Vladimir Korotkevich. How did he manage to remain un-Soviet and not sell out? He paid a high price.
Today marks the 95th anniversary of the birth of the brilliant Belarusian writer. His biography teaches us a great deal. This is an archival text.
The late 1950s. A remote village in northern Belarus. Forests as far as the eye can see. A young history teacher throws himself into the life of the people, but his educational zeal soon fades: his school colleagues drink like horses, and everyday life is a grind. To abstract himself, he buys collections of Belarusian poetry. But even there, it's all "Deep Plowing," "High Wave," "Tractor Driver's Song"…
"Suddenly I find a booklet in a cardboard cover, 'Mother's Soul.' A wild title, an un-Soviet title, what is this? I open it and read the first verse. I expect to find something about the Party or at least about a shock worker or a milkmaid. And then: 'In the age-old Fatherland, maples silently begin to fall.' I can't believe my eyes. I leafed through it. Not a single tractor driver, not a single milkmaid. And I fell in love with this author. Vladimir Korotkevich is his name," recalled archaeologist Mikhail Chernyavsky.
Into Literature Through the Death of Stalin
Few classics studied to be writers. Korotkevich also became one by chance.
The first signal of fate he received from Yanka Kupala himself—he considered his first printed work to be a letter with impressions from Vyazynka. The young Korotkevich sent it to the poet's wife, Vladislava Frantsevna, and she published it in a collection dedicated to the singer.
But who doesn't write in their youth? And, waving his hand at a couple of hundred allegedly student poems, Korotkevich, a student of Russian philology at Kyiv State University, was going to be a scientist. But something unexpected happened: Stalin died.
Korotkevich confessed to his comrade, literary critic Arseniy Lis, that he would not have become a writer if it had not been for the Thaw, the 20th Party Congress, and the demolition of Stalinism. He "hated Stalinism, totalitarianism, all oppression, egalitarianism," testified Warsaw professor Florian Neuważny, his classmate and lifelong friend.
Brovka and Tank Asked
Korotkevich, fortunately for Belarusian literature, did not enter the Kyiv graduate school. Then he "attached" himself to the department and went to teach in a village in the Kyiv region. He declared the topic of his scientific work to be "The Uprising of 1863 in Russian Literature." The dissertation remained unwritten, but few others did more for the memory of that uprising.
Petrus Brovka and Maxim Tank helped Korotkevich himself return to Belarus: through the local living classic Pavel Tychyna, they asked the Ukrainian Ministry of Education to allow the promising young poet to go teach in his homeland in Orsha.
Agent Vysotsky
Korotkevich gave several poems to the Orsha district newspaper "Leninsky Prizyv." "Recklessly, because I didn't think about how they would be perceived by homegrown 'experts.' And they, it turned out, were still breathing in the Stalinist spirit," he recalled.
A staff member of the editorial office (and concurrently of the KGB), Leonid Vysotsky, wrote an article "Out of Step with Life," accusing the author of black melancholy, a fascination with history, and predicting the collapse of the USSR in the poem "Hydrogen." The persecution unfolded as if from a textbook. Even Brovka, who tried to defend Korotkevich's "interesting voice," did not scare the Orsha newspaper.
The persecution was stressful. And Korotkevich went to Moscow, first to literary courses, then to screenwriting courses.
At the same time, he was admitted to the Union of Writers. And after his Orsha mentorship, Korotkevich never officially worked anywhere else. Membership in the creative union allowed him to live like that and not be considered a "parasite." "It turns out that I should even thank that soldier Vysotsky for this," Korotkevich said.
And the vigilant veteran, by the way, lived until 1973 and even witnessed the heyday of the fame of the object of his criticism.
There Were No Such Heroes Yet
Korotkevich writes that he "learned a lot" at the Higher Literary Courses in Moscow. Moscow gave Korotkevich material for his first novel, "Leonids Will Not Return to Earth," which he wrote in 1962 in 60 days. The main character is not a peasant, but an intellectual in the fourth generation. For Belarusian literature, that was, let's say, atypical.
When the novel was being prepared for publication as a separate book, the Central Committee ideologue Vasily Shaura read it—and the typesetting was dismantled. The censors were particularly caught by the title "Leonids…": it so happened that Leonid Brezhnev came to power in the USSR at that time. The novel was published as a separate book only 22 years later—in the winter of 1984.
"Moscow Thing"
So, they say, Ivan Melezh called Irina Gorova—the heroine of "Leonids…," with whom the main character was in love. She had a prototype—Nina Moleva, a professor of art history at the Higher Literary Courses.
