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

For nearly two months, Abdziralovich waits in a Moscow hospital for his transfer to the Caucasus, hiding from the flies in a garden pavilion while his fellow officers grumble about the crassness of the common folk. The revolution seems to be passing by, just out of reach. Then, in a park square, a worker in a greasy blue blouse turns out to be Vasil, the shepherd boy he grew up with, now out of the army and working in a factory.

Vasil takes him across the city to a cellar room near the factory, where his old nurse, very old now, opens the door with a candle stub in her hand and cries out for her Ignalik. Over herring and tea with cowberry, she frets about prices and about her son, who has become a Bolshevik. On the shelf by the grated window, Abdziralovich notices a thick book embossed “Capital.” Then a neighbor drops in: Ivan Karpavich Harshchok, a short, gray-haired, curly metalworker in an embroidered linen shirt, who shares his tobacco, rails against the Halszany princes and asks the officer plainly whose side he would be on if the people had to stand up against the gentry.

Glossary and notes:
Ignat Vosipavich (Ігнат Восіпавіч): Ignat, son of Vosip (Joseph); first name and patronymic, the respectful form of address
Malanka: a familiar form of the name Malannya
comrade: the revolutionary form of address that came into use in 1917
Socialist-Revolutionaries: the SRs, the large peasant-oriented socialist party of revolutionary Russia
Capital: Karl Marx’s Das Kapital

The complete novel is available in print, ebook and audiobook at grunwald.ca:
https://grunwald.ca/products/two-souls-maksim-haretski?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=two_souls&utm_content=ts-e03

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

July 1917. After a month of severe illness in a divisional hospital, Warrant Officer Ignat Abdziralovich takes the night train to Moscow, allowed a first-class compartment as a sick man. On the lower bunk sits a reserved guards officer with a small black mole above his lip, who unpacks a feast of roast piglet, game, cheesecakes and a huge pear, while the convalescent on the upper bunk struggles with his own hunger and a certain dislike.

Leaning out into the warm night air, Abdziralovich feels reborn. The fields bring back the hay-mowing of his boyhood. He thinks without bitterness even of his harsh, unjust father, who disowned the “people-loving simpleton” and was glad when he was expelled from the university, and he remembers his company in Palesse, among the forests and swamps, thinned by scurvy and dysentery. Moscow greets him with drizzle and factory smoke. Arriving in the rain is good luck, he tells himself. At the crowded station buffet, a girl’s sparkling black eyes laugh at him across the table, and he calmly looks away, glad to feel new and different. Out on the street, in his officer’s coat, he is nobody’s enemy, but nobody’s brother either.

Glossary and notes:
warrant officer: the Russian army’s praporshchik (прапаршчык), its most junior officer rank, often held by educated wartime recruits
guards officer: an officer of the Imperial Guard, the elite regiments officered largely by the aristocracy
velikarosy (вялікаросы): Great Russians, that is, ethnic Russians, as distinct from Belarusians and Ukrainians
Palesse (Палессе): the region of forests and marshes in southern Belarus

The complete novel is available in print, ebook and audiobook at grunwald.ca:
https://grunwald.ca/products/two-souls-maksim-haretski?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=two_souls&utm_content=ts-e02

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

The novel opens in 1890, on a stifling summer night at a country ball where the nobility of the whole district dance to an orchestra brought in from N. Amid the champagne and the music, the young wife of Mr. Abdziralovich, a moderately wealthy landowner, is seized by a sudden, inexplicable sadness. She begs to go home at once to their firstborn, three-month-old Ignalik, while the other guests carry on until dawn, when the peasants are already heading out to the hay with their scythes.

On the dark forest road home, at the Devil’s Bend, highwaymen are waiting. Afterward, the master shuts himself in his study with cognac and cigars, blaming the neighboring peasants and all but forgetting his son. Loyal servants bring a wet nurse from a distant village: Malannya, a quiet, sensible woman whose husband was taken into the army and soon died, with a baby boy of her own, Vasilyok. The two boys grow up together on the estate like brothers, playing side by side and listening to Malannya’s fairy tales, until a tutor in a long black coat and glasses arrives to teach the young master to read and write.

Glossary and notes:
phaeton: a light, open, four-wheeled carriage
King Poniatowski: Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1764–1795), to which Belarus then belonged
Ignalik, Ignas: affectionate forms of the name Ignat
white bone, blue blood: old expressions for noble birth

The complete novel is available in print, ebook and audiobook at grunwald.ca:
https://grunwald.ca/products/two-souls-maksim-haretski?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=two_souls&utm_content=ts-e01

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