The discovery of a new and 'different' writer is undoubtedly one of the most exciting events in the life of any lover of reading. The discovery of a whole new literature is incomparably more so. Yet, with the increase of mass-communications and foreign travel, it would seem that the discovery of such new literatures must be left to the archaeologist in the hope that he may yet excavate scrolls or tablets in some hitherto undiscovered tongue (with for preference a convenient equivalent of the Rosetta Stone to aid the decoding), or to the anthropologist, that he may yet record some last traces of ballad and folksong before the steamroller of universal literacy crushes down these vestiges of oral tradition.

The concept of a new and undiscovered, and, furthermore, a written literature, right on our literary doorsteps so to speak, in Europe itself, seems to lie quite beyond the realms of fact - to belong, indeed, rather to the kingdom of Rupert of Hentzau and his fellows, or to stretch back into that saga past when Goth fought Hun in the Vistula forest and the unknown bournes of Reithgothaland lay 'somewhere between Poland and Russia'.

Yet such lands, and such literatures exist, and if we do not know them, it is because our geographical consciousness still tends to rule off Europe at the eastern frontier of Poland, and to leave the former Soviet Union an undifferentiated landmass stretching eastwards to the Pacific. The new names which appeared in our atlases in 1991-1992 and the unfamiliar flags flying over international conferences, sporting events and pop festivals have, not, largely speaking, found a resonance at the international literary level.

Yet just a century ago, an event took place that made the birth or rebirth of such literatures possible. In 1905, in what would prove a vain attempt to defuse political unrest, Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly granted his empire a Constitution that, among other concessions, permitted, after decades of suppression, the publication of literary works in languages other than Russian. And when, in 1917, that vast imperium began its catastrophic disintegration, there arose upon its ruins a number of new and nationally-conscious states. Just as farther west, when the Habsburg empire died there arose from its ashes 'new' nations, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes - whose very existence had scarcely reached the ears of those abroad until their sudden emergence at Versailles - so, on the ruins of Romanov power, Georgians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians and many others emerged from the shadows of minority existence and took the reins of statehood into their own hands.

Although, within a few years, the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had, to a large extent, consolidated itself within the old territorial limits of the Romanov empire, the legal status had irrevocably changed. Now it was a Union of Republics, and although the Russian Republic itself, both by its very size and what may be termed historical impetus, would remain the dominant force of this Union, and although the Russian language would remain the official language of the Union, nevertheless the Republics remained as legal entities - constituent Republics of the Union. Two in fact (in addition to the USSR itself) became founder-members of the United Nations. It is to the more northerly of these - Belarus - and its literature, that this collection is devoted.

In the middle of the last century, it might well have been said that the Belarusian language, and indeed the Belarusian nation itself, had a dim but glorious past, a putative future and an underground existence. Far away, down through the centuries, shone the memories of the Old Grand Duchy of 'Lithuania-Rus' (Chaucer's Lettow ond Ruse) in which Belarusians and Lithuanians (in the modern sense) had been equal partners in statehood, and in which, until the conversion of the Lithuanians to Latin Christianity in 1386, the Belarusians had been the only literate member of the partnership. (The Belarusians had been converted by missionaries of the Eastern Church in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Although there are traces of an indigenous system of writing before the coming of Christianity to the East Slavonic peoples, it was, as is usual, the conversion with its great need for hagiography, pastoral letters, monastery chronicles and the like that provided the first great impetus towards literary output, some examples of which will be found in this collection).

However, union with Poland and the gradual Polonization of the cultured classes, conquest by Russia with her ever-increasing desire for a unified, homogeneous and totally-Russian tradition from Kalisz to Vladivostok and 'from the Moldavian to the Finn', and ever-more-severe reprisal measures against any who dared raise the slightest voice against this policy, made the future outlook entirely uncertain. When, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, modern Belarusian literature was born, it must have seemed, to the presiding spirits of literature, that here indeed was a star-crossed, indeed a near still-born infant.

Modern Belarusian literature, by convention, dates from Vinkenti Rovinski's Travesty of the Aeneid, written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in imitation of a similar, Ukrainian work by Ivan Kotlyarevskyy (published 1798). During the early years of the nineteenth century, a number of authors laid what may be called the foundations of the literature. To this period belongs the keen folklorist Jan Chachot, who made two important collections of folk poetry and ballads (Piosnki mesniacze znad Niemna i Dzwiny - 'Songs from the Nioman and Dzvina' - 1839 and 1844) which he augmented in the second edition by didactic verses of his own on the virtues of diligent work and abstinence from 'hard' liquor. Another leading figure was Vincuk Dunin-Marcinkievich, the novelist and dramatist, who, in view of the conditions of the time, achieves a really remarkable detachment in his character-drawing. In his long narrative poem Hapon, for example, the villain of the piece, who is the cause of the hero's being sent away into the army, is not the Lady of the Manor, trying as a widow to hold her estates together, in constant terror of a peasant rising (who actually sends him into the army); nor is it the Bailiff (who tells the Lady that Hapon is a potential revolutionary), for he is motivated by unrequited love of Hapon's sweetheart Kaciaryna and believes that once his rival is removed, Kaciaryna will consent to marry him; nor is it the Innkeeper, who only carries out standing orders by reporting to the Bailiff that Hapon wants some drink on credit in order to celebrate his betrothal. Rather, the villain emerges as the system which makes the situation possible. Compared to many works written under comparable conditions in other countries, in which all landlords and their minions are painted in unrelieved black, the characters in Hapon emerge as real living people, with human motivation, rather than as the political lay-figures one encounters only too often.

