Jurka Vicbich
We certainly have no grounds to feel offended by the newspaper “Novoye Russkoye Slovo.” This newspaper, as its very name emphasizes, is not Belarusian, but Russian. Therefore, while we Belarusians know the history and literature of Russia, Russians, especially in emigration, are under no obligation to take an interest in the history and literature of neighboring Belarus. Hence it is entirely natural that, opening an issue of “Novoye Russkoye Slovo” from November 12 of this year, we found a large article “Silhouettes of Old Moscow” and a bulletin from Kerensky, or the “League of Struggle for People’s Freedom” — “Gryadushchaya Rossiya.” And the Belarusian name, so dear to all our compatriots from cradle to grave, we found among the advertisements. There, on the business page next to an advertisement for the Russian cabaret “Two Guitars,” we noticed:
Books from the USSR
E. Mozolkov — Janka Kupala. Life and Work. 181 pp. Hardcover. Price 75 cents. The book is dedicated to the founder of Belarusian literature, a poet-revolutionary, laureate of the Stalin Prize.
Janka Kupala as a laureate of the Stalin Prize? From the agitated past, a string of vivid, immediate memories surfaced.
- Vieliž. The former boys’ gymnasium, renamed the 5th school of the second level. Among its teachers, Mikhail Navitsky stands out particularly. Later the Bolsheviks will torture him to death as a protopriest, for having signed, together with Metropolitan Melchisedek, an appeal in 1924 for the organization of a Belarusian Autocephalous Church. But now he abandons teaching Russian language and literature and, contrary to the programs of the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR, delivers lectures to us on the geography, history, and literature of Belarus. One day Navitsky comes to his lecture extraordinarily excited and, opening the latest issue of “Pravda,” reads aloud:
Demyan Bedny
Janka’s nightingale voice
Has turned into a serpent’s hiss,
Yes, a serpent’s,
Yes, a serpent’s.
And while reading, Navitsky conscientiously tries to convey to us and emphasize all the hatred of the Kremlin’s court scribbler toward our native poet. For half a minute he is silent and suddenly, raising his hands high, reads with immense inspiration:
To the assembly, to the great, thunderous, stormy assembly
Go, robbed, chained people!
Navitsky reads with such feeling that his face turns white, but his voice does not lose its power:
How your Fatherland is being cut to pieces,
How you perish with your children from the executioner’s hand —
Put everything before the judgment, before the great assembly,
Go, robbed, chained people.
Navitsky covered his face with his palms and quickly left, almost ran, from the classroom. Many times later I heard people read Janka Kupala’s “To the Assembly,” but never did it ring out for me with such force as then, in 1919, in the ancient Belarusian town of Vieliž, which was bleeding in its struggle against Russian Bolshevism.
The Vieliž town hall in 1932
- Vitebsk, which after persistent demands from the population has only just been annexed to the BSSR. The Pedagogical Institute, within whose walls young people have gathered from all over the picturesque, lake-dotted Vitebsk region — from the shores of Lakes Nieshcharda and Jezaryshcha, from the Dvina riverside villages, from the apple-tree farmsteads near Bieshankovichy and Chashniki, from near Ciapina, where Vasil Ciapiński once worked, from the Polacak of Francysk Skaryna. I recall a literary evening to which Janka Kupala was specially invited from Minsk. Before the evening, the poet, with characteristic modesty, addresses the aspiring writers of the local “Maladniak” chapter:
— You go ahead without me, lads. I’ll just sit in the presidium and listen to you along with everyone else. Alright?
But things turned out quite differently. When the auditorium, filled to overflowing, saw its poet, it seemed as though all the rapids of the Dvina had burst into the hall:
— Kupala! Janka Kupala!!! Kupala!!!
The poet rose from his seat and began to read. His voice was muted, and he always read his works monotonously. Yet he always conveyed to the listener the inspiration in which these works were born. He read only one poem, but one had to have great courage to read it. In the front rows sat local communists. A significant number of them would later perish in Soviet torture chambers for supporting what the judges would call local nationalism. But among them sat Chekists, on whose hands Belarusian blood never dried. Janka Kupala did not see them as he read:
A savage stranger, drunk on fresh blood,
Has harnessed you into bondage, into servitude,
And carves your mother-fatherland,
Tears her alive into parts, into pieces.
And when Janka Kupala finished, the rapids of the Dvina roared again as before. Blue-eyed young women in homespun village clothes, roughly remade to look urban, brought him ordinary Belarusian wildflowers — cornflowers, daisies. And then suddenly a tall, strong, well-built young man in an embroidered shirt jumped onto a chair. Later he — Stsapan Takelia — would disappear forever as a “national democrat” in the mines of Siberia. But now he burst into song — the entire auditorium caught up his powerful voice:
The stars in the sky will not go out,
As long as the sky endures.
The Seized Land will not perish,
As long as there are people.
