Belarusian literature

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Eric

Former Member
Yes, that's how you spell it, with one "s". The term "White Russian" is dated, and can be, quite erroneously, confused with literature written by the Whites (i.e. anti-Communists) in the Russian Revolution. So: Belarusian. Literature written in the country where Minsk is the capital, and the regime oscillates between love of the West and love of Russia. The half-forgotten country where one Lukashenka holds sway.

I had no interest in this literature whatsoever until I visited a small library where they had a dozen or so books by Belarusian authors and about Belarusian literature.

Belarusian literature has a long history, but it has been living something of a twilight existence internationally of late, although there are a few translations into English and Swedish, more into Polish.

Authors? I'm still discovering. But one Uladymier Arlou is an author of ironic short-stories and essays. And Valzhyna Mort, living in the States, is a young poet.

I'm not very well versed in what's being produced yet, but watch this space.
 
Stewart

Stewart

Administrator
Staff member
Eric said:
I'm not very well versed in what's being produced yet, but watch this space.
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I suppose in the meantime we can have a look at this list of Belarusian writers, as provided by Wikipedia. Still, it's quite useless when most won't be available in English.

If she's reading, abecedarian, who is drawing to a close her armchair tour of the world may be able to throw a name or two into the hat, too.
 
E

Eric

Former Member
Sadly, yes, to Stewart's points about the huge list of Belarusian authors. This kind of list is only helpful if you can find a profile of each writer elsewhere (e.g. a full Wikipedia entry). There are people around who love to produce huge lists, trawling with a fine-seine net to make sure they've got every name. But what then? They often can't read the language of the original, and simply produce a list from other people's lists.

The list there is impressive in length, but I would want to know whether the author was a poet or prose author, contemporary or classic. And so on.

And as Stewart points out, it's a kind of prick-tease of names you can't read, 'cos they've not been translated.

I've only had the slightest access to one poet, 20 of whose poems are in Swedish; plus an anthology with one poem per poet in parallel text with English; and one collection of stories translated into Polish, a language I know quite well, but still have to look up an awful lot of words, too many for reading comfort.

If Belarus had oil, diamonds or similar, there would be much more interest in their literature too. But up to the present it's been left to a few idealists, sprinkled around Europe.

The easiest (what d'you mean "easiest"?) thing to do is learn the language. But you also have huge problems finding dictionaries and primers. My Russian is crap, and the only two-language dictionaries I've found so far are between Russian and Belarusian.

So you see how authors, probably writing perfectly good literature, can be shut out of the mainstream of literary discussion by such factors.
 
abecedarian

abecedarian

Reader
I read and enjoyed Pack of Wolves by Vasil Bykov. Good clear writing so crisp I put on a pair of socks to ward off the chill from the swamp. I will definately be revisiting Bykov sometime soon.
 
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Eric

Former Member
Thanks Abecedarian for drawing our attention to the Bykov / Bykau. Despite all my Googling, I'd not yet discovered that book. I'll buy it from (or via) Amazon.

Pre-school? Yes, er, well.
 
E

Eric

Former Member
Hilarious though the pre-school reading of disabled partisan literature may be, it shows how careless people are when compiling these manic lists of books to read, books to buy, and so on.

Disappointing is that this book was published back in 1981. I'd prefer to read what Belarusians are writing this decade, not old Soviet propaganda dished up in a different guise. The problem with Soviet literature was that it had double standards. As long as the Nazis were doing the slaughtering, you could write heroic books. But should you try to point out that the Soviets also put people in cattle wagons and shot them in clearings in the woods, then you would be censored and maybe even sent to Siberia.

As I say, Arlou and Mort seem to be two accessible modern authors- accessible, that is, if you can read them in translation into a language other than English. Even one foreign language, such as French or German, can give you a lot more access to certain literature than if you only have a knowledge of English.
 
Patrick Murtha

Patrick Murtha

Reader
Eric said:
Disappointing is that this book was published back in 1981. I'd prefer to read what Belarusians are writing this decade, not old Soviet propaganda dished up in a different guise.
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Well, hold on, let's not be "presentist" here. I, for one, lean more toward books that have weathered a little time, rather than those that are hot off the presses.