Another landmark work of this period (dating, apparently, from the early 1840s) is the anonymous mock-epic Taras on Parnassus, the tale of a Belarusian peasant (of the sober and diligent type praised by Chacot), who, after stunning himself in an accident, finds himself transported to Mount Parnassus, where he encounters the gods and goddesses of classical antiquity. This lively tale not only gives fine scenes of Belarusian life, all the more 'telling' since they are here magnified to divine proportions; it shows that the unknown author had mastered the traditions of classical literature so thoroughly that he could aptly and wittily adapt them for his own use. It shows, too, through the allegory, the sterility and pettiness of the 'approved' literature of the day, and, since the divinities on Parnassus are shown as glorified Belarusian peasants, the implication is that it is with the people of Belarus that the literature of Belarusian should be concerned. As we shall see, this tenet was to become the guiding rule for many generations of poets to come.

But, outside the pages of fantasy, life for the Belarusian peasant was no heaven-on-earth. In 1828, when a liberal-minded Catholic priest opened a parish school in his native village of Kroshyn, he found to his surprise and delight that one of the serf-boys who attended it, the 15-year-old Pauluk Bahrym, showed considerable talent as a poet. Within a very short time, as a result of serf riots in Kroshyn, Bahrym was sent into the army for a term of twenty-five years (military service was frequently used in the Russian Empire for punitive purposes, as those familiar with the life of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko will recall). Although he lived until 1891, Bahrym is not heard of again as a poet after the brief flowering of his talent as a boy in Kroshyn. The one poem of his that survives, does so because it was incorporated into a volume of memoirs, Powiett z czasu mojego, czyli Przygody Litewskie (My Times or Lithuanian Adventures) published in London in 1854. The author, the Polish Count Leon Potocki, included in it a description of an encounter with the priest-schoolmaster 'Fr Magnuszewski', and Bahrym himself appears under the pseudonym of 'Piatrok' (Peter) an 'easy' code for his own baptismal name of 'Pauluk' (Paul).

Such a story may be taken as an archetype of the fate in store for those who attempted to write in the Belarusian language, a language against which sterner and sterner measures were taken until its use for any literary purposes was finally forbidden completely, and Belarus became merely the 'Northwestern Region' of the Tsar's empire.

Yet the story was not over. The Belarusian land with its poor and often marshy soil had bred in its people the twin virtues of determination and perseverance, and, however harsh the reprisal measures against it, Belarusian literature survived. The works of this period all bear on their title pages the names of foreign cities - though it is not entirely clear whether the manuscripts were actually smuggled abroad for publication - and the finished books smuggled back again for illegal distribution - or whether they were printed in secret by clandestine presses at home, and the names of foreign cities added as a disguise for the printer, just as the authors themselves concealed their identity under a pseudonym. Thus the 'father of modern Belarusian literature', Francishak Bahushevich, who wrote under the pseudonyms of 'Matsiei Burachok' and 'Symon Reuka spad Barysava', had his first collection of poems Dudka bielaruskaja (Belarusian Pipe) produced (or allgedly produced) in Cracow in 1891 and his second collection, Smyk bielaruski (Belarusian Bow) in 1894, was attributed to Poznan (cities then under Austro-Hungarian and Prussian rule, respectively).

But in 1905 things changed dramatically. A spirit of revolution was abroad within the Russian empire, and, although its immediate aims were frustrated, the first cracks began to appear in the monolith of absolute power. In St Petersburg a representative assembly, the Duma began to take its first tottering steps in the direction of constitutional government. And throughout the empire, ethnic minorities were at last able to publish openly in their mother-tongues - although still subject to the control and sometimes arbitrary whims of the censors.

In these circumstance the first Belarusian newspaper Nasha Dola (Our Fate) - was founded. This soon fell a victim to its editors' outspokenness; after a few issues, the censors forced it to close. Its successor, Nasha Niva, was more moderate in tone, and managed to survive through nine years of more or less stringent control, until the outbreak of the First World War.

Nasha Niva means 'Our Field', more properly, our ploughland; and, indeed, it was the fertile field in which literature of the time could take root and grow. So much so that its name came to embody the early 20th century Belarusian literature renaissance, and the chief literary movement of the time is now known to literary historians as: Nashaniustva, - in other words, Nasha Niva-ism.

