VASIL BYKAU
Arnold McMillin
Vasil Bykau, who has died aged 79, was the leading Belarusian writer of the post-Stalin period. As well as being the creator of outstanding war stories, he represented, to the intelligentsia of his beleaguered country, a powerful moral authority, speaking out on literary and socio-political issues, particularly against abuses of power in the Soviet era and by the authoritarian regime that followed it. Later, he was forced into exile.
Bykau was born into a peasant family in the province of Vitebsk. He studied sculpture at Vitebsk art school (famous for Shagall, Soutine and others), but had to leave for lack of funds. During the second world war, he served in an engineering battalion and, by 1943, was a junior officer.
The great majority of his fiction in the Soviet years was, in fact, about the war, but its avoidance of panoramic heroics, and its concentration on small, moraly fraught episodes, won him popularity throughout the Soviet Union – where he was often passed off as a Russian – and abroad.
From early on, however, Russian translations of Bykau’s works bowdlerised his texts, removing references to Belarusian national identity and the mildest criticisms of Soviet reality – so that phrases such as “things cannot go on being lousy forever” were transformed into “the collective farm is good”. None the less, Russian translations were the pass to a broad readership, and so Bykau later made his own.
In the early years of his career, as a result of his boldness, he suffered considerable KGB harassment, and his courage earned the soubriquet of the Belarusian Solzhenitsyn. Certainly, he was the only prominent Belarusian writer not to join the Communist party.
A particular feature of Bykau’s fiction is the tension of critical situations, where the temptation to make moral compromises is highlighted, often from a viewpoint of a young military officer witnessing the cynicism, cowardice and even treachery of his superiors. Also characteristic is Bykau’s linking of past and present: Stalinism is shown not to have died with the dictator, but to be a constant threat.
Among Bykau’s best works are the novels The Dead Feel No Pain (1965), not reprinted in his homeland for more than 20 years on account of its demonstration of how a wartime traitor could attain status in postwar Belarus; The Bridge At Kruhlany (1969), a tense story underlining the Sovet disregard for life; and The Ordeal (1970), the first of Bykau’s works to be published in the west, which again centred on impossibly difficult, yet inevitable, moral decisions.
The Sign Of Misfortune (1982) depicts an old couple in a rundown farmstead, attempting to cope with the German occupation; it uses flashback to show how many of the Belarusian collaborationist police came from families dispossessed by Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture. The Quarry (1986) also links past and present, emphasising the importance of memory. It attracted vicious press attacks for its moral steadfastness – characterised as “paper truth” – and Bykau was, among other things, absurdly accused of writing “landowner” elitist literature. This book was followed by one of his gloomiest works, In The Fog (1987), a story of moral confusion and duplicity.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bykau was occupied in supporting the nascent, but quickly suppressed, democratic movement and national renaissance in Belarus. He continued to write fiction, but turned away from war as a subject. For example, a story set at the time of the Slutsk uprising against the Bolsheviks, On Black Ice (1994), highlights choice and destiny at his turning point in Belarus’s unhappy history. An unofficial collection of his last fiction, The Wall (1997), was printed by public subscription.
Increasingly oppressed by the Belarusian authorities, Bykau was given refuge, first by the Finnish Pen Club and later by its German equivalent, before the Czech president Vaclav Havel offered him asylum in Prague. During this period, he continued to write, producing the concise but profound Parables (1999), followed by a collection of non-fiction, The Way Of The Cross (1998), and a book of memoirs, the Long Road Home (2002).
Bykau was shortlisted for the Russian Booker prize in 1997, and two years ago proposed by Havel and Czeslaw Milosz for the Nobel prize for literature. It was not, however, only as an outstanding writer who put contemporary Belarusian literature on the map, but as a morally courageous patriot that he was so deeply loved and will be so missed.
He is survived by his wife Iryna.
Vasil Bykau, writer, born June 19, 1924; died June 21, 2003
„Belarusian writer who challenged Soviet abuses. Vasil Bykau”
(The Guardian, 25/7/2003, p. 25)
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