Episodes of a Great Life

Veras, Zoska (2013). I Remember Everything. Memoirs, Letters. Hrodna-Wrocław: “Hrodna Library”, 475 pp.

Review prepared by Andrei Vashkevich.

The poet and public figure Liudvika Sivitskaya (1892–1991), better known as Zoska Veras, left a visible mark on the history of the Belarusian Revival of the early twentieth century. It was indeed a “Revival”, for the first Belarusian spark in Hrodna was lit precisely by her and by her friends, pupils of Hrodna gymnasiums. Having begun her path in the Hrodna circle of Belarusian youth, Zoska Veras worked for many decades in Belarusian charitable organizations, publishing, and cooperative activity. Yet perhaps the most important work of her life was the preservation of the memory of her comrades and the transmission of that memory to later generations. This is precisely what the volume in the “Hrodna Library” series, published for the 120th anniversary of her birth, is devoted to.

The forest house near Vilnius where Zoska Veras spent the rest of her long life was a true Mecca for several generations of Belarusian public activists, historians, literary scholars, and museum workers. Anyone could write to Mrs Liudvika and find out what interested them. Some were interested in Haliasz Leuczyk, Maksim Bahdanovich, or Symon Rak-Mikhailouski; others wanted to obtain a valuable book; someone collected local herbs and wanted to consult her as a good expert. For everyone, even at the age of ninety-five, Zoska Veras found time and answered.

The letters and memoirs of Zoska Veras, compiled by Mikhas Skobla, include her correspondence, 386 letters in all, with Hrodna residents Danuta Bichel, Aliaksei Piatkevich, Fiodar Ihnatovich, Ales Hostseu, Mikalai Taranda, Ales Bielakoz, Larysa Heniush, Mikalai Martsinchyk, as well as an autobiography and substantial memoirs. The memoirs had previously been printed only in fragments in periodicals and are now published in full according to a photocopy of the autograph preserved in the Belarusian State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art.

The memoirs cover the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Second World War, that is, the time when their author was actively involved in Belarusian public, cultural, publishing, and cooperative structures: the Hrodna Circle of Belarusian Youth (Hrodna, 1909–1912), the Society for Aid to War Victims (Minsk, 1916–1918), the editorial offices of Belarusian newspapers in Vilnius (Vilnius, 1924–late 1920s), and the editorial office of “Belarusian Beekeeping” and the “Bee” society (Vilnius, 1930s).

Zoska Veras’s correspondence is of interest not only to researchers of Belarusian literature, although she corresponded primarily with writers and literary scholars. It should not be forgotten that the poet took part in the Congress of Belarusian National Organizations in March 1917 and the First All-Belarusian National Congress in December 1917, and later worked in the editorial offices of Western Belarusian newspapers and journals and herself published several of them, including the children’s “Zaranka” and the economic “Belarusian Beekeeping”.

She left a visible mark on the history of Belarusian cooperation by creating the “Bee” society, which maintained active contacts with Western Ukrainian cooperators. Meanwhile, the subject of Belarusian cooperation in the interwar period is one of the weakest researched topics in the entire history of the Belarusian national liberation movement.

The most interesting subjects in Zoska Veras’s correspondence, in our opinion, concern her work in the editorial offices of publications of the Belarusian Deputies’ Club and later of the Belarusian Peasant-Workers’ Hramada. She touches on this field of activity rather episodically, but nevertheless paints a very vivid picture of how the process of organizing, printing, and distributing interwar Belarusian legal newspapers looked, and emphasizes the significant role of Anton Luckievich in editing them.

What is especially interesting is that she states specifically that the publications were financed by the Belarusian Deputies’ Club and later probably by the Hramada club. She even names the amount of this support: Symon Rak-Mikhailouski gave her 4,500 zlotys every month for Belarusian publishing, a huge sum for that time, the mid-1920s.

A separate interesting topic is Zoska Veras’s reflections on the fate of Belarusians of the Sokółka region. Most members of the Hrodna Circle of Belarusian Youth came from the Catholic environs of present-day Sokółka; the circle also staged its performances and other events there. After the Second World War, Catholic Sokółka almost disappeared from the Belarusian life of Poland, which shifted to Orthodox regions south of Białystok. Zoska Veras saw this well, rightly asserting that the post-war authorities of “People’s Poland” opposed the creation of Belarusian structures there, viewing the Belarusian population of Sokółka as Catholic Poles.

The Sokółka region, like Hrodna, always remained a special love and pain for the poet: there were the graves of her friends, the land of her ancestors, and the best years of her youth. Zoska Veras also felt Hrodna life very keenly, although she herself last visited Hrodna in 1970. Sensing the peculiar attitude of local officials toward the city’s Belarusian activists, she wrote as early as 1982 in a letter to Danuta Bichel-Zahnetava: “The affairs of Hrodna are very painful. It is hard to believe that things are much worse there than in other towns. Even Maladzechna has its own Belarusian newspaper, but here… Why do Hrodna Belarusians not appeal to Minsk, to the higher authorities? Are the Hrodna tsars untouchable?” (228). Thirty years have passed, but in light of the fate of the textbook “Hrodna Studies”, these words are still relevant.

While speaking of the unquestionable creative achievement of both the compiler and the publishers of the book, one cannot fail to note certain shortcomings. There are inaccuracies in the captions to what is otherwise an interesting and high-quality selection of photographs. A photograph with the family of Liudvika Sivitskaya and the future poet herself is dated 1890, although Liudvika Antonauna was born only in 1892. In the neighbouring photograph, captioned “Father Francisak Hrynkevich”, we see a rather well-known image of an entirely different Belarusian priest, Aliaksandr Astramovich (Andrei Ziaziulia). Some letters are dated inaccurately by the compiler or by the poet’s addressees. For example, the letter on p. 110 is dated approximately 1970, although in it Zoska Veras writes about the death of her son in the second half of the 1970s.

The name index is also not entirely complete, since not all pages on which particular persons are mentioned are listed. The substantial commentary on the letters, more than thirty pages long, is almost not covered by the name index at all, which creates a rather strange situation: the reader may find references to a particular person in Zoska Veras’s correspondence, but then has difficulty finding information about him or her in the comments.

Despite all these remarks, the volume of Zoska Veras’s correspondence is a valuable achievement of Belarusian book publishing and will occupy an honoured place in the libraries of researchers of Belarusian literature and of the national liberation movement of the first half of the twentieth century.