Yanka Bryl: how to live happily in an unhappy era

Paradoxically, Bryl's loyalty to his personal samurai code saved him from both ruin and shame, even in a totalitarian society. In public life, Bryl was a master of wise caution. And in his personal life — he managed to pass on the charge of kindness, love, and friendliness received from his parents to the next generation of his family. How did he manage this? We are publishing an archival article from "Nasha Historyja" (Our History).

Павялічыць

Yanka was the last, tenth, child of his dad and mom — a "pet" (пестун), as they said then without negative connotations. His father was 47 in 1917, his mother was 44. The mother was a little ashamed of her age, but the doctor who delivered the baby exclaimed: "Madam, don't sin! What a charming boy!"

"Madam" — because Yanka was born in Odesa. His father, Anton Danilavich, went there for work from near Karelichy. He worked as a conductor on trains on the Saint Petersburg — Odesa line. The job had many advantages: a conductor received 35 rubles a month under the Tsar (a teacher 24) — plus tips, plus it was allowed to transport baskets of grapes for sale in the northern provinces in the service compartment.

His wife, Nastassya Ivanawna, remained at home to look after the household, children, and her husband's elderly parents.

The Bryl family still keeps a large leather wallet where Anton Danilavich kept tsarist banknotes. And yet, "clean" urban work was seen as something temporary: penny by penny, the family saved money for the eternal "buy land, get your own corner." World War I thwarted their plans: with its beginning, the father took his family from Belarus to Odesa.

Павялічыць

It's hard to imagine now: Anton and Nastassya's first children were a whole generation older than their youngest. Sister Hanna, who already had her own child, sometimes breastfed little Yanka — which she jokingly reminded him of in adulthood.

Hanna and Yanka — the first and the last — lived the longest of Anton and Nastassya's children. Three of them died young from scarlet fever, incurable at the time; Uladzimir was shot by the Soviet NKVD at 39; Ihnat died after hard labor on the White Sea–Baltic Canal from leukemia; Mikalai from a stroke at 59; Misha suddenly from a heart attack at 51; Vilita from cancer at 75.

Павялічыць

From Odesa — to Zagora

The family did not manage to settle in Odesa: inflation came with the war, the father fell ill with typhus, then with a relapse, and the older sons had to travel as conductors instead of him. In 1922, the family decided to return from the Land of Soviets to Belarus, to their native Zagora, to the farm. It was then already under Poland.

Bryl has a vignette of his dad spreading clean barley straw for their first cow and, unable to resist, lying down on it himself and inviting his five-year-old son — such was the owner's joy.

The older sons did not go. They already had professions and wives at that time. Uladzimir became a zootechnician, and Ihnas, who in his gymnasium years tried to escape to a monastery, later enrolled in medicine but only studied until his first visit to the anatomy lab. He taught in a Belarusian school in Odesa, and later did take on the rank of an Orthodox priest.

The parents had a plan for the older sons to eventually take their younger brothers — Mikhas and Yanka — to the city. The border that formed between Odesa and Zagora after the Peace of Riga was not taken seriously at first. The collapse of an empire, as we can see from the example of the USSR, is realized gradually. Fortunately for Mikhas and Yanka, the parents' plan did not come to fruition.

Павялічыць

Mouthpiece and Folder

Yanka Bryl described the fate of his eldest brother in the story "Mouthpiece and Folder." Volodzia's trace was lost — or rather, found — in Bykivnia near Kyiv. These are the Ukrainian Kuropaty, where hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalinism are buried. During excavations, a mouthpiece with the scratched inscription "Bryl V.A. 16.IX.1937" was found among the bones.

Volodzia, a collective farm zootechnician, had a conflict with the party leadership and was arrested on a denunciation as "an exposed son of a Polish landlord." The date on the mouthpiece is from his first interrogation.

Volodzia's wife recalled waiting for the investigator by the door until night and kneeling in the snow before him. It didn't help. The authorities also charged Volodzia with espionage for Germany and extracted the necessary confessions.

