Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
According to the BBC, Belarus’s authoritarian leader and Putin puppet Alexander Lukashenko has banned two 19th poems by one of the founders of the modern Belarusian literary tradition. According to Wikipedia, Vincent Dunin-Martsinkevich was a Polish-Belarusian writer, poet, poet, dramatist and social activist who helped establish the national school theatre. It appears that his extremism consists of drawing a contrast between Belarus and Russia. Lukashenko has also targeted works by 20th century Belarusian authors Larisa Geniyush, Vladimir Neklyayev, Lidiya Arobey and Natalya Arseneva.
Despite an intense google search, I have not been able to find copies of the two banned Dunin-Martsinkevich poems, “The Winds Are Floating” and “Conversation of an Elderly Man.” The poet sounds like other regional authors in the 19th century Russian empire, such as Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko. (I write about Shevchenko here and here.) By tapping into local folklore and writing great poetry in his own tongue, Dunin-Martsinkevich gave Belarusians confidence in their own national identity.
In this, Dunin-Martsinkevich served not only the interests of Belarusians but of Poles as well. He translated Poland’s great epic poem Pan Tadeusz, by its greatest poet Adam Mickiewicz, into Belarusian, the first translation of the poem into another Slavic language. One subplot of Pan Tedusz involves a spontaneous revolt of local inhabitants against an occupying Russian garrison. There’s also this famous invocation, which nationalist Lithuanians, Poles, and Belarusians thrilled to:
Lithuania, my country! You are as good health:
How much one should prize you, he only can tell
Who has lost you. Your beauty and splendor I view
And describe here today, for I long after you.Holy Virgin who shelters our bright Częstochowa
And shines in Ostra Brama! You, who yet watch over
The castled Nowogródek’s folk faithful and mild;
As You once had returned me to health, a sick child,
(When by my weeping mother into Your care given,
I by miracle opened a dead eye to heaven,
And to Your temple’s threshold could straightaway falter
For a life thus returned to thank God at the altar)
Thus to motherland’s breast You will bring us again.Meanwhile, bear my soul heavy with yearning’s dull pain,
To those soft woodland hillocks, those meadows, green, gleaming,
Spread wide along each side of the blue-flowing Niemen,
To those fields, which by various grain painted, there lie
Shimmering, with wheat gilded, and silvered with rye…
To understand the poem’s power, imagine how “America the Beautiful” would sound to our ears if the United States were dominated by a foreign power.
Both Dunin-Martsinkevich and Adam Mickiewicz came under fire from Russian authorities. Mickiewicz fled to France while Dunin-Martsinkevich was arrested for his role in Poland’s 1863 January uprising. Although he was eventually set free, his daughter Kamila Marcinkievič was sentenced to a psychiatric hospital for her participation.
Once can see why Dunin-Martsinkevich would take on a new urgency in present day Belarus. Lukashenko relies on Vladimir Putin to stay in power but is facing new nationalist pressures as Belarusians see what Russia is doing to Ukraine, with whom they can relate.
It doesn’t matter that Dunin-Martsinkevich’s works were composed over 150 years ago. Poetry, no matter how old, can speak with power to the present moment. Keep this in mind as Florida school systems ban classic works by Toni Morrison, Khaled Hosseini, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, Arundhati Roy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sandra Cisneros, Isabel Allende, and hundreds of others. And as they censor Shakespeare as well.
This is what authoritarians do.