Literary Studies as a Journey

The review was prepared within the framework of the joint Book Review project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Liavon Yurevich. Genres. Minsk: Knihazbor, 2013. – 528 pp.

Review prepared by Hanna Kislitsyna.

The new book by the US-based archivist Liavon Yurevich, devoted to Belarusian literature in emigration, undoubtedly evokes far more emotion than books on the history and theory of literature usually do.

Moreover, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Yurevich is, in general, one of the few contemporary Belarusian-language literary scholars whose texts one reads with the kind of interest more often associated with fiction.

This in no way diminishes the book’s scholarly and theoretical value, since the level at which the researcher develops the history of such genres as historical-mythological prose, memoir writing, travelogue, translation, epistolary writing, obituary as posthumous remembrance, feuilleton, and biography cannot fail to impress.

What impresses is the serious and thorough approach to the study of the material, all the more so because it concerns a true terra incognita of Belarusian studies: the materials on which Yurevich builds his research have often not only never been studied before, but at times have not even been described or in any way registered in Belarusian literary scholarship. Or else they were identified with such errors that they could almost be cited as a particular scholarly anecdote: for example, Uladzimir Siadura’s essay “In the Holy Land” was characterized by one well-known researcher as an account of Euphrosyne of Polotsk’s journey to Palestine in the twelfth century.

To restore brilliance to genres that are now perceived as marginal, and at the same time to breathe life, through an appeal to works in these genres, into historical figures who are sometimes known to their descendants only through the paper pages of diaries, someone else’s distant recollections, letters, and yellowed photographs, is to some extent a utopian task, but one commendable by virtue of its nobility alone.

And, it should be noted, the author manages not to lapse into pathos, not to fall into sentimentality, not to follow the path of inventing and supplementing rather chaotic documents and testimonies, but to remain on the rational path of the scholar.

At a time when colleagues in the homeland are taking their first, rather uncertain steps toward the study of some under-researched genres, L. Yurevich is already dealing with such subtleties of the problem as the canons of the biography of Belarusian figures (“The Microhistory and Macrohistory of Biography”). But what is interesting is that while the US-based researcher demonstrates a good familiarity with the works of his Belarusian colleagues working in the same field of literary studies (their names appear both in the survey literature and are periodically cited in the scholarly texts), it must be admitted, to our shame, that Liavon Yurevich’s own name is essentially absent from Belarusian literary studies texts, except perhaps for the few devoted to the history of emigration. Meanwhile, his latest book shows that the author is not only an outstanding archivist and historian, but also possesses exceptional analytical abilities, fully realized in the texts devoted to literary genres.

The book Genres, which runs to 528 pages, is a collection of scholarly texts united by one overarching theme. If its author lived in Belarus, he would most likely have published several separate monographs: the book contains material for at least four volumes of the size customary in today’s Belarusian humanities. Among them there would be reference materials (for example, “A Dictionary of Pseudonyms and Cryptonyms of Emigration Figures” and “Literary Studies and Criticism on the Pages of the Newspapers Baćkaŭščyna and Belarus,” among others), texts devoted to literary genres (“In the Language of the Travelogue,” “The Tonality of Biography as an Encyclopedic Genre,” “The Microhistory and Macrohistory of Biography,” and others), a book covering the activities of outstanding figures of Belarusian culture in emigration (“The Literary Soldier Yurka Vićbič,” “The Life Story of Siarhei Malevich in the Correspondence of Emigrants,” “Vitaŭt Tumaš as a Biographer of Contemporaries,” “The Man Who Held the Moon in His Hands,” and others), and a volume devoted to humor and satire (“Humorous and Satirical Works on the Pages of Baćkaŭščyna and Belarus,” “A Self-Portrait in the Style of Grotesque: Satirical Prints and Works of the Postwar Emigration in Canada,” and others).

It is obvious that Belarusian researchers have recently become accustomed, with relatively little work invested, to announcing the maximum possible number of scholarly events…

Yet it is enough to look at Yurevich’s output over the past two years to understand how things really stand: Genres, published in 2013, numbers, as already noted, more than 500 pages in small type, while his previous book, The Polyphonic Epistolary: A History of People and Ideas in Emigration through Correspondence, which appeared only last year, contains more than 600 pages of text! Such productivity could perhaps be explained by the large number of cited archival materials and photographs. Yet it is clear that even taking this feature of Yurevich’s works into account, the volume and depth of the material analyzed still exceed the rather conventional ideas of how much a scholar passionately devoted to a favorite subject can accomplish.

One of the great advantages of this archivist and researcher’s scholarly texts is the unhurried manner in which the material is presented, as the author, like a good investigator, does not miss a single detail that could affect the understanding of a particular literary phenomenon or fact. Thanks to such detailed elaboration, the article “What Does The Snuffbox Hide?” appears especially convincing. It brings together not only all the more or less well-known opinions of domestic and foreign scholars (those who lived in emigration) about the genre and content of this enigmatic work by Zmitrok Biadulia, but also arrives at a rather unexpected conclusion about its genesis and philosophical message. The system of arguments presented by Yurevich compels one to agree with his rather unusual, if not paradoxical, conclusion that The Silver Snuffbox articulates Gospel truths.