Ihnat did not remain a priest for long. Soon he was arrested and sent for "re-education" to dig the White Sea-Baltic Canal. "Dressed, shod, fed," he wrote home. Ihnat was lucky to survive; after the camp, he settled beyond the Urals, taught, and at the first opportunity returned to the priesthood.

The Bryls Sing

Zagora, to which the Bryls returned from Odesa, is an old village on the paved road that connected Slutsk, Nesvizh, Mir, and Novogrudok. Here their lineage was traced from the late 18th century. Although they were serfs.

According to Uladzimir Kalesnik, the writer's ancient ancestors had the surname Brylevichy under serfdom, and Anton Danilavich, when he came to the volost to get a passport to go for earnings, called himself by the village nickname Bryl. The writer himself did not corroborate this version. But there are Brylevichys in the vicinity.

Zagora is the ancient name, although the village is written on maps as Zagorye.

Павялічыць

In the Bryl family, it was a long-standing tradition to "be friends" (дружыць).

Their grandfathers, the biological brothers Danila and Iosip, Zagora serfs, "were friends" and together bought five desiatinas of land from Pani Narkevich-Yodka. Their children also "were friends" — cousins Anton and Pavel, who worked together in Odesa. Anton Danilavich did not abandon his wife's relatives either. He took Nastassya's brother, Navum, a cripple from childhood, to the city and sent him to study as a tailor. Navum returned to his native village as an overly stylish tailor.

The next generation also stuck to the tradition. "They had a large family and everyone was friends with each other," Yanka Bryl's daughters recount. "And, by the way, they sang well. Our father knew Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian songs — when they gathered in Zagora, they would sometimes walk two kilometers to the Usha river to fish, and then sit by the fire and sing. It could be heard in the village and they would say: 'Well, the Bryls are singing again.'"

"Eternally Busy and Justly Kind"

Life under the Poles was not an idyll. Especially when in the spring of 1924, after catching a cold in the forest, his father died of pneumonia. "Pray, Ivan, that I recover! A child's prayer will be heard," he pleaded, lying down, to his 7-year-old son as a last hope.

"My childhood, the last 'pet's' childhood, after urban, rural, continued with her. Eternally busy, strict, but also justly kind," Bryl wrote about his mother.

Bryl recalled how his mother, after bathing him, a little boy, in a tub, would kiss the soap suds from his eyes so he wouldn't cry. But once, when he brought home ugly ditties from the pasture, she whipped him with a nagajka (whip) left at their homestead by Cossacks when the front line stood in Zagora.

His brother Mikalai, who was turning 14, became the master of the house. Dying, his father asked his mother to "educate" the younger children — Misha and Yanka. This was expensive and deprived the farm of working hands.

Reading and Thinking

Before that, the brothers had completed seven years of schooling in the town of Turets. They were taught in Polish there, but a few lessons a week were conducted in Belarusian — this was a compromise with parents who sought a school in their native language for their children.

The teachers there were varied: Pani Maria Praneuskaya was Yanka's good genius and guardian. Thanks to her, he took away from school "a healthy natural love for Polish culture." Meanwhile, a mathematics teacher, wearing a mask, helped the police torture arrested communists. The students boycotted that teacher.

When Misha, who managed to enroll in the Navahrudak gymnasium, prepared Yanka for entrance exams, their mother dreamed: "I hope you don't get in." But Yanka passed with excellent marks and was admitted. True, he couldn't study for long: Uncle Navum came and said that their mother was ill, the farm was fined, and Mikalai couldn't manage alone. The brothers cried all night and decided to return to Zagora.

Since then, Yanka Bryl never studied anywhere, if one doesn't count the post-war Marxism-Leninism courses, which all writers — even Yanka Maur, who was over 60 — had to attend.

Bryl's university was replaced by reading and thinking. His brothers from Odesa gave him a whole chest of gymnasium textbooks and Russian classics. Yakau Vauchok, a book lover and activist of the Belarusian Peasant-Workers' Hramada from a neighboring village, had Vilnius Belarusian publications. They obtained Heine through a maid from the landlord's library, as the landlord himself wouldn't lend books. Bryl even bought a subscription to the Jewish communal library in Turets and went there for books.

