Starting to Write in Belarusian. The Regional and Social Composition of the Belarusian Revival, 1880–1918

On 7 December at 18:30, the next meeting of the regular research seminar of the Political Sphere Institute will take place in the CSI courtyard.

Topic of the presentation: “Starting to Write in Belarusian. The Regional and Social Composition of the Belarusian
Revival, 1880–1918”.

Speaker: Andrei Kazakevich

Discussant: Andrei Asadchy

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Efforts to unite a community in order to achieve a common goal require the existence of certain institutions. This implies a reduction of diversity, the selection of particular elements, and the ignoring of the rest. As a result, the community becomes more homogeneous, while the initial material, unevenly represented within it and reflecting the chosen principle of selection, may influence the development of institutions and the community for a long time.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the Belarusian national movement, and through it Belarusians as an ethnic community, had to solve the task of reducing diversity and selecting particular elements of cultural and political organisation. The choice of strategy was quite limited, except in certain spheres where greater freedom of action existed, for example in the formation of the literary language. In choosing the basic institutions of the new community, the field of possibilities was narrow. Among the usual set, the state, public structures, the church, high culture, and so on, only ethnic culture and language were available.

In such a situation, the legitimisation of Belarusian culture and language through the institutionalisation of literary activity occupied an exceptional place in the movement whose goal was the formation of a new national community. To a significant extent, the beginning of the national revival as a phenomenon at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries manifested itself precisely as a transition to literary and journalistic activity in the Belarusian language. This meant overcoming cultural and political barriers and creating a new tradition.

The people who joined this simultaneously sociolinguistic and political process in fact constituted the first generation of Belarusians in the national, not merely ethnic, sense.

The process of the Belarusian revival, to use the terminology of its participants, had its social, demographic, as well as territorial and temporal dimensions. The examination of these dimensions is the main focus of the research. We are primarily interested in considering the first active participants of the cultural movement as a special social and political community, whose composition will allow us to understand more precisely the beginning of the institutionalisation of a new national community on the basis of ethnic culture and language.

There are every grounds to believe that particular regions, professional and social groups of ethnic Belarusians differed significantly in their activity at the first stage of the nation-building process. Analysing this community will make it possible to see the areas through which new institutions and norms were crystallised and formalised. It may also be important to determine the social and geographical trajectory, consequences, and achievements of joining the nation-building process. Thus, we will try to locate the first stage of the Belarusian nation-building process more precisely from geographical, sociological, and demographic points of view.

The subject of our consideration is all individuals who published literary or journalistic works in Belarusian sufficient for them to be included in encyclopaedic publications.

In total, based on the analysis of materials containing biographical and bibliographical data, we compiled a list of 98 people who in one way or another left their mark on the literary and cultural history of Belarus. The list of figures is sufficiently large, in our view, to make it possible to identify supra-individual tendencies.

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Main parameters of the analysis. As noted above, the emergence of the Belarusian movement was a multi-level process that had its social, demographic, and territorial dimensions. We will record these dimensions through the following complete set of parameters. The territorial dimension will be fixed through an examination of the place of birth and place of death of the participants in the cultural movement. It is assumed that this will allow us to determine the territorial basis of the Belarusian national movement, as well as the influence of participation in the emergence of the movement on a particular life trajectory. By the demographic dimension we mean the following parameters: year of birth, age at joining the cultural movement, life span, and time of death. By the social dimension, within the framework of the research, we mean social origin, education, chosen profession, and cause or circumstances of death. Thus, we have 10 parameters which, in our opinion, will help us understand much more deeply the nature and circumstances of Belarusian nation-building at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

The seminar will include a presentation and discussion of the results obtained.

Everyone interested is invited. For additional information about the venue, please contact [email protected].