|
 Do modern
Belarusians care about the belarusian literature?
Ivan Burlyka
This is one of those questions that are of importance for any educated person who cast in his lot with this country, its cultural heritage or who is simply indifferent to everything what is going on in one of the corners of the European civilization.
To more efficiently answer this question it is worth (like in case of the Belarusian language) referring to the issue of categorization of the Belarusian population in order to specify the groups of people who could potentially read works of Belarusian authors in original as well as to analyze on how deep the roots of this tradition are. At the Trialog-2003 meeting that attempt of mine resulted in specification of the four major layers of the Belarusian population as of their attitude towards the Belarusian language.1 To be more precise, Group A unites Belarusians who can speak literary Belarusian and do it in their everyday life; they comprise about 5 per cent of the total population of the country and include creative intelligentsia and other intellectuals; also, this group contains about 35 per cent of the rural and provincial population); Group B is formed by the citizens who want to speak Belarusian but think that they cannot do it well as they posses the hypertrophied complex of “linguistic inferiority”; they comprise the majority of urban dwellers); Group C unites all those who can speak Belarusian but do not want to as they consider Russian to be more functional and beautiful (they comprise 20 per cent and according to their background these are the former rural young people who do everything possible to forget about their provincial roots but in reality they did not achieve more than only mastered their “trasianka”) and Group D is the one, representatives of which do not want to have anything in common with the native language of the country they are residing in and who “permit” themselves to deal only with definite elements of the Belarusian culture, i.e. ethnography, folklore etc. (they comprise about 10 per cent of the population). Thus, generally speaking, representatives of Group A, B and C (and they comprise about 90 per cent of the citizens of Belarus) have the sufficient linguistic potential to be able to deal with the Belarusian literary word. And only representatives of Group D treat Belarusian literature and many other aspects of national life as alien and which are not worth their attention. To sum it up, nine out of ten Belarusians could absorb wisdom from the masterpieces of our Belarusian literary patriarchy.
Now, let us take a closer look at what the real situation in the field of Belarusian reading is. It has been evaluated on the basis of my visit with the Hrodna Yauhim Karski Regional Library. This is the place where they have accumulated the bulk of works of the Belarusian authors.
It is of interest to specify that out of 303 000 inhabitants (as of 1997 census of the population) only 2 490 of them became the readers of the library. In 2003, for example, they came to the library and borrowed books 7 933 times, i.e. each of the officially registered readers visited the library loan department approximately three times a year. At the same time, this very department serves about 300 readers daily. Total, in 2003 they loaned 42 557 books; 2 723 of them were in Belarusian. Within the first half of 2004 they loaned total 56 000 books and 5 500 of them were the Belarusian ones; that comprised some ten per cent of the total amount of the read materials.
The loan department readers tend to comprise the below three main categories, i.e. schoolchildren (about 8 per cent), students of higher and specialized secondary institutions (some 60 per cent) and regular adult citizens of the city (about 32 per cent). Major attention of the readers of the first and the second category is paid primarily to the works by the writers whose names have been included into the list of the curriculum works and are studied at schools and universities, (i.e. they must be read by the young people) and to the materials, belonging to various fields of their specialized studies (i.e. economics, law, education, psychology, pedagogy etc.). And only representatives of the third category can let themselves enjoy reading just for the sake of reading. These readers tend to borrow about one third of the total number of books and read them in Belarusian. Very few of them prefer to read works by the Belarusian writers and poets in their translated versions. The highest level of authority is enjoyed by Vasil’ Bykau, Uladzimir Karatkevich, Ivan Chyhrynau, Sviatlana Aleksievich.
One of my questions was also associated with the rate of interest of the readers to the Russian literary heritage. I wondered how many citizens of Hrodna enjoyed reading and re-reading the works by Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev and such. I was shocked to have learned that not a single soul (among the officially registered readers) had borrowed the above works within the recent couple of years. At the same time, a detective story became the most popular genre among them. According to the library assistants, “the nowadays readers use their one eye to look through the book, the second one to watch TV while their thoughts would simultaneously be rushing from one domestic problem to another”. It means that any other serious information but for the one, dealing with who, where, when and why killed another one, can not be digested by an average reader today. However, there is the only (!) adult reader in the library whose hobby is to re-read works by the Russian classical authors…
In this respect Belarusian literature has some vivid advantages as compared to the modern Russian one, i.e. it is broader in the range of topics, covered by it as well as it contains a more important and deeper social content.
It should also be mentioned that some of the most active readers of the Belarusian prose works, whom I talked to, tend to complain about the “artificial” Belarusian which is applied by the modern Belarusian writers. This is the reason why the readers highly appreciate the original, distinctive language and the manner of writing of such writers as Sakrat Yanovich, Viacahaslau Adamchyk etc.
There is one more department at the regional library that unites the fans of the Belarusian literary word, i.e. the department of Regional Literature. Out of 7 134 books, loaned to its readers within the first half of 2005, 4 500 of them were in Belarusian. On of the sections of the department, which gathered works by the regional writers (including the ones from the Belastochchyna), also won great popularity among the readers. By the way, the works by Sakrat Yanovich, although having not been yet included into the school and university curriculum as the obligatory ones, are frequently read by both adult and young people of the city. Besides, Annus Albaruthenicus has been also recognized here as a very informative and useful source of unique information and, therefore, is read on a frequent basis.
The above analysis would be not complete in case we would say nothing about the most numerous Belarusian “readers”, no matter whether they originate from the rural or urban areas. These are the people who prefer to read nothing. Only small percentage of them subscribes to the newspapers or occasionally buys and reads them. They read but do not believe in what they learn from the printed materials. Generally speaking, the value of the official Belarusian newspapers today is defined by the fact whether they have the weekly TV-guide enclosed or not. Actually, the latter covers the bulk of the newspaper reading space.
At the end of the interview I cautiously enquired about the prospects and the future of the Belarusian literature. The replies were not so pessimistic, but, at the same time, it could be better if they would sound more optimistic as well. Almost each of the library workers (with a trace of nostalgia) remembered about the 1990s when the majority of the citizens of the city were extremely interested in everything what was published in Belarus at that time…
As for the question whether modern Belarusians care about their national literature or not, the answer to it can be very simple: it depends upon what kind of Belarusians we are speaking about. Belarusians, like any other nation in the world, are different. There are numerous families that have huge home libraries containing Belarusian works which they read and loan to their friends. As for the youth, they claim to have no time to cope even with the amount of obligatory materials to read; the adult population finds time to preferably read their professional materials or paperback bestsellers.
To conclude, I wonder whether one could find many regular Americans who would rush to the library to learn more about life of characters of the novels by Mark Twain, Jack London or representatives of color and feministic American literature?…
1 Ivan Burlyka. Do Belarusians speak Belarusian in the street? Annus Albaruthenicus. – Villa Socrates. – Krynki 2004, p. 103-108.
Ïóáë³êóåööà íà ñàéöå ç ëàñêàâàé
çãîäû Àá'ÿäíàíüíÿ Villa
Sokrates
|
Ïîëüñê³ à¢êöû¸í