Also, your observations would appear to be unfair to Bykov:

Vasil Uładzimiravič Bykaŭ (June 19, 1924 - June 22, 2003) a prolific author of novels and novellas about World War II, is a monumental figure in Belarusian literature and civic thought. The writer's talent and the moral courage that permeates his writings earned him endorsements for the Nobel Prize nomination from, among others, Nobel Prize laureates Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasil_Bykaŭ
 
E

Eric

Former Member
Just saw a review of Valzhyna Mort on the Bookforum.com website, as advertised elsewhere on our forum here:

Dec/Jan 2009

Factory of Tears

By MATTHEW LADD


Factory of Tears (Lannan Literary Selections)

by Valzhyna Mort

translation by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright

$15.00 List Price

More information:
Amazon ? IndieBound

Even more than its neighbors, Belarus remains chained to its past. Landlocked by Russia and the Baltic states, the country was decimated in the 1940s by the Nazis; over the next two decades, it was absorbed into the Soviet Union, its language and culture suppressed. The majority of postwar poets exported from the former Eastern bloc have been Polish (Herbert, Milosz, Szymborska), and Belarus, still crouching in Moscow?s long shadow, has yet to produce a bard of international stature. So when the press release for Valzhyna Mort?s Factory of Tears declares it ?the first- ever Belarusian/English book of poems published in the United States,? the statement comes tinged with urgency.

Unlike her cultural forebears, Mort, born in 1981, does not seem keen to exhume her country?s past. She is similarly ambivalent about its future: ?Belarusian I? ends with the cryptic lines ?and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future / was leaping through the fiery hoop / of the sun,? suggestive of both courage and reckless self-obliteration. Likewise, the title poem concludes with a series of declarations??I have compound fractures on my cheeks. / I receive my wages with the product I manufacture. / And I?m happy with what I have??that hover between bitter sarcasm and weary sincerity. This is not to say that Mort argues against the pro-Western spirit of the many political movements, like the Ukraine?s Orange Revolution, that have spread like wildfire throughout Eastern Europe. It?s just that her focus is trained elsewhere.

On sex, for instance. Often (too often, perhaps), Factory of Tears taps the vein that was first opened by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and that, over the past forty years, has been drained almost dry. If Mort aims to shock, one can only assume that Belarusian audiences are scandalized by lines like ?Lust is sitting inside me like a cherry pit? and ?Who will pinch the ass of love.? Americans have heard it all before. The otherwise elegant translation occasionally dips too eagerly into slang, as if hinting that not all Belarusians are the dreary pensioners that we (admittedly) tend to picture them as.

What?s most compelling about these poems?especially the multipage ?White Trash,? whose lines seem written for performance rather than reading?is that they are political, but obliquely, almost sneakily so. ?Your glance in certain circumstances can replace tear gas? serves, for instance, as an apt metaphor for Mort?s continual obstruction of the political with the personal. This strategy, if not always well executed, ultimately succeeds. It suggests that the author has captured a perspective that many Americans may have simply overlooked: that of a European generation for which the United States is not a blazing torch of democracy but a bizarre admixture of puritanism, militarism, and sex?a collective export the author approaches with skepticism rather than adulation.

***

Source: factory of tears - bookforum.com / in print
 
JPS

JPS

Reader
All of my grandparents were from Pinsk and environs, and my mother always called it "White Russia", though to my grandparents (and the Tsarist authorities), they lived in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were compelled to make their homes.

Yet my grandfather, a learned man in Pinsk, had first editions of all of Tolstoy's works, and had even met the great man once. He and his wife brought the books to New York, and after he died--this was before I was born--she gave them all away. To my eternal regret.
 
E

Eric

Former Member
JPS: I used to call that country "White Russia" too. But there is latent confusion between the White (i.e. non-Communist) forces, termed the Whites, that fought against Lenin, etc., in Russia itself, during the Russian Revolution.

There used to be "[Red] Russia" (Russia), "White Russia" (Belarus) and "Little Russia" (Ukraine). But to avoid mix-ups regarding a region of Europe that is already complex, it is called "Belarus" today, with the adjective being "Belarusian" (with one "s").

Belarus was one of the big Jewish areas of Russia, from what I understand, which is why it features in quite a lot in Holocaust documentation. There was a lot of contact between both Jews and goyim between Lithuania and Belarus over the centuries. So there is a lot of specifically Yiddish literature from both these countries. Because, in the olden days, Hebrew was the religious language for Jews there, with Yiddish being used as an everyday language. Yiddish is, of course, medi?val German with a lot of Hebrew loanwords, and written in the Hebrew alphabet.

Present-day Belarusian literature exists, but is partially stifled by the policies of the present leadership. Apart from Valzhyna Mort, the name Uladimier Arlou keeps cropping up.
 
JPS

JPS

Reader
Yes, I'm aware of that. Actually, Yiddish is a kind of mongrel street language (my grandparents spoke it, and when my mother conversed with her mother it was in a combination of Yiddish and English, so I grew up with a lot of the Yiddish idioms I still use), with traces of Hungarian, Hebrew, Low German, etc.

