Proud of Our People! Belarusian History in Warsaw
Let me tell you about a small survey I conducted in the centre of Warsaw, near the monument to Adam Mickiewicz. I asked 10 random passersby about natives of Belarus whose life and work were related to Poland. It may have been simple bad luck, but none of the 10 people I spoke to could name even one such person – not Mickiewicz, not Plater, not Niemen.
This comes as no surprise. A plaque with a brief biographical note about the inventor of Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhof – which hangs on one of the arches in the street named after him – says that he was born and spent his childhood in Białystok amongst Jews, Poles, Russians, Germans and Lithuanians. There is no mention of Belarusians at all. During the long and troubled history of the city of Białystok – which was incorporated into the Russian Empire after the third partition of the Republic of Poland – Belarusians were subjected either to Polonisation or Russification several times. Nevertheless, during the 1897 census, according to Wikipedia, almost four percent of the population of Białystok called Belarusian their native language.
It is difficult to determine who is Belarusian, Russian, Lithuanian or Polish on the territories of today’s Poland and Belarus. And the philological confusion of the terms ‘Lithuanians’ and ‘Litvins’ is organically intermingled with misconceptions about contemporary Lithuania and the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
However, there are individuals whose destinies are interwoven in our national histories like bizarre patterns on the canvas of human history. And who knows, maybe it is the crossroads of cultures and lands they were born on, where they grew up and made use of their talents, that left an imprint on the richness of their genius.
A monument unveiled in silence
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‘Portrait of Adam Mickiewicz’ by Stanisław Chejmann, reproduction by Marek Skorupski / Forum
The Belarusians, Lithuanians and Poles cannot come to an agreement over the great Adam Mickiewicz. Academic and non-academic circles in Belarus are still debating whether he should first be considered a Belarusian poet and only then Polish, or vice versa. Poles do not argue about this. They unanimously consider Mickiewicz a great Polish poet – and a bit Lithuanian in the worst case.
It is true that Mickiewicz wrote in Polish. However, the Belarusian imprint is also undeniable: he was born on the territory of today’s Belarus, he drew on Belarusian folklore in his works, and his language is full of Belarusianisms. And the patriotic ideas expressed in Mickiewicz’s works were central to Belarus at the time; traditionally, Belarusians fought shoulder to shoulder with Poles against imperial occupation. The famous Pan Tadeusz, Konrad Wallenrod, Grażyna and Forefathers’ Eve narrate events that played a historical role for both Poles and Belarusians.
Yes, he was the one who exclaimed: ‘Litwa, Ojczyzno moja!’ (O Lithuania, my country [trans. Kenneth R. Mackenzie]). But the state of Lithuania in its contemporary sense did not exist at the time.
Mickiewicz has always been widely read and held in reverence all over Poland, regardless of the historical period. The situation in Belarus is worse: the state does not approve of honouring national heroes. At least as long as a hero’s actions had to do with the struggle for independence or liberation from oppression – no matter whose. Even the celebration of the anniversary of the Kalinousky Uprising was not welcomed by the state, which perceived it as an opposition event.
The circumstances surrounding the unveiling of the monument to Mickiewicz in Warsaw may serve as a metaphor. It was in 1898, under Russian imperial rule. Patriotic sentiments in general and Mickiewicz’s in particular were not approved of by the tsarist authorities. They allowed the unveiling of the monument under one condition: all solemn speeches were banned. But what could be more symbolic than the unveiling of the Mickiewicz monument in the silent presence of more than a thousand guests? The celebration started in silence, with a prayer. It ended with a polonaise from Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Halka. And this unveiling, in silence, of a monument to a great son of the Belarusian, Polish and Lithuanian lands is also very indicative of the Mickiewicz’s affinity with today’s Belarus.
Belarusian Joan of Arc or Polish Valkyrie
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‘Portrait of Emilia Plater’ by Julia Mielcarzewicz, 1840, National Library (Polona)
Who knows if there would be an Emilia Plater Street in Warsaw were it not for Mickiewicz and his poem The Death of the Colonel (originally: Śmierć Pułkownika), which rhapsodised about the courage of the fragile 24-year-old patriot and colonel in the rebel army in the November Uprising (1830-1831)? Emilia was already a legend during the Uprising. Stories about the fearlessness of the female Litvin, the new Joan of Arc, as she was called, spread across Europe. In the 1830s, a popular play in Paris featured Emilia as the prototypical heroine.
Portraits of Kościuszko and Joan of Arc hung above her bed. From childhood, she cared about her native land, dreamt of serving her people, collected Belarusian folklore and learnt folk dances. Her contemporaries admired her great gift for singing and talent for performing folk keening songs. She was passionate about fencing, shooting and horseback riding, all of which she did at one of the Platers’ estates in Līksna, in the Dinaburg uyezd in the Vitebsk Governorate (today’s Latvia).
