Belarusian culture: national, European, post-Soviet

The National Bolshoi Opera and Ballet Theatre in Minsk which offers an experience happily removed from European modernity. Photo: Homoatrox (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

This coincided with a different publication – a journal published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus (CPB) called Political Interlocutor which accused Chagall of mortal sins, including “damage to the republic”. Chagall was accused of the latter when he was the Vitebsk Province Commissioner for the Arts. He occupied this position from 1918 to 1920, before he left the country forever.

Vendee of anti-perestroika

The “exhibition” was rather unusual, nonetheless. Since it was impossible to find Chagall’s reproductions anywhere in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), the organisers decided to cut his photos out of the official catalogue of the Moscow exhibition. They did so without any problems. However, even this sort of exhibition was not meant to take place. Three days before its opening, the library received a call from the regional committee of the CPB and the event was cancelled. Clearly, the BSSR did not fully implement the perestroika tendencies of Gorbachev’s Moscow. A year later, a Belarusian writer name Ales Adamovich, in an article titled “Look around” published by the same Ogoniok, described the atmosphere in the BSSR of 1987 and 1988. He called the republic a “Vendee of anti-perestroika”. Vendee refers to the territory in the west of France whose residents categorically refused to accept the achievements of the Great French Revolution. They remained staunch monarchists even after the king was overthrown. Just like Vitebsk, communists were unwilling to hear anything about the “wind of change” blowing from Moscow.

Let us now move to the present day. The continuation of this story can be found in my book Homeland: Marc Chagall in Vitebsk published by New Literary Review. There I analyse the way in which the memory of Chagall was constructed in the BSSR and the early years of Belarusian independence. In many ways, Belarus’s culture has been programmed to be the “Vendee of Perestroika”, meaning a rejection of liberal trends and the preservation of Soviet conservatism. The difference with the French Vendee is that, starting approximately since the 2000s, the construction of the “new USSR” began throughout the entire post-Soviet space. Miraculously, it did not work in Ukraine, which overthrew the “Soviet” Viktor Yanukovych, but it was successfully implemented in Russia, which is now enthusiastically restoring Soviet historical myths and Soviet identity.

A discussion about contemporary Belarusian culture must begin with a brief description of the context. Namely, there is a marginal discourse about the region – the “new USSR”, which clearly is the background to the attempts undertaken by some enthusiasts who are trying to construct European or national culture in Belarus. Their work and activity, however, show features of individual protests rather than are a reflection of official state cultural policy. What is more, in contrast to the homogeneous Baltic countries – like for instance the neighbouring Lithuania – Belarus’s modern culture is characterised by a simultaneous co-existence of several layers. The most explicit among them is the Soviet cultural project.

Belarusian Soviet culture

The simplest way to have the experience of a time-traveller who moved back 30 years is to visit the Bolshoi Theatre in Belarus. In terms of the repertoire, the Minsk opera and ballet offer an experience which is happily removed from European modernity. The Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Giselle, Carmen, and Eugene Onegin are still doing very well there. Their staging is no different than what it was in the 1980s, as if there was no revolution in theatrical arts in Europe. It also seems oblivious to the fact that in cities such as Berlin the term “ballet” means a variety of arts, equally distant from Stanislavsky and Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons.

I will correct myself: it is certainly not so much about the repertoire, as it is about the reading. In February of this year, I listened to Eugene Onegin being performed at the Vienna Opera. This, of course, was a completely different interpretation of the opera. Starting with the first scene, where Olga and Tatiana are dancing under the snow, which is falling from up above. In Minsk, in turn, Stanislavsky’s legacy is maintained without any innovative rethinking. It resembles the first studio recordings of 1936. And, moreover, looking around the half-dark theatre hall, you may notice the shoulder straps of the highest ranks of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs in the audience. Yet there is no irony in my words when I say that the Minsk ballet dancers and opera singers are very talented. Nor do I exaggerate anything when I claim that there is no country in the world today where you can see such a ballet and opera. The same applies to other spheres where the instruments of state cultural policy are applied – like the ultra-modern Second World War museum in Minsk. It is structured in such a way that when visiting it you get the feeling that the Soviet vision of Zhukov’s and Stalin’s contribution to the Great Victory have lived to see the emergence of the era of multimedia expositions.

