the number of repeating motives and images can be found. The peculiarities of women and children memory functioning determine the ways of constructing space and identity of a person in it. The article analyzes various types of the space: the own and the others one, the space of initiation, the taboo spaces, acoustic space, heterotopias, etc. composing the world of the Great Patriotic war seen by the eyes of Alexievich characters.
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