Hope in despair: Vasil Bykau's long road home.

Mozur, Joseph P., Jr.

ON June 22, 2003, only days after his seventy-ninth birthday, Vasil' Bykau--one of the world's greatest war novelists and contemporary master of the endangered Belarusian language--passed away in Minsk. The date of his death came as an uncanny coincidence for all who knew Bykau and his literary works, for on that very day, sixty-two years earlier, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, beginning a war that would for some four decades serve as the central theme of Bykau's fiction. While literary works about the Soviet victory in World War II were encouraged by the Communist Party to instill pride in the Red Army and glorify the supposed ingeniousness of the wartime leadership, Bykau liberated the genre, turning his attention instead to the conflicts between ordinary Soviet soldiers and officers and their behavior in life-threatening situations. Implicit in all his war fiction was an urgent appeal to reject the myths and vestiges of Stalinism in the postwar era. Only late in his life, during the years of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and after the demise of the USSR, did Bykau find it possible to write freely about life in his native Belarus before and after the war. (1)

Bykau was a man of great courage, both as a young lieutenant in battle and as a writer who made few compromises in his art or with Soviet censors. In his works he tackled the taboo topic of Stalin's prewar genocide in Belarus and exposed the myth of noble Soviet partisan fighting behind German lines. His active role as an advocate for the Belarusian language during the decades of Russification in Belarus provoked the ire of numerous Soviet officials. In recognition of Bykau's personal aplomb in the face of persecution and the truth revealed in his fiction, tens of thousands of Belarusians attended his funeral and accompanied his casket through the streets of the Belarusian capital. Official Minsk, which since the election of Alexander Lukashenka in 1994 has turned away from democratic reforms and has taken on some of the worst traits of Stalin's USSR, had hoped to "manage" the funeral in a way to deflect attention from the years it had harassed the writer and driven him into exile. It spread the lie that the outspoken author had returned to Belarus to die in his homeland and even tried to force the grieving family to adorn the casket with the flag and symbols of the neo-Soviet regime. But fearing massive public demonstrations, the authorities backed down, and the people accompanied their beloved writer to the cemetery carrying Christian crosses and the white-red-white striped Belarusian national flag. As Bykau was laid to rest, the crowds sang the Belarusian religious hymn, "Magutny Bozha" (Mighty God), which for opponents of the regime has become the unofficial national anthem of Belarus. Afterward, the participants spoke out, noting that they were thankful to the deceased for giving them the rare opportunity to feel like free and independent Belarusians, if only for a day. (2)

Much of Bykau's highly dramatic fiction is firmly rooted in the Russian realist tradition of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Vsevolod Garshin, among others. Bykau's works demonstrate just how resilient that tradition can be under conditions of censorship and political repression. Unlike the superhuman communists that populate socialist-realist fiction depicting World War II, Bykau's heroes are lower-ranking soldiers, partisans, and civilians caught up in the conflict, fighting not for Stalin but for their homeland and comrades. Often they are alone, forsaken, and left only with their conscience in the face of annihilation. Bykau is a master at portraying the psychology of the mind as hope begins to run out. His characters' lives flash before them, and in rapid succession they recall the events that ultimately define who they are: a mother's caress, the experience of hunger in childhood, their first love, the loss of a parent, or the chain of events that led to their current predicament. Such retrospective narrative flows naturally from the human reaction to impending death and enables the author to heighten the suspense through narrative delay. Nevertheless, Soviet criticism frequently accused the writer of focusing too narrowly on the fates of a few individuals at the expense of portraying the big picture of the Soviet victory in World War II. His work was denigrated in the press for "abstract humanism" and "Remarqueism," labels for what his critics saw as a pernicious brand of pacifism undermining the morale of the Red Army and the security of the USSR.