Last December I visited the War Museum in Kyiv which seems to have the same structure of exposition, the same set of exhibits and the same fragments of the Soviet cultural memory. Yet the guided tour that the Kyiv museum offers to international tourists is conducted by veterans who fought in the war in the east of Ukraine. The military conflict, in many ways, became an echo of the still not so obsolete Soviet identity. However, the message conveyed by the exhibits of the museum is completely different. I would even say it is remarkably different. For instance, in the first hall, which is filled with elements of unexploded German bombs, our guide began to talk about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which divided Ukraine into two parts; while in the hall dedicated to the horrors of the POW camps, visitors were told about the Soviet order which forbade helping soldiers who were captured or else surrounded. Overall, while the museum in Kyiv openly assigns a significant share of responsibility of the Second World War to Stalin and the USSR, the museum in Belarus, on the other hand, only mentions the atrocities of the “fascists” (as the Nazis were called in Soviet textbooks). And it does so in the very same way as they were presented in my childhood in the Soviet Union.

European culture of Belarus

Next to the colossus of the [post-]Soviet Belarusian cultural project, which receives generous state support, there is a much less noticeable layer of Belarusian culture which I call the “European layer”. It includes films made by independent directors, which are financed via personal funding. The best example of such a production is the unique documentary Around Belarus on Motorcycles which was directed by Boris Nikolayevich and Roman Svechnikov.

 There are also exhibitions which only display still life portraits and landscapes. After a recent lecture on the influence that Cezanne and Matisse had on Chagall’s work, we had an interesting discussion with the audience among who were mainly contemporary artists. We tried to figure out the time period of paintings exhibited in state museums. We agreed that they were definitely not 21st century, not even the 20th century, as in a space that hosts works like Duchamp, Pollock, Warhol, Giger and Banksy it would have been hardly possible to have an exhibition titled The Art of Women: Still-life Through the Eyes of the Fair Sex. Hence, we came to the conclusion that Belarusian paintings, presented to the public by state institutions, were frozen pieces of art which convey messages that date back to 1862. That is the time when Salon des Refusés in Paris had already passed, but impressionism was not yet fully accepted and considered something very bold and scandalous. This also explains Chagall’s failure in Vitebsk in 1918-1920.

The question, of course, is what is European art in the era of Elaine Sturtevant? I would argue it is a very direct conversation about pain. One that does not have to provoke a scandal, as was the case with Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin’s Era of Mercy. It was a photograph of two policemen tenderly kissing in a birch grove, which the Russian minister of culture called “pornography” and a “shame” to the country. But it is one that provokes a certain reaction, in the same way as Banksy’s graffiti does. In that sense, there are four names in Belarusian art that deserve great attention: Ruslan Vashkevich, Sergey Shabohin, Vladimir Tsesler and Sergey Gudilin. Vashkevich works on different techniques and forms (including installation), but his most interesting pieces, in my view, are those painted in a hyper-realistic manner that are full of paradoxes. These painting visually resemble the still images from Hitchcock’s films. Unfortunately, a deeper discussion on the meaning and themes of Vashkevich’s work requires a separate article.

Shabohin is an activist-artist who focuses on the problems of collective memory, public space, humanism and tolerance. Tsesler, in turn, uses the language of design for sometimes ironic and sometimes sarcastic discussions about the practices of everyday life, advertising, post-colonialism and rethinking of the Soviet experience. Sergey Gudilin is a photographer who creates a visual iconography of post-Soviet Belarus. His chronicle of official celebrations and parades bring about associations of Kafka and Ionescu. You could say he is the Milan Kundera of photography. His images of the Belarusian youth remind us of the pioneers and Alexander Rodchenko’s trumpeters. There is no doubt these four are the artists of European Belarus.