Both in the novel and in reality, she was married—to the artist Eliy Belyutin. It was his modernist group "New Reality" that organized the famous exhibition in Moscow, which was dispersed by Khrushchev. The dispersal marked the end of the political "thaw" in the USSR.
Frightened, Belyutin agreed after the scandal to retrain abstract artists into realists. Korotkevich was outraged by such a demarche. Perhaps he was upset that Moleva, whom he loved, remained with such a conformist.
The "romance" with her, Korotkevich confessed to his friend Vladimir Kolesnik, was platonic.
And yet, he—a romantic!—was seriously going to earn 200,000 rubles by the summer of 1960 (this was at a time when a teacher earned 700 a month) on film scripts and plays, buy a house and a car near Moscow so that Nina, after leaving her husband for him, would not live worse.
However, Moleva, of course, did not leave Belyutin and the comfortable apartment on Mayakovsky Square. In Korotkevich, she saw a provincial who "came to me as not yet a formed person… much of what I said literally turned something in his soul."
Still, Korotkevich remained friends with her until the end of his life, bought and gave her paintings. The 98-year-old Moleva died in Moscow in February 2024. After her husband's death, she bequeathed his and her art collection as a gift to Vladimir Putin. There are probably paintings given by Korotkevich in that collection as well.
And even such personal tragedies as with Moleva gave rise to chaotic creative energy in the writer.
Kupala of the Early Stagnation Era
Today, Korotkevich is a classic. But "at the beginning of the road," in the 1960s, he broke out of the permitted Belarusian literature, although he never said a word against communist ideology in his works.
On the contrary, he valued Lenin and largely agreed with Khrushchev. But he wrote something that made Belarusians stop moving towards the merger with the Russian people that Khrushchev had determined.
The "organs" saw this foreignness, so they were extremely interested in Korotkevich, interrogating his scientist and literary acquaintances. Just as Kupala was placed at the head of the fabricated "Union for the Liberation of Belarus" in the 1930s, in the 1970s they wanted to "mold" Korotkevich into the leader of an anti-Soviet organization.
There were few levers of influence on Korotkevich himself: he was not in the Party, had a defiant, bold character, drank, did not work anywhere, and was not even a member of the trade union.
But it was not possible to not print him at all: literary masters stood up for the writer, and readers not only snapped up each of his new books but also stole them from libraries.
Ears and Sickles
Korotkevich considered the novel "Ears Under Your Sickle" (now excluded from the school curriculum) to be the main book of his life. It was conceived earlier than all the others—in August 1959, in Ozerishche above the Dnieper, where the writer saw an old pear tree above the precipice. "Ears" grew instead of the never-written dissertation on the Kalinovsky uprising.
"I tried to pay off the debt to the Dnieper, the people of 1863, Belarus with this book," Korotkevich said. He, who did not have an academic degree, but was "a historian to the depths of his soul," as his classmate Nina Snezhko said, understood the significance of those events.
What we know today as "Ears Under Your Sickle" is actually only a third of what was conceived. Korotkevich planned to write two more parts of the novel: "Battle"—about the uprising itself, and "Golgotha"—about its defeat.
Whether the continuation of "Ears" existed is a mystery. Throughout his life, Korotkevich said in various interviews that it was time to finish the novel. But no completed texts, apart from two small parts-branches, were found in the writer's archives.
Maybe the continuation was stolen by unknown people who robbed Korotkevich's apartment in 1982? This is how Korotkevich's words are sometimes interpreted: "They hit what was most precious."
Borodulin did not think so. Although he admitted the version that KGB officers broke into the apartment under the guise of villains. The ring stolen from Korotkevich was subsequently thrown back, but the order, received on the occasion of the anniversary, was not.
But even the first part of "Ears" had to be fought for. In "Soviet Belarus," a review by Yakov Gertsovich of the journal version of the novel was published. The critic accused Korotkevich of sympathizing with the aristocratic "exploiters" Zagorsky, the absence of "social lower classes" in the work, and in fact demanded that the novel be rewritten.
The publication of the novel as a separate book was under threat. To save the situation, Ivan Melezh organized a discussion of the work at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences. The honest Bryl, Yanka Kupala's friend Yazep Sushinsky joined, and Pavlina Medelka, shocked by the novel, called Korotkevich a "son."