Bykau's war fiction gained real recognition in the USSR only under the sobering influence of the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and the advent of glasnost under Gorbachev. In 1986 Bykau received the State Prize for Literature for his powerful novel Znak bedy (The sign of misfortune), which depicts the suffering of Belarusian villagers under Stalin's collectivization and Nazi occupation. By 1998 Bykau had become a viable candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1999 he received the Russian Triumph Award for the moral authority of his fiction, but his failure to receive the Nobel Prize was a heavy blow for the Belarusian intelligentsia, who hoped that the award would focus attention on the state of human rights in post-Soviet Belarus. Some observers blamed the lack of good translations of his fiction for the rejection of his candidacy, despite strong support from Czestaw Milosz and Vaclav Havel, whereas others pointed to his earlier acceptance of the Soviet State Prize as having had a negative impact on the deliberations of the Nobel judges. The latter circumstance, if true, is especially unfortunate, because the 1986 award can be seen as a signal by Gorbachev reformers to initiate and support a more truthful depiction of Soviet history in literature and the arts.

BYKAU'S PERSONALITY was molded and forged by the national calamity of World War II. Of a hundred Belarusian boys born in 1924, the year of Bykau's birth, fewer than ten survived the bloodletting, and as a result Bykau felt compelled to speak for the dead. As a seventeen-year-old, he was mobilized into a work brigade to dig trenches in a futile effort to stem the German blitzkrieg. It was at that time that he had an experience that colored all his future war stories. While searching for food in a small town, he fell behind his brigade and was picked up by NKVD troops (the Soviet secret police), accused of being a German spy, held in a crowded jail room for a day, and then led out to be executed when the Nazi offensive moved closer. As he walked out to be shot he began to sob, and his executioner, perhaps aware of the absurdity of the charges, told the boy to run. A shot rang out over his head. The incident taught Bykau a lesson he was never to forget throughout the war: namely, to fear the Communist Party's punitive units in the Red Army just as much as the enemy. On more than one occasion as a young lieutenant, Bykau faced arrest by NKVD officers because of their paranoid mistrust of the actions of Soviet soldiers. Military failure was viewed as sabotage, while capture by the Germans was tantamount to treason. He writes unequivocally about this malaise in his recently published autobiographical work Dougaia daroga dadomu (2002; The long road home). The merciless attitude toward Soviet soldiers and the resulting high casualties represent a side of World War II that Soviet historians and writers chose to ignore for decades. Censorship made it impossible to write freely about that unseemly aspect of the Soviet war effort until 1991, when the Soviet state finally collapsed. Indeed, Bykau paid dearly just for broaching the topic in his now classic novel Miortvym nie balic' (1965; The dead feel no pain). Hateful articles appeared about him in the press, the windows of his home were smashed, and publication of the novel was banned for twenty years. To this day, the current Belarusian leadership, which openly aspires to give up the country's independence to join what it hopes will be a neo-Soviet Russia, continues to censor anything that disparages Soviet myths about the Red Army in World War II and the partisan struggle on Belarusian soil. (3)

By 1998 life in Belarus had become intolerable for Bykau. His role in promoting Belarusian language, culture, and sovereignty had deeply angered the Lukashenka regime. Recognizing his difficult plight, international PEN centers and Czech president Vaclav Havel provided Bykau the opportunity to live and write in Sweden, Finland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Ever cognizant of the generous support of European writers, Bykau proved to be very productive in the years of his exile. But the repression he faced at home had taken a toll. While many considered Bykau to be a pessimistic writer even before the advent of Lukashenka and the writer's exile, there is a discernible darkening of that pessimism in his later works. Perhaps that mood is best expressed in "Truba" (The pipeline), a 1998 short story that depicts the fate of a man who sets off for home after a drinking bout, gets caught in the rain, and takes refuge in a giant pipeline under construction parallel to the road. Hunched over, he walks some ten yards into the pipe to stay dry and then lies down to sleep. In his dreams he hears distant voices, and, when he finally awakes in the dark from his stupor, he realizes to his horror that workers have connected and sealed his part of the pipeline to the rest of the line. He tries calling for help, walking in the direction he believes the pipeline might still be open, then changes his direction and becomes disoriented. He runs, then crawls back and forth until workers finally hear him a week later at a compressor station. He dies on the way to the hospital. What makes this simple story so powerful is the protagonist's extended internal monologue. The pipeline is like a truth serum, and the man begins to articulate all that has bothered him in life, yet which he had dared not say aloud. He curses the KGB for trying to recruit him as an informer, he decries the recent election manipulations that ensured the victory of Lukashenka, and ridicules the president's efforts to impede the country's movement to meaningful reform. In short, he speaks as a free man for the first time in his life. His disorientation, despite the fact that there are only two directions he can go, forward or back, is analogous to the movement of the Lukashenka regime, which has lost the sense of political direction--the right direction to democratic reforms appears to be the wrong way, in contrast to a return to Soviet socialism as an easy way out of the political and economic crisis. The story, which was written while Bykau was in exile in Sweden, realistically captures what many Belarusians think about the regime but are too intimidated to say openly. Typical of Bykau is that it takes an existential test for his protagonist to assess his life and that of his people realistically. As an author writing within the tradition of Russian critical realism, Bykau has always found the fate of the "little man" more interesting to portray than that of the powerful in the world. In a way, the story is a modern version of Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich," in which the protagonist, when faced with the prospect of death, begins for the first time to ponder his life in earnest and comes to the realization that by doing everything society had expected of him ("comme il faut," in Tolstoy's words), he has squandered the most precious things in life: his freedom and conscience.

