Two Souls: A Novel of Revolution in Belarus (1919)

A warm, sunny morning dawns over N. on the day of a public funeral organized by the town council: teaching is banned for the day, and municipal employees are ordered to join the procession. Abdziralovich wakes late but in a cheerful mood. Yesterday’s turmoil already seems unreal, like a dream lost in fog; what matters is the good news about Mikola, and without even having his tea, he sits down to write to Ira.

From a box of letters and envelopes come photographs of old acquaintances, his St. George’s Cross and the colorful maple leaf she gave him, still fresh, and he puzzles over how to address her: dear, dearly respected, or simply “Beloved Iranka.” Then Vasil bangs at the door, grimmer than ever. He asks about the cross, which Abdziralovich never boasted of, and hears that it was for reconnaissance, and for nothing much. Vasil says there is no reason to be cheerful when everything is falsehood, and hands him the day’s newspaper, printed in red with black mourning borders. In the streets, workers with red ribbons on their chests gather from Zarechcha and Slabada, and a red battalion marches with its orchestra.

Glossary and notes:
St. George’s Cross: the Russian imperial army’s decoration for bravery
revolutionary tribunal: a Bolshevik court for political cases
“extraordinary commission”: the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police
samovar (самавар): a metal urn for boiling water for tea
This is the novel’s final chapter.

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Ira cannot get back within the week: the villagers are too busy in the fields to gather for a meeting. Then a counterrevolutionary plot is uncovered in N., several members of the bourgeoisie are sentenced to be shot, and the town is closed to outsiders. Hearing rumors of executions, and with no letter from Abdziralovich, she waits in the village with growing dread.

That Saturday, under the eye of a Red Army guard, Abdziralovich visits Mikola Kantsavy and Sukhavey in prison. Mikola has lost his spirit to the fear of execution and is overjoyed to see his friend. Sukhavey, calm and firm, hints that the letter from Abdziralovich’s father never reached the “extraordinary commission,” then asks about the money, and when he gets no clear answer, calls him a renegade and retreats to the bunks, deaf to Mikola’s pleas to act like a human being. The guard, a man from the S. district who recognizes the uniform of a Horki student, observes that they talk like peasants yet go against the people. Abdziralovich tries to reassure Mikola, but his hesitant words carry little conviction, and after that day, events in N. begin to move very fast.

Glossary and notes:
“extraordinary commission”: the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police
renegade: in the revival’s language, a Belarusian who has abandoned his nationality
demarcation line: the line dividing German-occupied Belarus from the territory held by the Bolsheviks

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

After a Red Army victory on the Eastern Front, the Bolsheviks of N. declare a holiday on Saturday, the one day Ira could have visited the prisoners. Every door is shut, and she must wait another week. She decides to use it to get papers from the kambed (камбед) in Mikola’s village, and from Horki for Sukhavey, vouching for the arrested men until their trial.

On the hotel stairs she meets Abdziralovich, and both are frayed. In her room, with processions and an orchestra playing “The Internationale” in the street, he says that in spite of everything he likes the music. Ira answers that the Belarusian peasant “Marseillaise” speaks to her more, and turns on the strangers who come to Belarusians with internationalism on their lips; he blames the gap between theory and practice and asks why the Obliskomzap has every nationality but Belarusians. They go to lunch, each silently reproaching the other, and part with her pleading that he do everything to free Mikola and Sukhavey. He spends the holiday wandering the streets, hearing the lame Harshchok speak from the tribune, and thinking of Ira’s gray eyes, of Alechka, and of that evening at Harshchok’s.

Glossary and notes:
kambed (камбед): the Committee of the Poor, a Bolshevik village body of poor peasants
“The Internationale”: the anthem of the socialist movement, sung by the Bolsheviks
Belarusian “Marseillaise” (Беларуская марсельеза): a revolutionary song of the Belarusian peasantry
Obliskomzap (Облискомзап): the Bolshevik executive committee governing the Western Region, which included Belarus

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Abdziralovich and Vasil arrive at Karpavich’s apartment that evening to find it full of commissars and tobacco smoke. When the others leave, only one guest stays: Comrade Harelik, a tall man in a black leather coat and big boots, with a thick beard, graying hair and large black glasses. Karpavich, limping round the table, asks whether Abdziralovich has finished working out his identity, and the former warrant officer answers that, as a Belarusian, he is gradually finding a Belarusian national and social consciousness. Harelik remarks that he shot Ukrainian independents with his own hands on the Southern Front, and Karpavich mentions two Belarusian ones just brought to the “extraordinary commission.”

