One People, One Language, One Literature? Changing Constructions of the History of Old Belarusian Literature (1956–2010)

Abstract

Histories of literature mirror views and experiences of their own age and thus are constantly being rewritten. This is true also for the history of Old Belarusian literature. The short introductions and comprehensive overviews, written in the period between the Thaw and the Lukashenko era (1956–2010), contain astonishingly different constructions of the literary past. The article analyses a dozen books in Belarusian, Russian and English and it singles out the most import changes, such as the role of the literature of Kyivan Rusʹ or periodization. However, the most prominent development is the step-by-step recognition of the multilingual nature of the literary heritage. This concerns the existence of texts not only in Eastern Slavonic varieties, but also in (Old) Church Slavonic, the discovery of Neo-Latin authors, and finally, the rehabilitation of Polish as a language of Belarusian literature. Although Old Belarusian studies in the post-Soviet years have been a field of innovation and reevaluation, even the most actual syntheses contain blind spots. The existence of texts in Lithuanian and the literary production of ethno-cultural minorities are hardly ever even mentioned. The idea of one common language has been given up, but the history of literature still deals with texts by representatives of one ethnos that inhabit one territory