The Nazis wiped out most of the population of White Russia (and of course I understand the differences between that and the political use of the term), including what remained of our family (my grandparents had emigrated in 1911). Online one can find the population roster for Pinsk with the name of every victim wiped out in a single day.

By the way, the expression "beyond the pale" comes from the time of the Pale of Settlement. A side note: my grandfather belonged to the only Jewish regiment of the Russian cavalry, based in Pinsk. Something of an anomaly, I should think.

But, yes, much enduring literature has come from the Pale.
 
E

Eric

Former Member
Are you aware, JPS, that Yiddish has quite a literature to its name? Not just Bashevis Singer who won the Nobel, thereby making Yiddish literature visible, but quite a few writers who were not mongrels, but sophisticated authors?

Do remember that English, with some rhetorical simplification, is one of the great mongrel languages of the world: a creole made up of simplified German grammar, French vocabulary (the posh bits from the Norman Conquest onwards) and a little Latin, to make it look educated, plus a sprinkling of Dutch, Danish and Gaelic words.

But to return to Yiddish, I find it sad that even Jews (I am a goy) tend to deprecate the language, falling back on the thigh-splitting and pant-pissing hilarities of Leo Rosten's "The Joys of Yiddish", while knowing very little about Abraham Sutzkever, Dovid Bergelson, Sholem Aleichem, Itsik Manger, Esther Kreitman, Israel Singer, Peretz, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Ozer Varshavski, Jacob Glatstein, Der Nister, An-Sky, etc., etc., who actually wrote real literature in Yiddish.

Your grandfather, JPS, sounds as if he rubbed shoulders with Isaac (Yitskhok) Babel, who wrote the stories about his times in Budyonny's cavalry regiment.

In Vilnius (Wilno, Vilne), before the Nazis created the ghetto, quite a few Yiddish and Polish-speaking authors would fraternise. Nowadays, Vilnius is almost entirely Lithuanian-speaking when it comes to authors and the production of literature. But in those days, Lithuanian-speakers lived either in Kaunas (Kowno) or the countryside. Much has changed over the past 70 or so years, apart from the Holocaust / Shoah / Khurbn.
 
JPS

JPS

Reader
I am of course aware of the vast range of Yiddish literature, much appreciated by my family over the generations (though all had a much bigger place in their heart, good Russians as they were, for Pushkin, naturally).

My grandfather also owned (and it's still in the family), a history of the United States written in Yiddish.
 
E

Eric

Former Member
Thanks for that, JPS. I note from various websites that one specifically Belorusian Yiddish author was the poet Kadia Molodowsky, who later moved to Kiev:

National Yiddish Book Center - Kadya Molodowsky: Poet of the Paper Bridge

http://www.booksite.com/texis/scrip...382&isbn=0814327184&music=&buyable=0&assoc_id=

And I found a webpage about Yiddish writings specifically from Belarus, thought it's more from a linguist's point of view:

http://belarus8.tripod.com/litvaki/yiddish.htm

I'm quite good at Googling, but can find hardly anything in English about contemporary Belarusian literature, which is disappointing. But new books about Belarus as a country do exist, for example:

http://www.booksite.com/texis/scrip...=1857334728&music=&buyable=0&assoc_id=&spring=
 
E

Eric

Former Member
To gain insights into Belarusian literature and other cultural activities, there is a cultural section on the Office for a Democratic Belarus website in English. This office is in Brussels and has political, cultural and other news about Belarus:

Cultural review | Office for a democratic Belarus

While Vasil Bykau (1924-2003) and Valzhyna Mort have already been mentioned earlier on this thread, I have discovered several further names. Artur Klinau has written a book about Minsk; Svetlana Alexievich is a prose author; Andrey Khadanovich is a poet; Uladimer Arlou has written about 30 books in various genres; Uladzimir Karatkevich (1930-1984) was a novelist; Maryja Martysevich is a young writer and translator, a rising star.

The interview with Martysevich is particularly interesting giving people insights into Belarusian culture today:

Maryja Martysevich: ?Our Literature Mafia Speaks Belarusian? | Office for a democratic Belarus

Eurozine also has articles, in English and German, about Artur Klinau at:

Eurozine - Minsk: The Sun City of Dreams - Artur Klinau

and

Eurozine - Neues aus den Partisanenw?ldern - Artur Klinau, Katharina Narbutovic Artur Klinau ?ber subversive Kultur und die Kultur des Subversiven
 
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