“This is what Christianity affirms: death is the last convincing testimony of love. Immortality is the punishment experienced by Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who denied compassion to Jesus. It is in this that I see Biadulia’s inner resistance in The Silver Snuffbox: not in creating allegories of Stalinist repressions, which the reviewer-censors would have instantly detected and destroyed, either the manuscript of the tale or the author’s life, but in affirming the Gospel truth: to fear God, not the evil one, and not to go against one’s conscience. ‘And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna’ (Matt. 10:28). Perhaps it is not a great find in the snuffbox, but good tobacco should be taken sparingly, one pinch at a time” (p. 404), Yurevich summarizes, and to a certain extent demonstrates not only his understanding of Biadulia’s work, but also his own scholarly credo.

The researcher prefers not the construction of beautiful abstract concepts, but attentive, step-by-step, consistent reading of the text, whose detailed study becomes the foundation for theoretical observations.

This principle, incidentally, also sharply distinguishes him from Belarusian scholars who have recently tended to “stretch” someone else’s beautiful theory over their local material, without much concern for the fact that the foreign “garment” sometimes bursts at the seams.

Yet perhaps the most noticeable feature of Genres is its humanism, a phenomenon rather rare in today’s humanities. One gets the sense that work with archives, with material testimonies about people most of whom are no longer alive, has made Yurevich feel a kind of personal responsibility as the bearer and keeper of information about them. Therefore, even when writing about such a “dry bone” of literature as genre, the researcher remains a storyteller who tries to convey to the potential reader the circumstances of the biographies of particular individuals, to identify the key moments in their lives, and to emphasize the tragedy of certain circumstances. This would seem incredible if the matter concerned other genres, but let us recall that the book deals precisely with those that provide grounds for such a biocentric approach: memoir writing, travelogue, epistolary writing, obituary, feuilleton, biography, and others.

In this respect, the material on Stanford Neil Herbert’s ethnographic book (“Russkoe celo, or the Journey of an American in the Last Century to a Mysterious People, Retold in Our Language by a Learned Lyre-Player in the Present Century”) deserves special mention. It is interesting that, beginning the text entirely in the spirit and tradition of scholarly works, with an examination of the opinions of a predecessor-colleague and critical remarks addressed to Herbert himself, Yurevich gradually shifts to a language more suitable for fiction. The very manner of narration somehow subtly recalls Pushkin’s The History of the Village of Goryukhino, while the enigmatic Herbert himself seems almost like a fictional “Belkin.” Were it not for the reference to Vitaŭt Kipel, one might ask: is this a mystification? Yet it is clear that the point is not the researcher’s desire to create intrigue, but the mythological character of the material under consideration. Herbert’s book impresses Yurevich not so much with its ethnographic information about Belarusians (who settled as a commune in the United States from 1911), as with the moral and ethical paradox it unintentionally records: at the end of Russkoe celo, the author describes a conflict between the first Belarusian settlers and Belarusian DPs (Displaced Persons), who arrived on American soil at the end of the 1940s.

Here Yurevich acts not so much as a researcher-archivist and publisher, but as a publicist who uses Herbert’s “ethnography of a Russian-American community” to draw the attention of contemporaries to certain aspects of life characteristic not only of Belarusian emigrants. In describing the conflict between the “old” and “new” Belarusians in greater detail than other circumstances, the author sharpens the theme: “Unfortunately, Herbert ends the plot here, and a few pages later, the whole book.

In search of the mysterious and the unknown, he passed over what was truly essential: how emigrants from Belarus at the beginning of the century settled among peoples alien to them, and how they did not accept their own compatriots, the postwar emigration.

Or: how strangers became one’s own, and how one’s own became strangers” (p. 67).

Undoubtedly, Liavon Yurevich’s book Genres stands out strongly among today’s historical-literary scholarly production. In addition to the qualities already named, anthropocentrism and attention to microdetails, one should also mention respect for another’s opinion, which, however, does not preclude a critical attitude toward it. The author actively uses contemporary scholarly knowledge that enters the texts of Belarusian humanities researchers rather slowly; the latter, unfortunately, are characterized by a certain inertia, and not only with regard to materials about emigrants.

Perhaps this may seem amusing and unworthy of separate mention to someone, but I still want to note one point: the author is perhaps the first scholar to cite the texts of the famous Julia Kristeva in English. It would seem a trifle, but it is a trifle that indicates a somewhat different level of presenting material than the one to which we have become accustomed in Belarus.

Genres is a unique opportunity to compare not only the ways in which the fates of Belarusians in emigration and in the homeland have developed differently, but also an excellent way to feel how different literary scholarship is abroad and in Belarus.