Yanka also didn't shy away from social activism: he organized an amateur theater. The money collected after performances was sometimes donated to charity: for example, for a cow for orphans (the old one died after swallowing a nail).

Павялічыць

Belarusian amateur activities in Poland were strictly regulated: for every event, permission had to be obtained from the starosta in Stowbtsy, and a policeman with a carbine also had to be present at performances.

It was then that Yanka began to publish; his first works appeared in the Vilnius magazine "Shliakh moladzi" (The Path of Youth). He accumulated enough for a separate book, but publishing a collection of stories cost at least 75 zlotys — the equivalent of 30 poods of rye.

"Why don't I think about whom the bullets hit?"

From Vauchok, Misha and Yanka also gained an enthusiasm for Leo Tolstoy's ideas. The brothers, who could converse in quotes from Gogol, after discovering Tolstoy, forgot about Gogol's "jokes."

There were many Tolstoyans in Western Belarus at that time: Tolstoyan humanism resonated with the spiritual searches of that interwar generation; it seemed a just alternative to Polish chauvinism, reactionary clericalism, radical Marxism, and the militarism that engulfed Europe at the time.

The anti-war Tolstoyan spirit so deeply entered Yanka that, upon joining the army, he wanted to be in the medical team. However, the command decided otherwise — the two-meter tall young man became the right-flanker in an elite marine infantry squad.

In Yanka's conscription year, Poland entered Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to annex disputed Cieszyn Silesia. Bryl recalled how happy he was not to have joined that war. However, soon he, the second man in a machine-gun crew, had to see Gdańsk through binoculars, draped in red Nazi flags: Hitler's forces were coming to carve out a "corridor" to East Prussia.

"Why didn't I think about whom the bullets hit?" — pondered Bryl-Tolstoyan in his old age, recalling how near Gdańsk he fired "the entire belt of the old 'Maxim' — two hundred and fifty cartridges — with a single press" at the advancing Germans.

"Gross Hans"

"He lived under occupation... He lived under landlord's Poland..." And in the first case, one had to be a partisan hero, and in the second, an underground prisoner, to be equated with some nobody who was never anywhere," Bryl sadly noted, reflecting on Soviet stereotypes.

Bryl later described his time as a German prisoner of war in the novel "Birds and Nests." He recalled that he was forced to revise his novel: the ordinary civilian Germans, whom "Gross Hans" met during his adventures on German soil, were not portrayed as sufficiently hostile.

Павялічыць

Yanka met June 1941 in captivity. At that time, it was not understood why his brother Misha insistently advised him not to escape from captivity but to act officially, through the Soviet representation. An escapee could be considered a spy sent back home.

Partisan

"Will we ever write everything about the partisan movement?.." — Bryl ended a sketch with this question, about a "forest" girlfriend of a partisan commander who went straight from his dug-out to have her third abortion.

The future writer went into the forest in 1944, after partisans defeated a local anti-partisan self-defense unit in Zagora. Before that, Bryl had been a partisan liaison for some time. His brother Mikalai was also a liaison, who, for cover, served as the head of that self-defense unit in Zagora.

Bryl joined the partisan intelligence. He was proud to have participated in expelling the Nazis from Belarus. But the writer was far from the formulaic eulogies that began in literature when partisans Kiryl Mazurau and Pyatro Masherau took power in the BSSR.

Bryl did not attend partisan anniversaries in his home district. He believed he was invited as a "celebrity," and as an ordinary partisan, he wouldn't have been called. He didn't want to listen to commanders boast to each other.

There were sincere, honest people among them, like "Uncle Valodzia" Tsaryuk, authorized by the Central Committee and the partisan movement headquarters, a former Western Belarusian political prisoner, or literary critic Fyodor Yankouski, who during the war oversaw an entire partisan zone for the GRU General Staff. But there were also "overfed, overpraised monsters." One such boasted to schoolchildren how the detachment devised a test for a twelve-year-old boy: to kill his own uncle, suspected of links with the police. When the boy refused, he was "shot along with that uncle"...