Her biographer, Maksymilian Marks, called her the harbinger of the national revival of the 19th century:
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She was the first one – if I’m not mistaken – to devote herself fully to the Belarusian people with a vehemence characteristic of sensitive and noble hearts. She felt for their distress and sympathised with them, trying to alleviate their hardships; she collected and sang their songs, paid generously for them and tried to pen her own imitations.
Emilia was friends with Marks’s mother and always stayed at their house when she was in Vitebsk.
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Monument to Emilia Plater in Lithuania, photo: Andrzej Sidor / Forum
At the end of March 1831, in the town of Dusiaty, Emilia assembled, in just a quarter of an hour, according to eyewitnesses, a partisan detachment of 280 riflemen, 60 cavalrymen and several hundred scythe-bearers known as kosynierzy and led them, together with her cousin Cezary Plater, to Dinaburg (Daugavpils). Many authors have repeated this astonishing ‘in a quarter of an hour’; such celerity seems incredible even in our age of social actions and flash mobs.
A series of military successes that made Emilia famous and inspired the rebels were followed by defeats. Wounded and feverish, Emilia was brought to a peasant hut by her comrades-in-arms. She was subsequently transported to the Abłamowiczes’ estate under the guise of being their children’s new tutor. She died soon after hearing the news about the defeat of the Uprising.
It is noteworthy that there is no monument to this young woman, Colonel Emilia Plater, in Belarus, nor is there a street named after her. Her mother’s Braslau estate has not been preserved, as most likely no one thought of preserving it – simply because the love of the motherland on the part of many national heroes of Belarus is unrequited.
Czesław of the Nyoman River
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Czesław Niemen, photo: Jan Bebel / Forum
Is there a better-known music showcase of Warsaw than the legendary hit Sen o Warszawie (Warsaw Dream)?
Paweł Brodowski, the editor-in-chief of Jazz Forum magazine, who performed with Czesław Niemen as a bass guitarist in their band Akwarele (Watercolours), explains the secret of the singer-songwriter’s talent as follows:
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The amazing world of his sounds and philosophy of life emerged as a result of a clash of two different cultures, even, we may say, two dissimilar civilizations – the East and the West – the intersection of tradition and modernity, old and new music, folk and urban music, secular and religious music, popular and classical music, jazz and experimental music, acoustic and electronic music [...] He was a Renaissance artist who crossed the boundaries between styles and expressed himself in different fields of art. He took infantile rock music to another dimension, bringing in texts from the most sacred canons of great poetry.
Czesław Niemen, whose real name was Czesław Wydrzycki, was born and raised in the village of Staryya Vasilishki in the Shchuchyn District of the Grodno Oblast. The village is now dying out, with only a few dozen inhabitants left living here. In 2013, however, the Niemen House Museum was visited by over 1,200 people, half of them from Poland. The Wydrzycki family left for Poland in 1958, when Czesław was 19 years old. By then, Czesław had been expelled from the Grodno Music College and was at risk of being conscripted.
For a long time, Czesław used to live on Długa Street in Warsaw – a street very well known to foreigners in Poland, since the Office for Foreigners is located there. There is no monument to Niemen in Warsaw, but the famous Sen o Warszawie is perhaps a more substantial testament.
Did Niemen feel any affinity with Belarus? Not only does Niemen’s pseudonym – derived from the Nyoman River, on the banks of which he spent his childhood – speak volumes about what his native land meant to him, he would buy tickets for his fellow villagers when he gave concerts in Minsk in the 1970s. Niemen visited Staryya Vasilishki for the last time in 1979, when he was on a concert tour in Moscow.
‘In Moscow, it turned out that he had a spare day in his schedule’, recalls Vladimir Senyuta, the director of the Niemen House Museum:
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Czesław took a taxi and came to Staryya Vasilishki. He spent two hours here with his childhood friends and was back on the road. He would always stress that he was from Staryya Vasilishki. And, you know, when asked about my birthplace, I used to say I came from somewhere bigger not far from my home village. But Niemen had such an influence on me that now I always give the name of my village.
These are only three individuals who became famous at a time of historical watersheds, when the borders were being moved. Their fame knows no limits. But there are dozens of such names on the map of Warsaw, and even more of them on the territory of Poland: Napoleon Orda, Stanisław Moniuszko, Stanisław Ogiński, Tadeusz Reytan, Ignacy Domeyko, Tadeusz Kościuszko.
There is a Russian saying: ‘znay nashikh!‘, meaning ‘proud of our people!’ It sounds cocky: we have something to be proud of, and you? In Warsaw, one would prefer to say ‘proud of our people!’ with different accentuation, since Belarusians have as many historically important places in Poland as Poles do in Belarus. And it would be great if there were fewer and fewer ‘blank spots’ on the map of our shared history.
Originally written in Russian by Yulia Rymashevskaya, Apr 2015, translated by Natalia Mamul, Dec 2020
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