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Link to Downloadable music of Narodny Albom
Belarus was built by Juzik. It was a Soviet Belarus, with the Russian language dominating. Because Juzik couldn't imagine any other. He put it together with old bricks and cracked concrete walls; then he entangled it with rusty wires, and finally covered it unevenly with asphalt. On this asphalt old and smoking trucks crawled. This country functions in the same way it looks.
The Soviet Union is long gone, but Juzik's work, dusty and muddy, still sneers at everyone who made it through an absurdly long line on the Terspol - Brest border crossing.
Everything that's colorful, nice, and friendly exists in post-Soviet Belarus as if against Juzik. Even the green spring seems to be strange dissonance in Mensk's asphalt grayness.
A village sawmill was where Juzik got his images of what the capital city should look like. He worked there as a young man. In those days, before 1939, the village and the sawmill were in Poland. There, apart from urban knowledge, Juzik got his class awareness.
When he arrived in Mensk he at once began to improve its appearance. The palaces and Orthodox and Catholic churches were replaced by socialistic edifices, designed according to the latest Moscow fashion.
From the 1980s comes Juzik's latest achievement although it's not finished yet. It's a huge, though gloomy and dark Palace of the Republic in the city center. It fits perfectly into Lukashenka's rule. For Lukashenka's rule and Juzik's rule are one and the same.
ja prosty chlopiec
ja chlopiec z vioski
na pilaramie
piluju ja doski
ja doski piluju
ad rana da rana
a skutku niama
bo pracuju na pana
maju zarobak
mizernyja hrosy
pju samohonku
kuru papiroski
ja suprac pryhniotu
panou i padpankau
ckaju z nadziejaj
na ruskija tanki
So sings Juzik in the Narodny Albom spectacle, an amazing Belarusian rock-opera or maybe a fable-ized concert, telling the history of the interbellum period town on the eastern outskirts of Poland.
But at its roots, Narodny Albom is not a historic tall-tale and it's not the past times that it's about. It's a thoroughly modern attempt at answering a question: if you dispose of everything that was built by the legions of the Soviet Juziks - what will there be left for the Belarusians? Is there another Belarus to which tradition could refer?
If one was to mark all the spots on the map of Mensk that attract people trying to answer those questions, one would get an archipelago, loosely scattered on paper: A few editorial boards in rented flats, a room hosting an independent trade union, headquarters of a few parties. Here an island and there an island. That's all.
It's not easy to get to those places. No placards or notices inform about them. You have to know which staircase to enter. Then you have to climb old stairs onto the 4th or 5th floor. There it will be. If there's anything that distinguishes it from its surroundings, it will be a more solid door and harder-to-crack locks. But Juzik's people have their ways to gate crash in there. They may come officially with orders to do a financial control or search; they may come unofficially as well with the skinheads. They may officially arrest or unofficially beat up. Or both.
If you visit those places as a friend however, you'll be welcomed by the hosts and you'll find out (with a surprise) that Poland is much closer than you thought. Some people cooperate with the Warsaw Karta, some create radio programs for Polish Radio 5, others think founding their own radio station in Warsaw, and still others have their performances arranged by Poznan's 8th Day Theater. People go to Poland to get work experience as journalists, on scholarships. Exhibitions are organized and Belarusian concerts are staged.
Why Poland? Because it's much closer than France or Germany. Because there lives a Belarusian minority which organizes their festivals and issues their own magazines. Because there's no linguistic barrier. Or finally because in Poland (only 10 years ago freed from the Communism) it's easy to gain understanding and back-up for independent publishing and cultural activity.
"Apart from being close linguistically and culturally, I can feel in the Polish audience a certain nostalgia for the times of resistance to dictatorship. Then it was clear what to do. And now - it is not. So at least you try to resurrect the spirit of those times by supporting democratic aspirations of the Belarusians," says Kasia Kamocka, one of the leading performers of the Narodny Albom.
There's even more enthusiasm to Lithuania in Belarus. Particularly to Vilno - the city considered a pivotal point for Belarusian culture. Lithuania is too small though to provide good support. Belarus needs a bigger momentum and the bigger money. That's why Poland is seen as the main ally in the Mensk freedom archipelago.