What he saw in the war sometimes echoed in nightmares: Bryl dreamed that he was ordered to shoot a policeman's family with small children. Nightmares of another kind also occurred: "A dream. I agreed to be Lynkou's deputy, chairman of the Union of Writers immediately after the war. ...How to decently get out of this?.. "

"Vanya, are you crazy?"

That "Uncle Valodzia" Tsaryuk became Bryl's "godfather" in Belarusian Soviet literature.

It was his hand that called Yanka from reconnaissance to the editorial office of the partisan newspaper, that ordered the headquarters typist to retype his manuscripts for dispatch to Moscow with the note "Union of Belarusian Writers. To Maksim Tank." Bryl was then taken to the editorial office of the combat leaflet "Let's Crush the Fascist Serpent," which was later transformed into the magazine "Vozhyk" (Hedgehog). If not for this, the partisan scout could have been mobilized into the army — the war was still going on.

Tsaryuk stuttered. After the war, as deputy chairman of the regional council, he traveled through villages, organizing collective farms, and thus agitated peasants: "M-men, s-sign up for the k-kolkhoz. I-if such an o-order we have, that they m-must exist, like everywhere else, then n-nowhere w-will you go anyway. The B-Bolsheviks, if they s-strive, will d-do it. Better, lads, to sign up earlier than l-later, shouting like pigs!.."

Bryl called the most difficult period writing "in the military press, first with the partisans, then in Minsk, when it was necessary to squeeze out of oneself, as from an empty tube, what was needed 'for struggle, for victory'... The Western Belarusian writer had to 'rebuild,' 'assimilate,' 'catch up.' The writer sought a balance between what he really wanted to say and what could be published. The typist of their forest partisan newspaper, where the word STALIN was written only in capital letters, typing Bryl's first works, sometimes said: "Vanya, are you crazy? You can't write such things!"

The Soviet regime had ways to show Belarusians from the West what was allowed and what was not. Symionikau, a member of the Communist Party of Western Belarus (KPZB), after a drink with Tank, recounted how he was summoned to Moscow and there in prison "had his head beaten against the entire wall." How he was sentenced to ten years and then "added to" until Khrushchev's 20th Congress freed him.

"In the same cell with him before execution sat Branislau Tarashkevich, who 'signed everything.' He also saw Viera Kharuzhaya in Valadarka prison, who walked around the prison and urged arrested communists to agree with the investigators' outlandish accusations, because it was 'the party's need.' Tank then suggested that Kharuzhaya went to the partisans, leaving her small child, because she felt guilty."

Burned Archive

Soon realizing what was allowed and what was not, Bryl almost completely destroyed his archive in 1949.

Those papers from the 1930s-1940s were buried in a barrel in his cousin's barn. Bryl burned "out of fear" everything that could be dangerous if it fell into the hands of the special services. What could have been there?

Literary scholar-Uzvyšeniec Anton Adamovich, who organized legal Belarusian press in occupied Minsk under the Germans, noted that Bryl began to publish not after the war, but in the German-backed "Belarusian Newspaper": "All this is well known to those who were there at the time."

For some time, Yanka Bryl even worked in Minsk under occupation, at the Historical Museum, which was managed by another future Belarusian emigrant — Anton Shukeloyts. The writer never mentioned this period of his life, not even to his children.

Many who lived under Stalin did this. Bryl's comrade from German captivity, the Western Belarusian writer Mikhas Vasilok, was sent to the Gulag after the war for the mere fact of publishing in the newspaper "Ranitsa" (Morning) under the Germans. Thanks to Maksim Tank's intercession, he was saved. Bryl did not even have such literary renown at that time.

"...what a fortunate fate wove you through dangers, what a bone-breaking path you had to traverse, what losses you had to endure, how — perhaps surprisingly — you still managed to do something!.." — thus, looking back, reflected the People's Writer Yanka Bryl. For Belarusians of his generation, there were no typical fates: the collisions and strategies of fighting for survival with great history were personal and unique.

