The Birth of Individuality from the Spirit of Belarusianness: the Life Trajectories, Conceptual and Emotional Matrices of the Belarusian Intellectual in the Novel by Viktar Vaĺtar Born Under Saturn

Abstract

The article is devoted to an analysis of the novel by Viktar Vaĺtar Rodžanyja pad Saturnam (Born under Saturn), describing the life and ideological collisions of the Belarusian students of inter-war Prague. This novel lifts the veil not only from over the conceptual world within which the Belarusian intellectual youth of those times lived, but also of emotional performance of this concepts. Born under Saturn gives us the opportunity to feel and hear the intonation from which the concepts of ‘homeland’, ‘intelligentsia’ had been pronounced. The reconstruction of this distinctive intonation, and the semantic, existential, psychological and social foundations on which it was based, forms the main goal of this research. We view this novel as a continuation of the tradition of the polyphonic (in the terminology of Mikhail Bakhtin) philosophical novel, where philosophical concepts and theories are not simply presented, but are given in a dialogic context. Proceeding from such understanding, аs the main interpretative strategy, we chose a two-aspect approach: we consider the text from the point of view of intellectual history and within the framework of the ‘history of emotions’. The main ideas of the novel were analysed both in their conceptual semantics and as emotional matrices of the Belarusian intellectual of the 1920s. One of our main findings is as the following: the tragedy of Tuhoŭski (the novel's protagonist) is a tragedy of the first generation of the Belarusian intelligentsia, of the burden of becoming oneself, after separation from the navel of traditional society and the collision with new anthropological knowledge, the violence of history and the aporia of national and social ideology