'And the good Lord, looking down from the height of heaven, had pity for the land of Belarus, and said: Let there be Belarusian literature! And, behold, there was Nasha Niva!'

Like all its kind, the epigram quoted above has its measure of truth, in addition to the usual measure of cynical exaggeration. Belarusian literature does, indeed, appear to have been created overnight, by and through Nasha Niva. The group of earnest young writers (formal studio photographs of them exist, complete, if memory serves me correctly, with potted palms) did, in the course of a very few years, create between them the basic requirements of a literature: poetry, drama, essays, short stories, novels. Each used several pseudonyms, partly to confuse the censors, partly to give the impression that their numbers were greater than in fact they were, thus hoping to attract still more aspiring writers to what was obviously a flourishing project. But although Nasha Niva and its adjunct, the Belarusian Publishing House in St Petersburg (whose name translates picturesquely as the Sun-will-look-in-at-our-little-window-too Press) could create literature in the sense of spilling upon the public consciousness so many thousand words per week/month/ year, the establishment of a newspaper and of a publishing house (however quaintly named) cannot of themselves create more than an output of verbiage. The picture gained from what one may call the 'folklore' or 'legend' of Nasha Niva is of a group of dedicated young men and women, sitting at their desks, conscientiously and by schedule 'writing literature' - Mr A. a novel, Mr B. an epic, Mr C. a drama and Miss D. a lyric, according to a pre-assigned plan of what a 'literature' should contain.

Yet nothing could be more remote from the truth. Among the Nasha Niva group we find the names of the novelist Tsishka Hartny, the literary critic Anton Novina, the poets Janka Kupala, Jakub Kolas, Zmitrok Biadula, and Maksim Bahdanovich, that enfant terrible who insisted on publishing his works under his own name (and not, as was the Nasha Niva rule, under a pseudonym) and who introduced into Belarusian poetry many of the 'classical' verse-forms of Europe. We find, in fact, the names of the great masters of Belarusian prose and poetry, so that Nasha Niva begins to appear more the kind of spontaneous literary group found in all countries and literary traditions rather than the earnest committee of legend.

What then was the essence of 'Nasa Niva-ism', the concepts and ideals which bound its writers together? In one word - Belarus; an awareness of their country, her lands, her people, her folklore, her history, her future. There is surely no aspect of Belarusian life that cannot be found in their pages. 'A peasant, a dull peasant I', sings Kupala, and this is far more than the literary device of first-person monologue; it embodies a profound psychological self-identification beautifully expressed in the seemingly simple verse-form of the kyrielle. 'I love our land', sings Kanstancyja Builo, and it is the voice of them all. 'Pictures beloved of my native country' are 'gladness' and 'pain' not only to Yakub Kolas, but to each and every one of this group. The harsh, yet lovely whiteness of winter, the sudden bursting of spring, night-fires in the summer pastures, the migrating birds of autumn - these are the very essence of Nashaniustva. The folklore is there too; wood-elves, rusalki and - in the works of Biadulia, even the old pagan gods - people the woods and forests with mystery. The past is also there - the historic past of the old monastery chronicler and the girls in the Radziwill girdle factory, together with that other 'past' which exists only in folk-memory - the 'past' of strange heroes and dark, near-nameless deeds, done in the mists of antiquity 'a century or more' ago. Here too is a people 'many million strong', whose 'spirit' is 'atremble', on the march, demanding the right 'to be called human'! And, in this poetry, implicit, yet to the discerning eye, self-evident, emerge those symbolic patterns by which government controls might be deceived, and which were to colour Belarusian poetry for ever with potent and evocative overtones from the days of its birth. Thus night or winter symbolized the forces of reaction and oppression, the young bride awaiting her bridegroom is Belarus awaiting independence. (In Biadula's lovely A winter tale, these two motifs are beautifully integrated into the lovely picture of the Sleeping Beauty in her palace of ice, while the bridegroom who is to awaken her is now no fairy-tale prince, nor even some symbolic peasant-figure; it is the reader himself who must 'call her by name' and bring spring, i.e. liberation, to the frozen world.) Wild geese migrating (as in Irish literature) symbolize exiles, whether political or economic, and (again as in Irish), Easter is inextricably linked with the idea of national resurgence. As a result, the literature, and in particular, the poetry of the Nasha Niva period exists on severs levels of interpretation, and although it would be untrue, and, indeed, misleading, to state that every description of a girl on her wedding-eve is 'really' about Belarus (any more than it would be true say that every Kathleen praised in song is 'really' Ireland, or every rose is 'really' England) nevertheless, the symbolism of Nasha Niva has bequeathed the Belarusian language, and in particular to its poetry an aura of connotation that, in its economy, can be compared perhaps only to Chinese.

PART VIII   >>