Belarusian literature

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Belarusian literature (more recently Belarusian literature ) is the literature of the Belarusian -speaking population in Belarus (Belarus), Poland and Lithuania . Belorussian emerged from the Ruthenian language , but also took on influences from Polish and in turn influenced Church Slavonic . A Belarusian identity only emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the area of ​​tension between Russian, Polish and Lithuanian power and cultural interests. Quite a few intellectuals continued to see themselves in a western tradition going back to the old Greater Lithuanian Empire .

In the following, the Belarusian literature and the Belarusian literature are treated in connection.

Early history

The first chronicles in the Belarusian vernacular were written in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 15th and 16th centuries . The reformer and humanist Francysk Skaryna (approx. 1490–1551) first printed translations of the Bible in Prague , then in Vilnius, in an impure Belarusian that was still based on the Church Slavonic language. The Tatars who settled in Lithuania at that time also used the Belarusian language, but wrote the translations of Muslim texts with Arabic letters (Kitab) . Wassil Zjapinsky (approx. 1540–1604) translated the New Testament, Szymon Budny (1530–1593) translated and printed the Calvinist catechism into White Ruthenian and thus attracted the hostility of the Orthodox. In addition, there were the beginnings of a poem by Andrej Rymscha (approx. 1550–1604)

Title page of the Francysk Skaryna Bible

Through the union with Lithuania in 1386 and 1569 , many Belarusian (and Ukrainian) speaking Orthodox Christians came under the rule of the Polish kings. The Vice Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Leŭ Sapieha published the comprehensive legal code in Belarusian language in 1588. In 1596 the ecclesiastical union was decided, after which the Orthodox Church in the Grand Duchy was subordinate to the Pope. As a result, Latin and Polish remained the languages ​​of scholars, while Belarusian, at that time the language of the majority of the population in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was Polonized and Baroque, and so on. a. by the monk Simjaon von Polack , who edited literary collections of poetry and wrote dramas in the 17th century. Minsk had become largely Catholic in the 17th century, and in 1697 the Belarusian chancellery language was abolished by decree. Folk poetry, which was more significant than art poetry, but lacked large epic forms, survived into the 19th century.

19th century

After the partitions of Poland , more and more country nobles in the part of Belarus annexed by Russia wrote in Russian. The Polish aristocracy was convinced that the Belarusian people were a Polish people, but the foundations for a self-confident national movement were laid by the Polonized upper class. The first romantic works based on the popular dialects come from Wikenzi Rawinski (1786 – approx. 1855) and Jan Barschtscheuski (1794 (?) - 1851). Winzent Dunin-Marzinkewitsch (1808–1884) lets peasants speak Belarusian in his romantic poetry and stage poems , while the educated speak Polish. After the November uprising in Poland in 1830, the Polish-Lithuanian influence in Belarus continued to decline; the Polish aristocracy was driven out, the Belarusian aristocracy and the Orthodox Church grew stronger. Belarusian became more widespread, and the term “Belarus” became common. But after the last unsuccessful Polish uprising, the January uprising of 1863, a massive russification policy began. The term "Belarus" was deleted, and Belarusian printed matter was banned in 1867.

Since the end of the 19th century, philologists have also systematically dealt with the Belarusian language, the numerous fairy tales and legends of the peasant people and their folklore, which could not be forbidden. The creative development of a written Belarusian language began with the poems and realistic epics of Franzischak Bahuschewitsch (1840–1900), which dealt with the worried life of the peasants. The purely phonetic rendering of local dialects was thus overcome. In 1905 the tsarist printing ban was lifted; the term “Belarusian” began to establish itself as the name of the language. That year Janka Kupala (1882–1942) was able to print the first poem in Belarusian.

The Belarusian minority in the Austrian part of Poland was able to develop much better after the end of the Germanization policy under the extensive autonomy of Galicia , which had existed since 1867, with the equality of all nationalities. In Lviv and Krakow texts were printed in Belarusian language and relocated. The Jagiellonian University as an important center of Slavic studies became the place of cultivation of the Belarusian language and literature. In the Prussian part of annexed Poland - largely identical to the province of Posen - all languages ​​were initially given equal rights, but after the establishment of the empire in 1871 they were in a minority position vis-à-vis the Germans and were exposed to efforts to Germanize themselves.

