Belarus - Alternative Visions

Nation, Memory and Cosmopolitanism

Simon Lewis, Simon M. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367583354
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351387750
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Belarus is often regarded as "Europe's last dictatorship", a sort-of fossilized leftover from the Soviet Union. However, a key factor in determining Belarus's development, including its likely future development, is its own sense of identity. This book explores the complex debates and competing narratives surrounding Belarus's identity, revealing a far more diverse picture than the widely accepted monolithic post-Soviet nation. It examines in a range of media including historiography, films and literature how visions of Belarus as a nation have been constructed from the nineteenth century to the present day. It outlines a complex picture of contested myths – the "peasant nation" of the nineteenth century, the devoted Soviet republic of the late twentieth century and the revisionist Belarusian nationalism of the present. The author shows that Belarus is characterized by immense cultural, linguistic and ethnic polyphony, both in its lived history and in its cultural imaginary. The book analyses important examples of writing in and about Belarus, in Belarusian, Polish and Russian, revealing how different modes of rooted cosmopolitanism have been articulated.

Part I

Contexts (1800–1991)

1 An abundant harvest

The emergence of Belarusian memory

This core Slavic land does not have its own name,

because it does not constitute a (separate) state,

but it leans towards the Polish system one day, and to the Russian yoke the next.

Adam Mickiewicz¹

In 1908, the young poet and promising nationalist agitator Ianka Kupala (pen-name of Ivan Lutsevich, 1882–1942) wrote the verse Khto ty hetki? (‘So Who are You?’), an imaginary dialogue with a Belarusian peasant:

So who are you?

— One of ours, from here.

What do you want?

— A better lot.

[. . .]

What do you want to be?

— Not to be a beast.²

Here, and in a number of similar poems, Kupala foreshadows Frantz Fanon’s famous evocation of the dehumanization of the colonial subject: ‘What does the black man want? At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.’³ Decades before Fanon became a leading light in the anticolonial movement, Kupala strove to give a voice to the subaltern figure of the Belarusian, who for so long had been denied subjectivity and excluded from history.

In Fanon’s philosophy, the gaze of the colonizer is one of the most powerful constituent factors in the subjugation of the colonized:

And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. [. . .] On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object.⁴

In other words, the act of looking activates frameworks of discriminatory knowledge and feeling which trap the colonial subject and, importantly, cause him to define himself using the categories dictated by colonial discourse. This chapter shows that the Belarusian-speaking peasantry was also the subject of a performative and constitutive gaze in the nineteenth century, although in the broader sense of a discourse that scrupulously studied their language and customs. In fact, two such dominant discourses existed and competed with each other: Polish- and Russian-language representations of the folk. Of course, the Belarusian case cardinally differs from Fanon’s description in that there was no clear line of racial difference between Polish or Russian speakers and the belarusophone population. Nonetheless, a similar effect can be observed: the nascent Belarusian nationalism that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century also adopted the terms imposed by the earlier colonial discourses: the first Belarusian nationalist thinkers were co-opted into grappling with the stereotypes of Belarus as a non-historical peasant collective.

Between Orientalism and pan-Slavism: Belarusian peasants in Polish discourse

The early-twentieth-century Belarusian philosopher Ihnat Abdziralovich (pseudonym of Ihnat Kancheuski, 1896–1923) was among the first intellectuals to conceptualize the history of the country as that of a borderland between civilizations:⁵

From the tenth century to this day, Belarus has essentially been a field of battle between two orientations of European [. . .] culture – Western and Eastern. The border between the two trends, which divides Slavdom into two factions, runs through Belarus⁶

Abdziralovich envisions a war between cultures which is also, at the local level, a war between Slavs – principally, Poles and Russians. The Polish scholar Wojciech Karpiński calls this ideological conflict the ‘Slavonic quarrel’ (Słowiański spór), taking care to point out that most nineteenth-century Poles disagreed strongly with Aleksandr Pushkin’s (1799–1837) use of a similar phrase in his infamous poem Klevetnikam Rossii (‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, 1831). In the wake of the November Uprising, in which Polish officers and nobles instigated an armed rebellion against Russian rule, Pushkin wrote that ‘this is a quarrel of Slavs among themselves, an old, domestic spat’; yet Polish soldiers and writers perceived imperial Russia as unquestionably foreign.⁷ In the middle, Belarus was caught up in a dispute over the very idea of Slavdom, over its meaning and geocultural scope. Two competing pan-Slavisms sought to appropriate the Belarusian-speaking masses,⁸ treating them as ‘ethnographic raw material’ to be assimilated.⁹