The senior writer Maxim Luzhanin, who, it was hinted, was a long-time KGB agent and was once "assigned" by the organs to Yakub Kolas (and wrote one of the best books about the classic—"Kolas Tells About Himself"), reviewed "Ears" for the publishing house. Luzhanin understood the logic of ideological censorship and proposed edits that would suit it. Korotkevich recalled: because of those edits, they "threw themselves at each other like beasts."
They made peace on the way to Brest when friends brought Luzhanin to Korotkevich in the compartment and diplomatically left them alone with a bottle of cognac.
Unexpectedly, Korotkevich found an interesting interlocutor in Luzhanin. They agreed on the fate of old Minsk architecture, on Belarusian literature of the 1920s, about whose legends and character "we know unforgivably little." Korotkevich wrote an essay about Luzhanin, "Warm August Afternoon." And Nadezhda Vasilyevna, Vladimir's majestic mother, played preference with the gallant Luzhanin. And, Korotkevich lamented, "lost as much as three rubles."
Luzhanin wrote 72 pages of remarks, and Korotkevich had to make many of his edits. "It did not come to cutting the veins of the work," Borodulin briefly summarized the work of the reviewer.
A separate story was with the publication of "Ears" in Russian. The publication of the finished translation, which they wanted to "cut" for being supposedly uninteresting to the non-Belarusian reader, was saved by the famous historian-Belarusian Nikolai Ulashchik, who after Stalin's camps worked at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The beginning of Ulashchik's review states the colonial state of Belarusian Soviet culture: "Works of art on historical topics appeared in Belarusian literature only in very recent times. The main reason for this delay is clearly not so much the youth of literature as the extremely weak development of the history of this country…"
Slapstick Instead of "Philosophy"
Tired of the excitement around "Ears," Korotkevich switched to cinema for a long time. Cinematography lured him like a mirage. Unmade film scripts occupy a whole volume of his new collected works.
"You don't understand anything about cinema!—he was angry with his friends.—This is a powerful force! A novel in Belarusian conditions will be read by ten, well, twenty thousand people. And a good film will be watched by millions."
Korotkevich's famous novel "Christ Landed in Grodno" began as a film script. And a lot of effort had to be spent on arguing with censorship "art councils," with directors-"Varangians." Maldis recalled how Korotkevich returned from Crimea, where the "Tatar" part of "Christ" was being filmed, and he had to make endless changes to the script. He returned gloomy, as they offered to change the title of the film to "The Life and Ascension of Yuri Bratchik," threw out all the "philosophy," all the common sense.
"They always think that my Christ is saying something wrong," he complained.—Too modern."
The worldview film was being turned into slapstick, leaving only comic scenes. Even the main role of Yuri Bratchik was assigned to the actor Lev Durov, who did not correspond to the type and role. Although he surprisingly coped well with the role of the "peasant Christ," but, Korotkevich noted, in the film, Lame Gudzak gained superiority over Eulenspiegel. Even the final scene of the crucifixion of Bratchik, abandoned by his friends, was cut. And still the film was not released: it lay "on the shelf" until 1989.
Director Bychkov later admitted that in the crucifixion scene, someone saw a hint of… Khrushchev, who was also abandoned by loyal comrades. "And although the analogy was absurd, we had to shorten the ending." And Korotkevich burned nerves, strength, and time fighting with re-insurers.
I Can't Not Drink
"He feels so subtly that sometimes next to him it becomes like on an X-ray, it seems to shine through… And in appearance—a long, long boy with huge eyes, a high forehead. He drinks a lot, but he is saved by the fact that he falls asleep, and in the morning—fresh again…" This is how literary critic Valentina Gapova remembered Korotkevich in 1962.
"It's a pity for Volodya and his bright talent… You can't cope with him now… there are so many different alcohols everywhere—the shelves are bending… Bad friends who indulge his pernicious weakness. Cheap friends, these are!"—Larisa Genius wrote to Korotkevich's mother. She herself had a similar misfortune with her son Yurka.
The strict Zenon Poznyak scolded Korotkevich and Borodulin for drinking (and they were afraid of him, who was younger than them). "I—want to drink, and want—I don't drink for months," Korotkevich bragged to Genius in the 1960s. And in the early 1980s, taking out a bottle of "Moskovskaya" hidden on a shelf behind books, he said to his guest—Vladimir Kolesnik: "I can't not drink!"
It came to hallucinations. Vasil Bykov recalled how during a joint vacation in the south, Korotkevich "in the twilight began to complain that a dragon was sitting in the bushes below, watching him. He says: go, I'll show you. I went to their room, and Volodya pointed down: there, there… he's looking out!.. No, he's hidden. Well, wait, I'll ambush you…"
He turned to psychotherapists, but it did not help. Korotkevich would have died much earlier if it were not for Valya Nikitina.
