Toward cosmopolitan mourning

belarusian literature between history and politics

Simon Lewis

pp. 195-216

in: Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, Julie Fedor (eds), Memory and theory in Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

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