Bykau frequently pointed to the disorientation and timidity of the Belarusian people as factors that have made them pliable tools in the hands of dictators. His 1997 story "Zhouty piasochak" (Yellow sand), set in the 1930s, can be read on two levels: the first examines Stalinist crimes in the prewar era, while the second alludes to the passivity of Belarusian citizens in defending their rights today. The story opens with the depiction of an NKVD van traveling down a muddy road at night to transport a group of four innocent political prisoners, a former NKVD interrogator accused of sabotage, and a hardened criminal to be executed at dawn. The men know that they will be shot and in their thoughts reflect on their personal fate, their families, and the injustice of the situation. As the van begins the climb to the execution site it gets stuck in the mud. The NKVD escort officer, armed only with a pistol, orders the men out of the van to push it out of the mud. The four innocent men and former interrogator dutifully begin pushing the vehicle while the officer guards them at a distance from the road. When the van sinks to its axles and eventually runs out of gas from spinning its wheels, the officer sends the driver to a nearby town for gasoline. Instead of taking advantage of the situation and making an attempt to escape, the men continue pushing until they get the van out of the hole. When gasoline arrives, the trip resumes. Upon arrival, all obediently get out of the van to be shot, and their bodies are kicked into an open pit. Only one, the former NKVD interrogator, seeks to change the executioner's mind by belittling his fellow prisoners and proclaiming his innocence. All he gets from the NKVD officer is a promise to bury him in a separate grave with soft yellow sand in the bottom. In the end the executioner breaks that promise and throws the body into the common grave. "Yellow Sand" is a masterpiece of psychological portrayal of different human personalities and a glum assessment of humankind's capacity to confront evil.

All of Bykau's stories are highly dramatic and have a small cast of characters. The prospect of immediate, inescapable death is always the touchstone by which the author tests his characters' humanity. Bykau often emphasized his sympathies for Western European existentialism, noting that Albert Camus's novel The Plague had strongly influenced his work. In a way, Bykau's death represents the final gasp of European existentialism and the passing of a generation of writers who had experienced World War II firsthand. Unlike The Plague, however, whose narrator seems more interested in society's response to the affliction consuming the city of Oran, Bykau focuses almost exclusively on individuals frightened and puzzled by the prospect of death and dissects their minds in a realistic stream of consciousness as time progresses relentlessly in the narrative background. Bykau himself never forgot the emotions and mental gymnastics the mind goes through in life-threatening moments. At the front he was wounded twice, barely escaped being crushed by a German tank, and was presumed killed at the battle for Kirovograd in Ukraine. Indeed, his parents were notified of his death, and his name appeared among the dead on a monument at the site. Although in his post-Soviet novellas and short stories Bykau continued to write about the war, there was a shift to other existential situations not connected to it, such as the failed Belarusian uprising in Slutsk in the 1920s ("Na chernykh liadakh" [1997; In the dark glades]), the horrors of the Chernobyl catastrophe ("Vauchynaia iama" [1999; The wolf's lair]), and the death squads operating in Lukashenka's Belarus today ("Glukhoi chas nochi" [2001; In the dead of the night]). One astute observer notes that perhaps only Dante's Inferno captures the essence of Bykau's art and worldview. Hope seems to work against the characters in his fiction, and even "nature itself is portrayed as a stepmother, cold and unforgiving." In the earthly hell of his fiction, his men and women are never victors but always the vanquished. (4) Such a view is too harsh, however, for the true victor in Bykau's prose is the human conscience. Indeed, Bykau tests the golden rule to the breaking point, and his readers come to realize that the fragile human conscience is all that protects the world from unending cycles of savagery.