The Belarusian rebirth 1905–1930

The Belarusian nationalists and the first prose authors gathered around the magazine Nascha Niwa (1906–1915) founded in 1906 in Vilnius , the then intellectual center of the Belarusian intelligentsia . An important figure in this movement was the poet, prose writer and translator Maksim Bahdanowitsch (1891-1917), who died early and who left Belarus early. The novelist Maksim Harezki (1893–1938) wrote with his work Two Souls (first published in 1919 as a sequel story) at a time when the struggle for independence had not yet been decided, a key novel of the time of rebirth. His hero, supposedly the son of a landowner, who has been exchanged by his wet nurse for her own son, is torn between the nobility and the peasants, between the Bolsheviks and the equally fanatical rebirth activists, while his foster brother follows the Bolsheviks.

Maxim Harezki (1937)

In the pre-war period there was a spirit of optimism, which was only briefly interrupted by war and revolution as well as the separation of the western parts of the country and the city of Wilna, which fell to Poland. At first, literature was able to develop largely freely in the Belarusian Soviet Republic, even after it was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1922 until 1932. In 1920 the Minsk Theater received the status of a state theater. For the first time, the free verse was tried out in Belarusian. The most important representative of this phase was the poet and playwright Janka Kupala (1882-1942), a representative of the national "rebirth" as well as the poet and epic Jakub Kolas (1882-1956) and Jan Skryhan (1905-1992), who temporarily Futurists and was not rehabilitated until 1954 after imprisonment and exile.

1932-1939

An intellectual group soon formed in the areas annexed by Poland, which continued the tradition of the conservative wing of the national revolutionary movement that had arisen around the Nascha Niva . With this, the Bolsheviks feared, many intellectuals in the country could sympathize. The constant evocation of the symbolic history of the decline of the Belarusian language since 1697 by the opposition across the border led to violent reactions from the state and put the Belarusian intelligentsia in the country in an ambiguous position, either to reject national traditions or to expose themselves to fascists and clericals to ogle in Poland.

In 1932 the Writers' Union was brought into line; of Socialist Realism became the literary doctrine . Kandrat Krapiwa (1896–1991) described the events of the revolution and the civil war in his dramas since the 1930s. The avant-garde Pauljuk Schukajla, Todar Kljaschtorny, Walery Marakou, Uladsimir Chadyka, Michas Tscharot, Ales Dudar and Jurka Ljawonn, however, were subjected to repression. Dudar was executed in Minsk in 1937, Kupala died in Moscow in 1942 under unexplained circumstances. As early as 1920 Harezki had been temporarily arrested by the Poles; now he was shot in 1938 during the Stalinist purges. Other authors such as the working-class writer Zischka Hartny (1888–1937), the first head of government of the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic, were also victims of the purges.

Maksim Tank's birth house in Piĺkaŭščyna near Minsk

In the western part of the country, which has belonged to Poland since 1920, a number of poets emerged in the interwar period, e. B. the farmer's son Maksim Tank (1912–1995), who had contact with many writers in Vilnius and who came to write. Already in his school days he agitated against the Polish occupation, joined the illegal Communist Party of Belarus and was imprisoned several times for it in the 1930s. During the war he worked as a journalist in the Soviet Union, after the war he made a career in the political system of Belarus. This group also included Philip Pestrak (1903–1978), who spent eleven years in Polish prisons as a communist.

Other Belarusian authors who had moved from Vilnius (or from Prague such as Uladzimir Schylka ) to Minsk in the 1920s and 1930s were liquidated under Stalin, as the initially promoted cultural autonomy efforts now seemed dangerous to him.

1945-1991

Prose and poetry of the 1940s and 1950s were completely influenced by ideology; thematically the war and the post-war period were in the foreground. After 1960, Belarusian writers spoke up again with independent contributions, for example Ivan Melesch (1921–1976) with a trilogy of novels about the inhuman collectivization of agriculture . A literary prize was named after him. Maksim Tank continued to publish; influenced by him was the narrator Janka Bryl (1917-2006), who struck a rather lyrical tone. Andrej Makajonak (1920–1982), who also worked for the Belarusian radio, became known as a playwright . His last work was a tragicomic satire about the consequences of atomic destruction. Aljaksej Karpjuk (1920–1992) placed the situation in the western part of Belarus at the center of his work. This enabled him to partially bypass censorship, but had been fighting with spying since the 1960s. In general, the predominantly Catholic north-western region around Hrodna (Polish: Grodno) , which had long been part of the heartland of Poland-Lithuania, was considered more open to western influences than Minsk and, like in the Tsarist era, became a center of opposition again after 2000.