National culture of Belarus

Belarus’s national culture is primarily found in the linguistic forms of art: literature and drama. As the Belarusian language has been oppressed for a long time, literary men and women are forced to overcome barriers in an unfavourable environment. Specifically, back in the 1990s the Belarusian language was a clear sign of belonging to the political opposition. The most popular political force at the time was the Belarusian Popular Front, headed by Zianon Pazniak. It opposed the official state agenda and fought for the use of the Belarusian language in schools, universities and the media. However, by the mid-2000s these activities led to the stigmatisation of everything Belarusian. This included language, the national version of history, the national coat of arms and the flag. They were all perceived as markers of belonging to the BPF. Which is why during police sweeps after mass protest rallies organised at that time, it was possible for someone to be detained simply because he or she spoke Belarusian.

In the 2010s attitudes towards the Belarusian language changed. Firstly because Pazniak left the country, which led to the marginalisation of the BPF and it ceased to be a major political force. Secondly, the new generation saw the Belarusian language as just a language without any political connotations. They began to use their mova (Belarusian for mother tongue – editor’s note) to separate themselves from their peers, who were caught within the post-Soviet myth. As a result, Belarusian has become fashionable again. And so has its literature.

Finally, the attitude of the authorities towards mova has changed. Noticeably this happened since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. More than anything else, this event made officials realise their last two decades of fighting against the Belarusian language, history and culture had led to the formation of a Belarusian identity which resembles the one that could be found in Crimea. In other words, “Soviet Belarusian” can quite comfortably be reprogrammed into “Russian”, should any larger clash between Minsk and Moscow ever occur.

Despite this, there has not been a significant change in attitudes towards the language in official state policy. There are no privileges for Belarusian publishers, especially when it comes to distribution. Books from the Lohvinau publishing house, for instance, can only be purchased in a few shops in the capital. This is also happening elsewhere, despite the fact the number of books published in Belarusian has grown in recent years, along with the number of plays by Belarusian playwrights staged at state theatres. 

The restriction of space here does not allow me to explore, in detail, the renaissance that Belarusian literature and drama is currently experiencing. For this reason, let me just point to a list of authors and books who write in Belarusian and whose writings are read in Western Europe. Among the most prominent are: Uladzimir Nyaklyaeu’s Soda Machine with and without Syrup; Dmitry Vishnev’s The Castle is Built from a Nettle; and Igor Bobkov’s Khvilinka. In terms of poetry, it is worth noting the works of Ales Razanau, who writes in Belarusian, Lithuanian and German; and Alhierd Baharevich who is famous for his work titled Alindarka’s Kids. Among playwrights I would recommend Pavel Pryazhko, Kirill Steshik and Andrei Ivanov. Their plays are now viewed and welcomed with great enthusiasm even in Moscow.

Vision of the future

While it may sound like a paradox, but based on the observation of our current day reality, I dare state that the Soviet cultural project is unlikely to survive in Belarusian culture for another 20 years. The fact that there are artists working in Belarus today, who represent the European or national layer of Belarusian culture, is a result of the disintegration of earlier mechanisms. This explains why before the works of the Soviet and Kyrgyz writer, Chingiz Aitmatov, were translated into other languages; he was part of the Soviet cultural project, which he widely promoted. The same thing can be said about Vasil Bykov, Uladzimir Karatkievich and others. Also, in a way, the widely known and well-deserved success of the Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich was a result of her relationship with Soviet problems and the system.

For now the new generation of authors, some of whom I have mentioned, speak through their art about topics that are still foreign to Europeans. Yet, the recent history of Ukrainian literature has shown us – especially through such writers as Yuri Andrukhovych and Serhiy Zhadan – that access to a wider European audience is also available to writers who did not necessary work during the late Soviet period. Therefore, I would conclude with an optimistic prognosis: it is possible to have good Belarusian-born artists who are not destined to migrate. During Chagall’s time, this was the only option. 

Translated by Yulia Oreshina

Victor Martinovich is an associate professor at the European Humanities University in Vilnius. He holds a PhD in history of fine arts. His dissertation focused on the life of Soviet avant-garde art in the regional town of Vitebsk (currently – Belarus). He is also a broadly translated novelist, author of five fictional novels sold in Belarus, Russia, the US, Finland and Germany

belarus, Belarusian culture