McMillin, Arnold Spring Shoots: Young Belarusian Poets in the Early Twenty-First Century (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 525 McMillin, Arnold. Spring Shoots: Young Belarusian Poets in the Early TwentyFirst Century. Publications of the MHRA, 19. Modern Humanities Research Association, Cambridge, 2015. vii + 191 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £22.99: $44.99: €39.99. This volume is the culmination of the series of monographs devoted to Belarusian literature begun by Professor McMillin with the publication of his A History of Byelorussian Literature from its Origins to the Present Day (Giessen, 1977). Spring Shoots (hereafter, SSh) examines the work of forty poets born between 1980 and 1997, almost all of whom have had at least one book of poetry published. The book is divided into ‘eight thematically titled’ (SSh, p. 1) chapters, which in turn are subdivided into sections, each dealing with a separate poet. Both the chapters and their titles, as well as the allocation of poets to a particular chapter, are somewhat arbitrary — as the author himself recognizes. However, it is extremely difficult to imagine a way in which the structure of the volume could have been improved. There are ample quotations from the poets’ published works, with the author’s own literal translations in the footnotes, to enable readers to form their own ideas about the quality of the poetry. One other feature of the book’s structure needs to be taken into account. The previous book in the series, Writing in a Cold Climate: Belarusian Literature from the 1970s to the Present Day (London, 2010) (hereafter, WCC) contains a section entitled ‘Four young poets of the future’ (pp. 1044–82), all born after 1980, and who had by the second half of the 1990s already established a reputation for themselves by their contribution to ‘a modern literature that can stand comparison with any at the start of the 21st century’ (p. 1082). One of them, Vaĺžyna Mort, has had some of her poetry translated into English (Factory of Tears, Port Townsend, WA, 2008) and an essay written about her by the English poet Fiona Sampson, ‘Bounce and Rebound: The Whip-Crack Language and Zig-Zag Reality of a Young Poet from Belarus’ () — a title that could justifiably be applied to several of the poets included in the book here under review. The very title of WCC raises a question: has there been noticeable climate change in Belarus since 2010? A partial answer can be sought in reports from the 23rd Minsk International Book Fair, held 10–14 February this year. One of them () cites extracts from the opening speech delivered by Minister of Information Lilija Ananič; the decline in numbers of books published in Belarus, she said, is due to an ‘ob˝ektivnoe snizhenie interesa k pechatnomu slovu’, adding that — as a possibly positive development — there had been a 17 per cent increase in the number of books published in Belarusian. The second report — an interview with the novelist SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 526 Viktar Marcinovič (), entitled ‘Tsenzury net, no belorusskuiu sovremennost´ staraiutsia ne trogat´’ — highlights the absence at the festival of both Svetlana Aleksievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature, and her books — and this in a year designated by the Lukašenka government as a ‘Year of Culture’. This interview raises another question that relates directly to Aleksievich and SSh: does a writer have to write in Belarusian in order to be considered a Belarusian writer? Some of the poets here discussed have also produced poetry in Russian. On one of them (Taćciana Nilava, SSh, pp. 180–84) McMillin writes ‘it is […] to be hoped that her creative energies will in future be devoted to Belarusian rather than Russian literature’, thereby making language choice the decisive factor. Perhaps this is as it has to be in the circumstances of today’s Belarus. In the epilogue the author quotes the early twentieth-century poet, Alieś Harun, ‘sam narod — piaśniar’, adding that these are ‘words that anticipate the continuing prevalence of poetry over other genres in Belarusian literature’ (SSh, p. 185). It follows, therefore, that it falls to poetry written in Belarusian to raise the status of the language and so promote a heightened sense of national identity. A picture emerges from SSh of poets who are still...