Abstract
Although the subject of this chapter is contemporary Belarusian literature, the guiding motifs are borrowed from a Polish poet born in Russian-ruled Lithuania. This is not as incongruous as it may appear: most of the lands of present-day Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus were for several centuries united under one crown as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Memories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), the eastern component of the dual state that wholly incorporated the territory we now know as Belarus, lived on in the political and cultural imaginings of many intellectuals after the partitions of the Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century.1 These memories are also vital to Belarusian culture today. Nonetheless, the project of establishing a link between modern Belarus and the GDL is fraught with difficulties, not least because of the enormous discrepancy caused by dramatic demographic change: the epicenter of what Timothy Snyder has called the “Bloodlands,” Belarus emerged as a virtually monoethnic polity in 1945, its formerly significant Polish and Jewish populations wiped out by Stalin and Hitler respectively.2
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Notes
Aliaksandr Smalianchuk, Pamizh kraevastsiu i natsyianal’nai ideiai. Polski rukh na belaruskikh i litouskikh ziamliakh, 1864–1917h (Hrodna: Hrodzenski Dziarzhauny Universitet, 2001).
See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 2010), esp. Chapter 7.
From the poem “Notatnik: Brzegi Lemanu” (A Notebook: On the Shores of Lake Leman), in Czesław Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie (Kraków: Znak, 2011), p. 375. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations (from Belarusian and Polish) are by the author.
Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1980, Nobelprize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1980/milosz -lecture.html (accessed January 20, 2012).
Ianka Kupala, Zhive Belarus’: Vershy, artykuly (Minsk: Mastatskaia literatura, 1993), p. 81.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008), p. 1.
Czesław Miłosz, Rodzinna Europa (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1959), pp. 17–18. For a more detailed elaboration of the concept of internal colonization, see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization. Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
Nicholas Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 56–62. N.B. The ethnonyms Belarusian, which entered into widespread use in the nineteenth century, and Ruthenian, which refers to the (originally Orthodox) Slavs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (including modern-day Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine), should not be confused. However, it is reasonable to posit a potential continuity (which was, in fact, largely broken) between the high culture of the sixteenth-century Ruthenian nobles of the territory now known as Belarus and modern Belarusian culture. For instance, the chancery language of the GDL in the sixteenth century was a predecessor of Belarusian, and well into the nineteenth century, many small landowners in the region still used Belarusian in the home and had mastered Polish imperfectly.
Valer Bulgakov, Istoriia belorusskogo natsionalizma (Vilnius: Institut belorusistiki, 2006), pp. 54–56.
Mścisław Olechnowicz, Polscy badacze folkloru i j ę zyka białoruskiego w XIX wieku (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 1986).
Bulgakov, Istoriia belorusskogo natsionalizma, pp. 124–33; Aleksandr Kravtsevich, Aleksandr Smolenchuk, and Sergei Tokt’, Belorusy: natsia Pogranich’ia (Vilnius: EGU, 2011), pp. 108–31; Ryszard Radzik, Mi ę dzy zbiorowo ś ci ą etniczn ą a wspólnot ą narodow ą . Białorusini na tle przemian narodowych w Europie Ś rodkowo-Wschodniej XIX stulecia (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2000), pp. 204–25.
Vakar, Belorussia, pp. 73–74; Edward C. Thaden, Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 121–43; and I. I. Kovkel and E. S. Iarmusik, Istoriia Belarusi s drevneishikh vremen do nashego vremeni (Minsk: Aversev, 2005), p. 81.
Vakar, Belorussia, pp. 87–90; Jan Zaprudnik, Belarus: At a Crossroads in History (Boulder, CO, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 63–66.
Ihar Babkou, “Henealehiia belaruskai idei. Z’ lektsyau dlia Belaruskaha Kalehiiumu,” ARCHE, 3 (2005), 136–64 (pp. 152–53).
Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 40–72.
