„Tales, stories of Navum” by Vincent Dunin-Marcinkievich: Creative History and Contradictions of Ideological and Artistic Interpretation

Abstract

The article is devoted to the creative history, the circumstances of the first publication in 1946 and turns of reception in Belarusian literary criticism of Bylicy, raskazy Navuma (Tales, Stories of Navum) (1857) by Vincent Dunin-Marcinkievich, the last (sixth) in the cycle of Belarusian epic poems of the writer. In the 1850s the genre of travel became especially popular in multilingual Belarusian literature, there were discussions about the creation of written literature for people, which influenced on the content and form of Bylicy, raskazy Navuma. Experimentalism, complexity, the fundamental denial of orientation on artistic ethnography, the connection of issues with the current socio-political questions of the epoch, the image of a new hero-peasant, a distinctive representative of the Homeland, the opposition of local / foreign, complicated composition with two independent components Zlaja žonka (Angry wife) and Chalimon na karanacyi (Khalimon at the coronation) became dominant and artistically important methods of achieving expected reader’s impression. The peculiarities of the author's worldview, the relevance of topics, specifics of the genre, compositional distinctiveness and poetics have become the cause of debatable aspects in the ideological and artistic interpretation of the work by well-known domestic literary critics. In the 1930s, according to vulgar sociological assessments V. Dunin-Marcinkievich was characterized as reactionary writer-slave, Bylicy… was qualified as a contradictory work and full of tsarist illusions. The role of Belarusian researchers of the second half of the 20^th – early 21^st centuries has been traced in denying the primitive interpretive schemes of vulgarizers. The significance of Bylicy… in the process of the author’s creative evolution and in the history of national beautiful writing is clarified.