Mehmet, a Tatar from Nesvizh, brings dinner and cognac. The doors are locked, the curtains drawn, and the drinking turns to boasting. Harshchok toasts internationalism and says he drinks from sorrow; Harelik describes the shooting of rebel peasants after a revolt, among them two papovichy (паповічы), a priest’s sons. Vasil, sickened, gets up to leave. On his way out, Abdziralovich begs Karpavich to free his friends, and Harelik offers to walk him home through the moonlit streets.

Glossary and notes:
commissar: a Bolshevik official
“extraordinary commission”: the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police
papovichy (паповічы): sons of a priest
left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries: a peasant socialist party, at first allied with the Bolsheviks and then against them

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

The news keeps coming. At the “extraordinary commission,” Abdziralovich learns that Mikola and Sukhavey are charged with counterrevolutionary propaganda among the peasants; only resolutions from the Committees for the Poor can free them, and he may see them on Saturday, under guard. Ira, despairing, will not walk with him in the garden, and he senses a discord growing between them.

He goes to Vasil, just back from requisitioning grain, tired and thin. While they wait for tea, the chapter opens into a bitter meditation on the Belarusian village, loved and despised at once, where a peasant at the town market waits all day for someone to trade him tobacco. Then Vasil tells of a rowdy meeting near Mstsislau: fathers quarrelling with sons back from the front, elders voting down a school (“Then who will weave my lapti for me?”), and a kambed (камбед) member threatening moonshiners with shooting. He speaks of young bandits who rule a village through the Committee for the Poor, of peasant revolts, and of a drunken captain called Harelik, maybe a former gendarme, who has taught Karpavich to drink. Abdziralovich asks Vasil to take him to Karpavich.

Glossary and notes:
kambed (камбед): the Committee of the Poor, a Bolshevik village body of poor peasants that helped seize grain
requisitioning: the Bolsheviks’ forced collection of grain from the peasants
lapti (лапці): peasant shoes woven from bark
saviet (савет), plural saviety (саветы): a council, the Bolshevik “soviet”
Kirpaty: the peasants’ name for the Carpathians, a front of the First World War
“extraordinary commission”: the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police
Midway, the chapter breaks into a first-person meditation on the Belarusian village before Vasil takes up his story.

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Word comes with Khaim the Peddler: Mikola Kantsavy and Sukhavey have been arrested and taken to the “extraordinary commission” in N. Ira fears the letter from beyond the demarcation line has been seized too, and that her friends may be accused of espionage. The frightened lads of Horki send her, as a woman and the least suspect, to learn the charges and plead for the prisoners’ release into the custody of the school board.

In N., the commission sits in the old episcopal school where Ira once went to dances, now wrapped in barbed wire and guarded by Red Guards with carbines. Without a pass, her papers are worth “spit,” so she sets out after one, and the day dissolves into the new bureaucracy: a commandant no one can locate, white tickets and blue tickets, a hungry clerk with a green, sickly face who swaps his ticket for three Tsarist rubles, an endless queue, and a clerk who tells her passes now come from the saviet (савет), the town council, in the former Belarusian Hotel on Karl Marx Street. There, worn out and leaning against a wall with ticket number 315, she hears a voice beside her say “Good day!”

Glossary and notes:
“extraordinary commission”: the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police
saviet (савет): a council, the Bolshevik “soviet”
Tsarist rubles: money issued before the revolution
sviadomy (свядомы): nationally conscious; a Belarusian who knows and serves his nationality
demarcation line: the line dividing German-occupied Belarus from the territory held by the Bolsheviks

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Ira Sakavichanka, a forest ranger’s daughter, went straight from the gymnasium in N. to a village school near Krupki, the Abdziralovich estate, meaning to work a year or two and save for further study. She stayed four years, until the spring she fell in love with the student Abdziralovich. Afterward she moved to the Horki district, close to the sviadomy (свядомы) students of Horki, and gave herself wholly to the revival, teaching children and adults to read, recite and sing in Belarusian without a single Belarusian textbook.

Now the news that Abdziralovich is living in N., and that his father wants to reconcile with him, has taken her peace away. On a long August weekday, while the women reap wheat in the fields, Ira cannot settle. She winds the gramophone and stops it, lies face down in a hammock under the apple tree, half dreaming of her cradle and her grandmother-nanny’s lullaby about the kitty, and wanders her overgrown garden of poppies and tobacco by moonlight. Her small room holds books, records, a guitar, a map of Belarus and a portrait of Yanka Kupala wrapped in a Belarusian sash. Lines by Kanstantsiya Buylo come to her lips.