The figure of 90 percent is given by R. P. Platonau and U. K. Korshuk, cited in Per Anders Rudling “‘For a Heroic Belarus!’: The Great Patriotic War as Identity Marker in the Lukashenka and Soviet Belarusian Discourses,” Sprawy Narodowo ś ciowe, 32 (2008), 43–62 (p. 44); for an analysis of the Terror on literary figures in particular, see Anthony Adamovich, Opposition to Sovietization in Belorussian Literature: 1917–1957 (Munich: Scarecrow Press, 1958).
Lyapis Trubetskoy, “Ne byts’ skotam,” http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=jSwmW3OxquY& (accessed October 25, 2012).
Laura Adams, “Can We Apply Postcolonial Theory to Central Eurasia?” Central Eurasian Studies Review, 7.1 (2008), 2–7 and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 6.
David Marples, Belarus: A Denationalized Nation (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1999), p. 50; Zachar Szybieka, Historia Białorusi. 1795–2000 (Lublin: Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, 2002), pp. 388–90 (p. 414); and Eugeniusz Mironowicz, Białoru ś (Warszawa: Trio, 2007), pp. 250–52, 272–75.
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 84–126.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 169.
Henadź Sahanowicz, Źródła pamięci historycznej współczesnej Białorusi. Powrót zachodniorusizmu, trans. by Andrzej Gil (Lublin: Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, 2006).
Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo, and Matilda Mroz, Remembering Katyn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. 16.
See, for example, Natalia Leshchenko, “A Fine Instrument: Two Nation- Building Strategies in Post-Soviet Belarus,” Nations and Nationalism, 10.3 (2004), 333–52; Nelly Bekus, Struggle over Identity: The Official and Alternative Belarusianness (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010); and Alexandra Goujon, “Memorial Narratives of WWII Partisans and Genocide in Belarus,” East European Politics & Societies, 24.1 (2010), 6–25.
Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Slavic Review, 54.3 (1995), 658–73 (p. 665).
Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology, 23.2 (2008), 191–219.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 91.
Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning. J. M Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 8.
Alexander Etkind, “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” Slavic Review, 68.3 (2009), 631–58.
Ihar Babkou, Karaleustva Belarus’. Vytlumachen’ni ru[i]nau (Miensk: Lohvinau, 2005), p. 18.
See Valiantsin Akudovich, Kod Adsutnastsi (Minsk: Lohvinau, 2007).
Ihar Babkou, Adam Klakotski i iahonyia tseni (Miensk: BAS, 2001), p. 10.
Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 97–108 (p. 98).
This story has an element of historical reality. Belarusian emigre activists in the United States, many of whom had been active in the nationalist (collaborationist) opposition during the war, were trained in specialist institutions and sent to Soviet Belarus on intelligence missions. See Jan Szumski, Sowietyzacja Zachodniej Białorusi 1944–1953. Propaganda i edukacja w słu ż bie ideologii (Kraków: Arcana, 2010), p. 62.
Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning. Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 21.
Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics, 25.2 (1995), 9–63 (p. 27).
Ibid., p. 57.
Al’herd Bakharevich, Saroka na shybenitsy (Minsk: Lohvinau, 2009).
Bakharevich, Saroka na shybenitsy, p. 324. Poe’s Latin original is: “Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum forelevatas ,” attributed to Ebn Zaiat; Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories (London: David Campbell [Everyman’s Library], 1992), p. 130.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborn (London: NLB, 1977), p. 62.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 249.
On misrecognition as a narrative device in postcatastrophic literature, see Alexander Etkind, “A Parable of Misrecognition: Anagnorisis and the Return of the Repressed from the Gulag,” Russian Review, 68 (2009), 623–40. On Bakharevich’s troubled relationship with Belarus in his other works, see Arnold McMillin, “The Early Work of Alhierd Bacharevic: From Verse to the Novel,” Studia Białorutenistyczne, 5 (2010), 249–64.
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed. and trans. by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 110–24.
Walter Benjamin, Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Peter Demetz, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 26.
Czesław Miłosz, Szukanie Ojczyzny (Kraków: Znak, 1992), p. 28.
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© 2013 Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor
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Lewis, S. (2013). Toward Cosmopolitan Mourning: Belarusian Literature between History and Politics. In: Blacker, U., Etkind, A., Fedor, J. (eds) Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322067_10
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