Wife for Korotkevich
Korotkevich in one of his poems explained why he did not marry for a long time: "There are dozens with whom you can sleep, wake up—there is not a single one."
Korotkevich's marriage was a national affair. Arseniy Lis took him to Vilnius to "accidentally" introduce him to the daughters of the old Belarusian activist Yanka Bogdanovich—a chemistry graduate student and a student at the conservatory. Korotkevich entertained the company all evening, and then said goodbye and ran away.
"I need a wife who has a good supply of patience," he explained to the failed matchmaker on the way to the hotel.—For example, we will walk with her down the street, and I suddenly want to, you understand, so irresistibly want to climb a tree or on the roof of a house, so that she can wait until I get off there. And then, as if nothing had happened, go on."
Chernyavsky mentioned that it was almost impossible for a conscious Belarusian to find a kindred spirit in Minsk in the 1960s. In the end, both he and Lis married Russian-speaking girls and Belarusianized them.
How did Korotkevich meet his future wife? Versions differ. Some say—at a literary meeting at the Brest Pedagogical Institute: she sat and read his "Wild Hunt," not knowing that she was talking to the author. According to another version, the acquaintance took place in a train compartment on the way from Minsk to Brest.
Valentina Volodkovich was a tall blonde with blue eyes, slightly nearsighted, but glasses suited her. She kept the last name Nikitina from her first husband, a short marriage with whom she did not like to remember. Valentina spoke Russian, but she knew Belarusian well, as her school teacher was linguist Fyodor Yankovsky.
By specialty, Nikitina was an archaeologist. She studied at the Minsk Faculty of History, and after that—at the Moscow graduate school. When she returned to Minsk, she allowed herself to be condescending to the local luminaries. And she was overthrown from the capital Olympus to the Brest Pedagogical Institute, where she had to teach the History of the CPSU, since there was no other work for her there. And she disappeared on excavations during summer vacations.
While not yet married to Korotkevich, Valentina moved to him in Minsk. She found work at the academic Institute of Art History, Ethnography, and Folklore. Here she became the driving force behind the creation of the "Code of Monuments of History and Culture"—an encyclopedia of architectural heritage. The ideologists missed this book, believing that there would only be partisan obelisks there. Meanwhile, the research group measured ancient wooden churches, photographed monuments of Belarusian Baroque. Korotkevich often went on expeditions with his wife.
When Korotkevich got married, Valentina Bronislavovna exchanged her Brest apartment for a room in Minsk, and after that, the two-room apartment on Khoruzhei and that room were exchanged for a three-room apartment in the writer's house at 36 Marx Street. There, Korotkevich finally had a full-fledged separate office.
Oncology hit Valentina Bronislavovna unexpectedly. She passed away in February 1983. Korotkevich outlived his wife by less than two years. He left this world in a deaf stagnant dawn, although one questionnaire predicted that he would live to our time.
In 1976, in Warsaw, when the couple was visiting Professor Florian Neuważny, his wife prompted Korotkevich to take the test "Will We Live to Be a Hundred Years Old?" from the Polish magazine "Kobieta i Życie". He later made a feuilleton about this in the Mrożek style. And the intermediate result of that questionnaire showed that Korotkevich would live 89 years—until 2019.
Let's imagine how Perestroika, Chernobyl, the opening of Kuropaty, gaining independence, Belarusianization could have been highlighted by Korotkevich. Maybe then it would have been easier and happier for us to go through all this.
Why Korotkevich is a Genius
Created Belarusian historical prose from scratch. His novels and stories about the past are unsurpassed to this day.
Consolidated the image of Kastus Kalinovsky in Belarusian culture, understanding his importance (Kalinovsky's declarations became the starting point for the formation of the modern Belarusian nation).
Created powerful images of aristocrats and their descendants in literature: Roman Rakuta, Ales Zagorsky, Andrey Grinkevich… Thus showed that Belarusians in the past had their own elite, and were not an impersonal people.
Created images of heroes of the Renaissance era—Yuri Bratchik and Gervasy Vylyvakhi—refuting the ideological postulate that the history of Belarus began in 1917.
Wrote a fascinating textbook-guide to the history of Belarus—"Land Under White Wings."
Began to write detective stories in Belarusian, creating "urban" mass literature.
With all the censorship pressure, he was able to preserve his works and bring them to the reader.
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