The poet Laryssa Henijusch (1910–1983), who was arrested in Prague in 1948 as an employee of the government-in-exile and spent a long time in a Soviet camp, was only allowed to publish again after 1963. In Germany, the narrator Wassil Bykau (1924-2003), who was highly honored in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s , dealt with the topic of World War II, then joined the civil rights movement in the late 1980s and went into exile in 1997 translations of his works written by himself from Russian known (first through Die third Leuchtkugel , German Berlin 1964). Other authors remained largely unknown in Germany well into the 1980s, as Neureiter noted in 1983 in the anthology of Belarusian literature he edited.

The presence

Memorial to Laryssa Henijusch in Selwa , where she lived after her release from the camp

After independence, primarily a literary reckoning with the past began. This also included the posthumous publication of Laryssa Henijusch's memoirs in 1990. In the 1990s, the so-called Bum-Bam-Lit (BBL) was created, which for a decade proclaimed total individualism and whose representatives now play an important role in Belarus Literature comes.

However, since 1995 numerous publications have been censored or banned. The literary production and discussion was thereby severely restricted. After all, it is thanks to Kultura magazine that the concept of postmodernism was introduced into the literary discussion of Belarus in 1995 . Interest in the Belarusian language is also increasing again. The poet and novelist Uladsimir Njakljajeu (Vladimir Nekljajew, * 1946) was one of the first Belarusian intellectuals who emigrated to Poland during this period (1999 to Poland); he now lives in Minsk, but was temporarily under house arrest after his presidential candidacy.

Ales Rasanau in Minsk, December 2011

Important independent contemporary authors are the innovative lyric poet and translator Ales Rasanau (* 1947), who mostly lives in Germany and who advocated the use of the Belarusian language as early as the 1960s, and also in Germany through the book Minsk - Sun City of Dreams known Artur Klinau (Russian: Klinow, * 1965), the US-based lyricist Valzhyna Mort (* 1981), Alherd Bacharewitsch (* 1975), whose novel Die Elster auf dem Galgen was published in Germany in 2010, and also the avant-garde Smizer Vishnyou (* 1973), the linguist, poet and writer Wolha Hapejewa (* 1982) and the journalist and narrator Natalka Babina (* 1966), whose stories are set in the rural border area of ​​Belarus with Ukraine and Poland.

The works of these authors are seldom published in their homeland, they often struggle with censorship. Private publishing is poorly developed, but some important works have also appeared in the state publishers. The official body of the authors is the Association of Writers of Belarus, headed by the former police general Nikolai Tscherginez.

The previously important private magazine Kultura largely only reports on official events, so that the Internet has become an important medium for the uncensored distribution of literature. Viktor Martinowitsch (* 1977), living in exile, only published his novel Paradiese on the Internet so that it could be accessed in Belarus.

Svetlana Alexijewitsch , who lives in Minsk, only writes in Russian , who for her documentary prose about life in Soviet and post-Soviet society (inter alia. The war has no female face , German Berlin 1987; Second-hand time. Life on the ruins of socialism , German Munich 2013) has received several awards. In 2013 she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and in 2015 the Nobel Prize for Literature .

Anthologies

literature

Web links

Commons : Belarusian Literature  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Belarusian literature , in: Der Literatur-Brockhaus. Vol. 3, Mannheim 1988.
  2. ^ Belarusian literature , 1988.
  3. ↑ A German translation was published in 2014. Lerke von Saalfeld: Schlüsselwerk der Weißrussischen Literatur. Deutschlandfunk, November 21, 2014.
  4. ^ Rainer Lindner: Historians and rule: nation building and history politics in Belarus in the 19th and 20th centuries. Munich 1999, p. 99 ff.
  5. ↑ literary landscape Belarus: A commission of, a representation of Zmicer Višnëŭ undated, with numerous references; first in longer form (but without lit.) in the journal Annus Albaruthenicus , 2010
  6. ^ Belarusian literature , 1988.
  7. ↑ See McMillin 2010
  8. ^ Leipzig Book Fair: Literature from Ukraine and Belarus , March 13, 2012, accessed May 21, 2014
  9. ↑ Belarusian literary landscape - an inspection. In: novinki.de, undated, accessed: September 1, 2017.