Romanticism, with its interest in realms beyond the rational self, provided the intellectual environment for the first literary explorations of the Belarusian folk, in Polish. Polish Romanticism was tinged with reaction to the partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth: having been deprived of a political territory to call their own, writers turned literature into a politically charged field and a forum for the discussion of cultural identity.¹⁰ An important feature of this movement was the search for an original self, especially a pre-Christian (and therefore pre-Latin), Slavonic self;¹¹ in other words, a return to the buried ‘roots’ of identity. Searching for ancient traditions that the passage of time had rendered irretrievable, polonophone writers ‘discovered’ them in the here and now by turning to the simple folk, who had been ignored by high culture for centuries. In the ethnically mixed lands of the former GDL, where the Polish language was the preserve of the nobility, the revival of ‘Slavdom’ (Słowiańszczyzna or Sławiańszczyzna) entailed studying of the customs of non-Polish-speaking groups, primarily the Belarusians.

Leon Borowski (1784–1846), who was a teacher and mentor to Mickiewicz and other future leading lights of Polish Romanticism at the Imperial University of Vilnius, wrote in 1820 that:

The forgotten songs with which the previous generations worshipped and supplicated their gods, and the forsaken remains of pagan rituals, which were in the darkness for centuries and have mixed with new habits, are still waiting for a scrupulous collector and scholar of local antiquity.¹²

His call, it transpired, was already being heeded. The pioneer of Polish ethnography, Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski (pseudonym of Adam Czarnocki, 1784–1825), a native of what is now Belarus,¹³ published the essay O Słowiańszczyźnie przed chrześcijaństwem (‘On Slavdom before Christianity’) in 1818, sparking a huge trend of folkloric exploration. The author argued that:

since we started to pour water on ourselves from an early age [i.e. receive baptism], all of our distinguishing features began to wash away, our spirit of independence was weakened in all manner of ways, and in trying to adapt to alien customs, we finally became foreign to our own selves.¹⁴

Guided by a belief that the music and poetry of the peasantry contained the purest essence of the Slavonic spirit, he advocated the study of the ‘pre-Christian’ customs of the common folk – including what we now distinguish as Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians – as a remedy for this self-alienation. He himself collected and published approximately two thousand folk songs in his lifetime.¹⁵

Romantic writers after him followed suit, including other territorially Belarusian Polish-speaking intellectuals who concentrated on the local Belarusian-speaking peasants.¹⁶ The first articles about the customs and language of the Belarusian folk appeared in the 1810s, and by the 1840s, the fashion for Belarus had evolved into a cultural phenomenon in its own right: several collections of transcriptions and Polish translations of Belarusian folk songs, detailed works of ethnographic description, and even specialist literary journals with a geographic focus on Belarus, forming a ‘Belarusian school’ of Polish poetry (complementing the better known ‘Ukrainian school’).¹⁷ There were also indirect treatments, above all in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz: the great bard never wrote in Belarusian or engaged in ethnography per se, but major works including Dziady (Forefather’s Eve, 1823–1860) draw heavily on pagan rituals and local folklore. Thus, as ethnography mixed with poetry, Belarus was envisioned as an archive of supranational Polish memory.

The poetry of the Belarusian folk was felt to contain ‘an enchanted land [. . .], a world of wonders, which, like stories from the East, are full of gold, pearls, uncountable riches’.¹⁸ In particular, both for this critic and for the enthusiast poet-ethnographers who collected, translated or transcribed, and then published peasant Belarusian folk songs, these ‘riches’ would enable the spirit of Polishness to be replenished with its ‘original’, Slavonic and indigenous, content. Alexander Rypiński (1810–1900), who published a collection of Belarusian songs as a Parisian émigré in 1840, considered his subject to contain:

new, unharnessed sources of language, History and Poetry: about which, despite the millions of discoveries, we have still not heard – to search them, and to extract something from them: this is and must be the principal and most primary obligation, if not the achievement, of every Pole writing today. After all, only on such materials, on such treasures is it possible to build a true national literature, free from foreign influence, which our Polish literature unfortunately! has not yet become.¹⁹

Similarly, Jan Czeczot (1796–1847), another local gentryman and the most dedicated and prolific st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Transliteration, Translation and Proper Nouns
• Introduction: Alternative Visions
• PART I Contexts (1800–1991)
• PART II Texts of Resistance (1956–1991)
• PART III Texts of Renewal (1991–2016)
• Afterword: On Cosmopolitan Memory
• Bibliography
• Index