Janka Kupala

Cyrillic ( Belarusian )
	Янка Купала
Łacinka :	Janka Kupała
Transl. :	Janka Kupala
Transcr. :	Janka Kupala

Janka Kupala (* June 25 ^jul. / 7. July  1882 ^greg. In Wjasynka in Minsk , † 28 June 1942 in Moscow , actually Ivan Daminikawitsch Luzewitsch , Іван Дамінікавіч Луцэвіч ) was a Belarusian national poet , playwright, journalist and translator who Together with Jakub Kolas and Maksim Bahdanowitsch, one of the main characters of the Belarusian rebirth (White: Адраджэнне ) at the beginning of the 20th century.

Janka Kupala

Childhood and youth

Kupala was born in Vyasynka, a small estate near Minsk , and came from a family that belonged to the impoverished petty nobility. He was taught almost exclusively by wandering private tutors and was only able to attend the final year of the elementary school in the village of Belarus, which is 25 km away from Minsk, for a year in 1898. Later on, Kupala worked as a private tutor, farmer, heavy laborer and assistant in a brewery.

Since the publication of his first Belarusian poem Muzhyk (Belarus. Мужык) on May 15, 1905, Ivan Luzewitsch used his pseudonym Janka Kupala . Kupala is the Belarusian name for the solstice celebration . From the beginning, his poems were heavily influenced by folk tales and experiences of rural and poor life.

Vilna and Petersburg

In 1908 Kupala went to Vilnius , which at that time was a center of the new Belarusian culture. There, Kupala worked in the editorial office of Nascha Niwa . In the autumn of 1909 he moved to Saint Petersburg for a few years , where he began to study Russian literature . In 1913, however, he returned to Vilnius to resume work for the magazine. Here he also worked for the Belarusian Publishers' Association based in Vilnius. During this time, several volumes of poetry appeared, including in 1913 Шляхам жыцьця (German: "The way of life"). Kupala's central work from the time before the revolution also falls in 1913: the drama Раскіданае гняздо (English: The Destroyed Nest), which premiered in 1917 after the Russian Revolution and was published in Vilna in 1919. Here the author addresses the uprooting of the Belarusian rural population, illustrated using the example of a farming family. In Vilnius, Kupala also supported Maksim Bahdanowitsch in editing his volumes of poetry.

First World War

After the beginning of the First World War , in the autumn of 1914, Kupala worked on the cycle of poems Песьні вайны (German: "Songs of War"). In 1915 he moved to Moscow , where he began studying at the People's University. In December of the same year he was drafted into the army and served in a road construction brigade in Minsk, Polatsk and Smolensk . Here he also experienced the October Revolution. Kupala was critical of the revolution and saw it as a source of destruction and devastation.

The "interwar period"

In 1919 Kupala moved to Minsk, where he lived until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War . In Minsk he helped establish a national Belarusian theater, the establishment of the Belarusian State University and the Academy of Sciences of the Belarusian Soviet Republic (BSSR). The development of an independent publishing system in the BSSR is also one of the achievements of Janka Kupala.

In August 1919 the first edition of the newspaper Звон (Eng .: The Bell) appeared here, whose editor-in-chief was Kupala. In the following years he wrote new poems and translated the Igor song into Belarusian. In 1922 the volume of poetry Спадчына (Eng .: The Legacy) was published, a compilation of poems from the time before and during the war. In the summer of 1922, Kupala finished working on one of his central works, the tragicomedy Тутэйшыя (Eng: The Locals), in which urban life from the time of the occupation in World War I is ironically illuminated. In the summer of 1926 the magazine Полымя (Eng .: Die Flamme), one of the leading literary magazines in Belarus to this day, printed a cycle of poems by Kupala, which were marked by a clearly noticeable protest attitude and were soon banned.

In the 1930s, like many other poets and writers connected to the idea of ​​the Belarusian rebirth, Kupala fell victim to repression. In the summer of 1930 he was accused of promoting bourgeois nationalism . His family was deported to Siberia as alleged kulaks . He was repeatedly summoned to interrogate the case of the so-called "Union for the Liberation of Belarus" (Belarus: Саюз вызваленьня Беларусі), an association that actually did not exist at all. On November 27, 1930, under the weight of the allegations and interrogations, he collapsed and attempted suicide, but remained alive. While still in the hospital, apparently completely broken, Kupala wrote an open letter (Адкрыты ліст Я. Купалы) in which he renounced the idea of ​​national rebirth. In the years after this break, Kupala wrote exclusively pro-Soviet poems and articles, which in artistic value lagged far behind the works before 1930.

Last years

Janka Kupala's grave in Minsk

After the attack by German troops on the Soviet Union in 1941 and the ensuing occupation of the BSSR, Janka Kupala returned to Russia. He spent the last years of his life in a small village near Kazan and in Moscow . In June 1942 he fell from a staircase in the Moskva Hotel in Moscow and was killed in the process, although the circumstances that led to this accident have not yet been clarified. Kupala was buried in the Vagankovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. 20 years later the urn with his ashes was transferred to Minsk and buried there.

Janka Kupala also appeared with translations into Belarusian. He has transferred works by Alexander Pushkin , Taras Shevchenko , Nikolai Nekrasov , Ivan Krylow and Adam Mickiewicz , among others .

Aftermath

A theater , a park , a street and a metro station are named after Janka Kupala in Minsk . There are monuments to Janka Kupala in Minsk and Moscow as well as in Arrow Park in Monroe (New York) . Museums dedicated to him and his work can be found in Minsk, which was built in 1960 on the site of his former home, and his birthplace, Vyazynka. The state university in Hrodna bears his name.

Web links

Commons : Yanka Kupala  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Short biography on slounik.org
• Article Janka Kupala in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) , 3rd edition 1969–1978 (Russian)http: //vorlage_gse.test/1%3D067495~2a%3D~2b%3DJanka%20Kupala
• Selected works (be / en / ru / ua /)
• Belarusian Anthology - A Reading Book (de / be)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Dirk Holtbrügge : Belarus. 2nd ed., Munich, Beck, 2002. p. 114
2. ↑ Dirk Holtbrügge : Belarus. 2nd ed., Munich, Beck, 2002. p. 113
3. ^ ^{A b c d} Wojciech Roszkowski, Jan Kofman: Biographical Dictionary of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. Routledge, July 8, 2016. p. 1996
4. ↑ SCULPTURES OF POETS AT ARROW PARK MONROE, NEW YORK USA ( Memento of the original from May 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at arrowparkny.com (English)  
5. ↑ Dirk Holtbrügge : Belarus. 2nd ed., Munich, Beck, 2002. p. 115
6. ↑ Official website of the Janka Kupala University in Hrodna ( Memento of the original from November 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.