- Minsk. The House of the Writer. It is two-storied with a mezzanine and a basement. On these two floors were housed the editorial offices of “Polymia Revalucyi” and “Litaratura i Mastactva,” the Literary Fund, the office of party committee secretary Hurski, the office of the chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers of the BSSR Klimkovič, the hall for general meetings, etc. In the basement was a restaurant. That very day, a general meeting was taking place upstairs in the hall, devoted to the discussion of Stalin’s Constitution. Being absent from such a meeting was not recommended. Therefore downstairs in the restaurant, at one of its tables, sat only Ales Dudar, Uladzimir Khadyka, and Valery Marakou. Ales Dudar had recently returned from exile, which he had served for his poem “Wind from the East.” Later he would be shot. Also, a few years later, a cruel cliff on the shore of Lake Baikal would crush Soviet convict Uladzimir Khadyka in a blast. Valery Marakou would go mad in one of the Siberian camps. But at that moment they silently drank bitter beer. From time to time, from upstairs came the shouts of Klimkovič:
Janka Kupala in Smolensk
— The great Stalin… The only Constitution of its kind in the world… The great fraternal Russian people…
Marakou pushed his mug aside and, raising his hand upward, almost in a whisper recalled Blok:
You will be content with yourself and your wife,
With your meager constitution,
But the poet has a universal binge,
And he has had enough of constitutions.
Suddenly the door opened, and Janka Kupala entered. He had not come from the hall, for snowflakes had not yet melted on his coat. The three younger poets were overjoyed. They were no longer alone. Janka Kupala was with them. They greeted him with that unique warmth reserved only for Janka Kupala. After waiting a moment, Uladzimir Khadyka turned to him with a request:
— Uncle Kupala, please read us something new of yours.
And Kupala read the first part of his new poem “Over the River Aresa.” The poem was dedicated to the construction of a commune in Palesie and was the poet’s attempt to understand Soviet reality. The three younger poets had never heard anything more impoverished in form and content. They felt sad and frightened. They felt pain for Janka Kupala. When he finished, he looked at them questioningly, and they tried not to meet his eyes. They loved Janka Kupala too much to tell him an untruth. And then he quickly stood up.
— Thank you for your honesty, — raising his hand toward the upper floors, he added: — Up there, they are delighted by it.
And suddenly, already grasping the door handle, he turned to Ales Dudar with the lines of his own poem:
People walked through Siebież westward,
Seeking what they had not lost.
And beneath the castle ruins wither and waste
Belarusian white bones.
No one had ever seen the brave, unbending, determined Ales Dudar cry, but then, that evening, in that cellar of the House of the Writer, he cried.
- Minsk. The same House of the Writer. But instead of the talented family of Belarusian bards, only temporary survivors and “shock workers called up to literature” remained. In the corridor I meet Janka Kupala.
— I heard, Jurka, that you went to Polacak, — he says. — I keep meaning to go there but can never manage it. Tell me, what interesting things did you see there?
I tell him how, wandering through the streets of Polacak, I quite accidentally came upon a lane named after Janka Kupala. It is small and seems violet from the lilac that hangs over it from both sides. It is overgrown with grass, for it ends in a cliff. And below that cliff flows the Palata — the very one for which “they called themselves Polachane.” To the right one can see the ancient Church of the Savior, built by Eufrasinia, Princess of Polacak. To the left, beyond the rise of the Lower Castle, peer the domes of Holy Sophia. And a little further, beyond the Dvina, a wall of forests rises and stretches far, far away, for dozens of kilometers all the way to the Braslau lakes. On one side the lane named after Janka Kupala ends at the Palata, and on the other — at the street named after Mikhail Kalinin.
Ales Dudar during his Smolensk exile
— A lane named after Janka Kupala? — the poet wonders. — Can it really be that they haven’t renamed it yet?
- Smolensk region. A steep hillock above an unknown river. The beginning of the Second World War. Thousand-year-old Belarusian cities are burning by order of both Stalin and Hitler. Janka Kupala is one of the last to leave Minsk. And here, in the Smolensk region, on a steep riverbank, he gets out of the car. Approaching the cliff, he bows low, low, down to the very ground, before Belarus, wrapped once more in the smoke of war for the countless time in its history. And then, turning to those present, he says:
— Better for me to throw myself headfirst off this cliff than to go any further.
- On June 28, in one of Moscow’s hotels, Janka Kupala dies unexpectedly. Time will pass, and history will lift the curtain behind which our national Prophet died in a foreign land, in emigration. To us today, his death seems both premature and mysterious. Only 10 days remained until his 60th birthday, and by the very constitution of his nature he belonged to long-lived people. Meanwhile, only speculations remain. As early as 1930, Janka Kupala had tried to kill himself… Perhaps, having ended up in the capital of the prison of nations, in a state of spiritual depression he took his own life. Or perhaps he was killed by an executioner in a white doctor’s coat. The Russians once killed their poets in duels, and in our times they poisoned them with medications — so can one expect mercy from them toward a dangerous foreign poet?
On July 1, Janka Kupala was buried. It was drizzling. Through narrow alleys a black hearse crept. Muscovites passing by paid no attention whatsoever to the modest funeral procession. The black hearse moved slowly with the body of the great People’s Poet of Belarus — not to the Kremlin wall, where the great people of the country were buried. Does Moscow bury its faithful hirelings — true Stalin Prize laureates — as it buried Janka Kupala? But in vain —
No one shall build such a coffin
Nor dig a grave so deep,
That within them, before my eyes, Belarus-Mother,
As people are buried, could thus be buried.
Yet though fate grant me a place in the coffin,
My day will rise from the earth, lean upon the cross,
And gaze in that direction without end,
Where lie the fields of my native Belarus.
Janka Kupala as a laureate of the Stalin Prize? A lie! An absurdity! A deception! Janka Kupala is a Stalin Prize laureate to the same degree that Alexander Pushkin is solely and exclusively a Kammerjunker “of the court of His Imperial Majesty Emperor Nicholas I.”
1950