The life and fictional worlds of the prominent Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ have been structured by a front line, both personally and politically. In Bykaŭ’s dramatically charged stories and novellas, characters are positioned in relation to the front line, whether they just encounter or cross it. Mostly, this is not a physical line one can draw on a strategic military map: rather, this is the line beyond which a hostile world lies. This line may run along a country road next to a village in the midst of the occupied territory. At the same time, the line may run ‘across’ his characters’ psyche at their moments of existential crisis.
The metaphor of the front line can also be applied to Vasil Bykaŭ’s discontinuous, mobile, “partisan” relations with the Soviet system which he criticised and which bestowed him with its highest honours: the Lenin Prize in Literature and the title of the People’s Writer. The culmination of his tenuous standoff against the system was his participation in the Belarusian Popular Front in the 1990s, followed by his emigration and then coming back, thus crossing a ‘front line’ with post-Soviet Belarus.
The historical and biographical contexts of Vasil Bykaŭ’s texts are refracted at the border of two media – literature and cinematography. His works were embodied in many film adaptations (not comparable in number to any other Belarusian writer), though this does not mean that his relationship with cinema was easy.
With this conference we would like to honour Vasil Bykaŭ’s 100th anniversary that is celebrated in 2024.
Conference online participation is also available, please register here (for online participants only): https://forms.gle/4YkeCwtmLNWhTpy67