Glossary and notes:
gymnasium: a secondary school preparing pupils for university
sviadomy (свядомы): nationally conscious; a Belarusian who knows and serves his nationality
demarcation line: the line dividing German-occupied Belarus from the territory held by the Bolsheviks
The chapter’s epigraph and the lines Ira recites at its end are by the Belarusian poet Kanstantsiya Buylo.

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

The novel pauses for a portrait of Mikola Kantsavy, the gentle village teacher who once hosted Abdziralovich on his way from the Caucasus. Mikola has never stopped regretting that his capable, educated friend Ignas was lost to the Belarusian revival as a renegade. The two came out of the same school, where both were simply counted as “Russians,” and Mikola always felt too ashamed to preach to a man he considered cleverer than himself, as if teaching a grown man a new alphabet.

Now Mikola is in high spirits. The movement is spreading through the peasantry like a great wave, taking on a social as well as a national character, and the students from Horki bring news of their work across eastern Belarus. Sviadomy (свядомы) workers are still too few, and the peasants’ growing dislike of Bolshevik rule pleases him, though he knows the price of such joy. He dreams of a Belarusian army once the Germans leave. His work also carries the threat of the “extraordinary commission,” and in nervous daydreams he wonders who would stand up for him: perhaps Abdziralovich, who lives in N. and once saved the life of a limping Bolshevik named Harshchok.

Glossary and notes:
sviadomy (свядомы): nationally conscious; a Belarusian who knows and serves his nationality
revival (адраджэнне): the Belarusian national movement
renegade: in the revival’s language, a Belarusian who has abandoned his nationality
“extraordinary commission”: the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police
demarcation line: the line dividing German-occupied Belarus from the territory held by the Bolsheviks
Muscovite: the revivalists’ word for Russian

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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

A sultry August night settles over a Belarusian village: the pear tree barely stirs, the night watchmen ride out to the pasture, and the schoolboys Taukach, Blyshka and Kastyuchok fall silent under its spell. The teacher Mikola Kantsavy can’t sleep. Walking out among the hemp and the ripe wheat on the road to N., he hears two voices arguing about Yakub Kolas and Yanka Kupala: Ira and Sukhavey, a clumsy student from Horki, coming to him on an important matter.

In the dark under a pear tree, Ira recites poems in memory of Maksim Bahdanovich, and all three grieve for the poet. Then Sukhavey explains their errand. A student has crossed the demarcation line from Minsk with Belarusian literature and a letter from Vilnia: old Abdziralovich, feeling his death approaching, wants to reconcile with his son, the former warrant officer, and leave him his wealth. The Horki students want that Belarusian money for the revival, and they think Iraida Auhenauna, who once knew the Abdziraloviches, is the one to persuade him, perhaps a nesviadomy (несвядомы) Belarusian, a renegade, to take it. Ira, for reasons she keeps to herself, refuses to go.

Glossary and notes:
nesviadomy (несвядомы): lacking Belarusian national consciousness; the opposite of sviadomy (свядомы)
demarcation line: the line dividing German-occupied Belarus, including Minsk, from the territory held by the Bolsheviks
Vilnia (Вільня): the Belarusian name for Vilnius
renegade: in the revival’s language, a Belarusian who has abandoned his nationality
The first poem Ira recites is by Maksim Bahdanovich, whose recent death the three friends mourn; the second is an elegy on his death by the poet Yasakar.

The complete novel is available in print, ebook and audiobook at grunwald.ca:
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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.

Several months have passed since the old nurse’s death. Abdziralovich is a man who never feels anything deeply all at once: a fire in a village near Krupki in his youth, the corpses of the front, all of it lodges first in his memory like a photograph and hurts only much later. The chapter wanders through such delayed feelings: quiet summer evenings in Mahileu, a pub under the sign “Belarusian-American Bar,” and a lone peasant in a white magierka (магерка) listening to the orchestra from behind the garden fence.

Then the grim present: the burial in Moscow, put off for days until the streets were quiet, and the evening after it, when Vasil and Abdziralovich remember her only half sincerely. Karpavich comes back from the hospital lame for life, and the Party sends him home to N. on his first mission, to help build the Bolshevik way of life there. He persuades Vasil to come, and Vasil persuades Abdziralovich, now discharged with a white ticket. In N., boarding with a quiet Jewish family and walking the outskirts, he turns over what the old woman told him and asks himself what, if anything, it has changed.

Glossary and notes:
magierka (магерка): a traditional Belarusian peasant hat of felt
white ticket: a certificate releasing a man from military service as unfit
verst (вярста): an old Russian measure of distance, a little over a kilometre
“Capital”: Karl Marx’s Das Kapital

The complete novel is available in print, ebook and audiobook at grunwald.ca:
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Translated from the Belarusian by Olya Ianovskaia.
Published by Grunwald Publishing.