It's Never Too Late to Edit

The Stalin Prize became an indulgence for the writer. He received it in 1952 for the novella "Dawn in Zabalotstse." Laureates were bothered less, and with the onset of the Thaw, they were even allowed to travel to the West.

Although Bryl recalled how some superior interrogated him before a trip to the GDR: "And why exactly should Bryl go, why not Shemyakin?" Just like that, in the third person. The argument that Bryl's novel had been published in the GDR and there was an invitation from the publisher did not sway Comrade Superior.

And Bryl often recalled "Zabalotstse," which described the advantages of the collective farm system, with shame. "It involuntarily hurt from that lie for the sake of racji stanu ['state interest' (Polish) — Ed.], which I piled up, stormed, eyes closed, seeking newspaper truth and lyrical lightness." The writer worked on himself all his life, guided by Tolstoy's words that it's never too late to edit oneself.

Павялічыць

The Ability to Refuse

The then-chairman of the Union of Writers, Pyatrus Brouka, helped with the Stalin Prize. Pyatro Ustsinavich intended to "bring Bryl into society" by showering him with administrative positions: at the end of 1956, he offered him to head "Litaratura i Mastatstva" (Literature and Art); a year later, the "Belarus" publishing house; and even later, to become his deputy in the Union of Writers. Yanka Bryl simply refused in the first case; in the second, he took two days to think, and the topic was not brought up again. In the third case, Bryl hinted to the acting deputy, Ivan Shamyakin, that Brouka considered him "too complacent" and intended to get rid of him. A frightened Shamyakin ran to repent and resolved the issue.

The Ability Not to Yield

Party membership was required for high positions. And Brouka made hints. But Bryl was not admitted to the Communist Party after the war because of his repressed brother, and later he himself did not want to join.

"Is it such a great, forbidden luxury — to think for oneself what is right and what is not, to decide for oneself, checking the correctness of one's decisions against the highest authority, over the heads of instructors and secretaries?.." — he mused and scoffed at the fervent communist Maksim Tank: "For Maksim, even a cleaning lady in the Central Committee is a great authority."

And yet, it was impossible to completely avoid administrative positions. The non-party member Bryl was even a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR. In his district, they were initially confused, and then decided that the party had ordered the writer to remain non-party, "because we need a block" — and calmly voted "for." It's clear that in Soviet times, voters were offered only one candidate.

During meetings with voters, Bryl felt the fear the Soviet system instilled in people: "Many people think well, soberly, but speak only 'whispering,' openly, loudly — voting for everything that comes by order, from above." And he himself, at the first session, felt like "an apparatus for raising a hand and clapping hands." And at a meeting of the culture commission, "some teacher-diva jumped up with the first question: 'What shall we do with the Belarusian language?'..."

"How easily Belarusians assimilate after all!.."

One fellow countryman spent a week less than a year in the virgin lands and already called ducks "utyami" (Russian for "ducks"), another, after living in Poland, no longer switched to his native language even when alone, Bryl wrote.

Many entries on this topic date back to the Brezhnev era. In the 1970s, the writer admitted to himself and in conversation with his close friend Uladzimir Karatkevich that he had little hope for the survival of Belarusian culture. They agreed that "all our major publications — volumes of the folklore series, encyclopedic multi- and single-volume works — are like summing up results, a balance sheet before closing..." There is no one to write a book about Kupala, Kolas, Skaryna for the "Lives of Famous People" series, but "multi-pood monuments" are being piled up. And the authorities behave like that Central Committee bigwig who bangs his pencil on the table at literary classics who dared to speak up at a meeting.

The Russification of society even affected his relationship with his teenage son. "Our grief! — and a language barrier is already growing between us: it's harder and harder for him to speak Belarusian with me," Bryl wrote. "And what can you give him alongside Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, into whose world he plunges, and how do you set him against the powerful current of assimilation?.. The granddaughter says 'tata,' but even this 'tata' will be taken from her in the nursery, where she went the other day... We are scoundrels — but how do others preserve their own?"