The Mensk authorities know that. And they know that their opponents' relationships with Poland are more dangerous to them than contacts with the French, Germans, or Americans, for whom Belarus is just another exotic country in the incredible maze of the nations of the Central-Eastern Europe. That's why Juzik fears even Bolek and Lolek, who act as the wicked spies in Narodny Albom [Bolek and Lolek were popular cartoon characters in Poland - WK].
Everything that's Soviet in Belarus, dreads Poland. And not even because the Poles, as the only nation from the Western civilization circle, that can grasp all the meanings within so familiar a phrase of a song from Narodny Albom: Matka Boska Vostrabramska, zlitujsia nad nami [That literally means: "Mary of Ostra Brama (in Vilno) have mercy on us" - WK]. That they can grasp them it's not so dangerous yet. More dangerous is the fact that this Polish phrase is a Belarusian one at the same time. It's a harmony of two cultures and traditions: Polish and Belarusian. This harmony questions Juzik's pretense to monopolize the concept of being Belarusian. Matka... - those words contain an answer to a question: Is there any other Belarus apart from that Soviet one of Juzik's?
The Narodny Albom, which may enter the canon of Belarusian national masterpieces, states: yes, we have other roots; there's another Belarus that we can refer to and whose tradition we can continue. We have Western Belarus which had belonged to Poland in the interbellum period, and to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania even before. This Belarus was a home country to many cultures, languages, and religions, and yet despite this internal differentiation it belonged to the Western civilization circle. For this Belarus Juzik's civilization is not a "spiritual harbor," but a "storm from the East," to which one has to stand up, like in 1920 when Belarusians set out to war together with the Poles. Although the former dreamed then of belaruskaj backaushchynie and the latter of polskiej ojczyznie [meaning "fatherland" in both languages - WK], but at that moment this difference was not important (even though in later years it was to cause tensions or even hostility). As often in history Poles and Belarusians were on a common path. No wonder then that the atmosphere of Narodny Albom is so well-known to the Poles:
We find a certain something in this song. Something that does away with a stereotype of the Belarusian spirituality as coming from the peasantry. This model of patriotism and national dignity is removed from a model which we associate with "primeval" bond of the "local folk" to their fields and forests. This song couldn't be sung by peasants without a precisely defined feeling of national and cultural identity. It couldn't be sung by people for whom the most important are class differences and a will to free themselves from exploitation.
To stand like a stonewall against an invasion from the East, supported by faith and truth, can be achieved only by the heirs to the centuries-old cultural and state tradition who feel secure in this tradition and have a clear awareness of their cultural distinctiveness from the invaders.
Belarus when looking for an alternative for Juzik, one discovers the heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It considers its own the whole of this heritage, not only its plebeian elements. In this search, Belarus can meet Poland for which the memory of the common history of the Crown and the Duchy is of vital importance ["the Crown" was the name for the Polish part of the unionist Polish-Lithuanian state from 1569 to 1795 - WK].
We can meet but we don't have to. For the historical commonness of Polish-Belarusian fate is not the only one experience of Western Belarus. There's a place--especially in the interbellum years--for some resentment. There was intolerance and hostility. Orthodox churches were burned indeed and Belarusian national activists were repressed. Many of them believed that it's better to build Belarus in the Soviets than in Poland, where heirs of Jagiellonian tolerance and openness lost their say to the people possessed with the national-democratic obsession of spreading a Polish Catholic cultural mission. On one side, there was Juzik from the sawmill but his counterweight were not the great statesmen but equally limited followers of an idea of creating a Polish national state on the ethnically mixed lands.
The Narodny Albom was twice presented in Poland where it was enthusiastically received. Says Kamocka: "I was surprised at the contact I had with the Polish audience. When we were walking in Poznan at night we met a group of young punks. They must have recognized us for they shouted: long live free Belarus!"
But I'm not surprised by the punks' reaction at all. They surely understood what the Belarusian artists were singing about. There's no linguistic barrier anyway and the world presented in Narodny Albom is well known to anyone who in school read a book beginning with the words: Litwo, ojczyzno moja... [This is from Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz written by Adam Mickiewicz. It means: "Lithuania, my fatherland..." ].
Link to Downloadable music of Narodny Albom
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Peter Kasaty : All Rights
Reserved. Last Updated: 1999/07/04
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