Vasil' Bykau is considered by Belarusian intellectuals to have been the conscience of his nation, a Belarusian Andrey Sakharov. In the course of his difficult life, he witnessed first-hand the catastrophe of collectivization, World War II, postwar Soviet repression, the Chernobyl disaster, the breakup of the USSR, and, at the end of the twentieth century, the rise of neototalitarianism in Belarus. His fiction speaks the truth about those events despite years of censorship and the continued efforts of those not interested in the truth today. Now, two and a half years after his death, many of Bykau's works have still not been published in his native land, and official Minsk continues to ignore his compelling legacy. In the final paragraph of his autobiography, Bykau writes that while all indications pointed to the fact that Belarus might forfeit its last historic chance for independence, he calls upon his compatriots to take the arduous road to freedom, even if they must walk it alone. And although hope is often a liability for his characters, Bykau concludes that in despair he continues to hope: "While my words may be pessimistic, my soul still longs for optimism," a phrase that perhaps best sums up his creative life. (5) The outpouring of public support at his funeral has given the democratic opposition in Belarus new determination, while Bykau's works in Belarusian assure that the literary language will be preserved and developed by the nation's intellectual elite. Both circumstances hold out the promise of a Belarusian cultural revival in the future.

University of South Alabama

From "Yellow Sand"

They pushed again. This time together and with all their strength. Felix Grom almost passed out from the pain. Next to him, he could feel that Valeryanov, the bourgeois White Army officer, was also wearing himself out. Maybe he too was afraid of the Chekist. Although, if you thought about it, what did they have to fear? Why were they in such a hurry? To rush forward, to their death? Maybe each of them was faced with the simple choice of where it was better to be shot--in the dry sandy earth, or in this bog, where they, still alive, found themselves stuck up to their knees. You could even catch a cold here, thought the poet, Felix Grom, with the irony of a man on his way to the gallows. They were pushing their hearse themselves to the place where they would be buried. That was something new in the age-old burial custom. Or was this some special method of torture? Now that's something worth writing a poem about, perhaps even a ballad or saga. But not in trite iambic meter, but in hexameter, like in Homer. Perhaps Homer would have been the most fitting poet for this cursed age....

For a bibliography of Bykau's works in English and comments on translations, see Zora Kipel, "Some Observations on English Translations of [Vasil'] Bykau's (Bykov) Work," www.belarusmisc.org/writer/bykau-kipel.htm and www.belarus-misc.org/ writer/bykau-w.htm.

(1) For a discussion of Bykau's prose before and during the Gorbachev years, see Joseph Mozur, "Vasil' Bykau: Exhuming the Belorussian Past," World Literature Today 64:2 (Spring 1990), 251-58.

(2) For a detailed report on Bykau's funeral, see www.nmn.by/ links/bykau.html.

(3) Ironically, Vladimir Sevruk, a notorious neo-Stalinist apparatchik from the former Central Committee of the USSR, out of a job in postcommunist Russia, has found a high position in the Belarusian Ministry of Culture. That hiring had critical consequences for Bykau, because in the 1960s Sevruk had personally orchestrated the defamatory campaign in the Soviet press against Bykau's war novel The Dead Feel No Pain. In the final years of his life, Bykau thus had to deal with the anachronism of Soviet censorship in his native country.

(4) See Elena Corti's remarks on the Ex Libris program on Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe: "Vasil' Bykov: 'Truba'--Stranitsy povesti," www.svoboda.org/programs/OTB/2000/OBI.27 .asp.

(5) Vasil' Bykau, Dougaia daroga dadomu (Minsk: Kniga, 2003), 539.

JOSEPH P. MOZUR JR. received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and teaches Russian language and literature at the University of South Alabama. He has reviewed for World Literature Today since 1981 and has written extensively on contemporary Russian letters and the literature of the former Soviet republics. His current interests include Russian postmodernism and recent literary developments in Belarus.

Bettina Brandt You write poems, novels, stories, and plays for radio and theater, and you also write a considerable amount of literary criticism. How do you understand the relationship between your fiction and your literary essays?