Bryl formulated his samurai attitude towards Russification while walking from his dacha in Krynichny, Karelichy district, to the village for milk: "I won't come up with anything else for myself but to live with the clear conscience of a son of my people, to try to write well in my native language."

Our Fenya — Glavlit

An honest writer in the USSR, who also wanted to publish, had to constantly balance between truthfulness and ideological conformity.

Bryl recalled how in 1978 he was scolded in the presidium of the Union of Writers for daring to doubt in his notes: how could Maksim Gorky agree to the renaming of his native Nizhny Novgorod? Shamyakin was especially "transparently principled": his novel "I Will Take Your Pain" was competing for the USSR State Prize along with "I am from a Fiery Village." And during the distribution of state prizes, ideological impeccability played a big role.

Bryl recalled the censor Fenya Dadzyomava, who rejected everything he brought, until Lynkou had a conversation with her. Kondrat Krapiva wrote an epigram about that Fenya, the wife of a high official:

Having written a good work,

we send it to typesetting.

But if we have doubts —

we send it straight to Fenya.

Our Fenya — Glavlit,

knows what in him aches.

The last line is a hint at the censor's level of Russian language proficiency. Not to mention Belarusian.

The children in the family were protected from "politics." "When they spoke about something 'like that' with their mother, they switched to Polish. When we started to understand Polish — the 'partisans' switched to German," says Bryl's daughter Natallia. They had no idea about the censorship problems of their writer-father, who "kept everything inside." As a result, in February 1957, Bryl suffered a heart block — after which he quit smoking. At that time, Bryl made it a habit to take evening walks — with Vasil Vitka, Ales Bachyla, Yan Skryhan. How much uncensored talk happened then!

Continuation of the "Class Struggle"

Yanka Bryl criticized Bykau's war prose: he found it lacking in details beyond the main conflict and the heroes' choices. He had seen much himself as a partisan, and learned more in the early 1970s when, together with Ales Adamovich and Uladzimir Kalesnik, he compiled a book about Nazi atrocities in Belarus. And he came to the conclusion that for Belarusians, World War II was a civil war.

They then interviewed over three hundred witnesses. And it was necessary to process what they heard and saw in their souls: stories of grandmothers living with pierced heads (incorrectly shot in the back of the head during execution), children of wartime who remained alive "without a single scratch" in a mass grave under the body of their mother or older sister.

"Fiery Villages" showed the terrible side of civil war: the dehumanization of a neighbor whom you supposedly knew your whole life. When "the Germans are coming, smoking, but the police, our own people, are beating people..."

"Here, in the Lahoysk region," he noted in his field notes, "another strong, disgusting confirmation of what we 'don't want to emphasize' — the war was essentially a civil war. Masses of police, the division of villages into 'theirs' and 'ours,' horrifying cruelty, to the point where one asks: where does it come from? And it seems that this was precisely the continuation of the 'class struggle'."

"I am from a Fiery Village" was published in 1975. Mikhas Straltsou called it "a journey through human suffering, through the fiery ravines of earthly hell." From this book grew the documentary genre in Belarusian literature, in which the future Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich found herself.

After finishing the book on Nazi genocide, Bryl wrote "Nizhniya Baiduny." This desperately cheerful, humor-filled "carnivalesque novella" was like compensatory therapy after the fiery villages, noted critic Mikhas Tychyna. Isaac Babel wrote similarly about Odesa.

I am an optimist only in the forest

"...A farm girl, an excellent Polish gymnasium student, then a Soviet university student with top grades, a university lecturer with five European languages — Latin, English, German, Polish, and Russian, not counting her sixth, her own — she knew her level normally, yet was not at all arrogant, loved healthy laughter, and could rise to self-irony."

This is how Bryl described his wife. They met in 1937, when Nina Kausuts was 16, and were friends all their lives. She was from a neighboring village, and her father Mikhail Kausuts led the local cell of the RSDLP during the 1905 revolution, and later served time in prison.

"Their villages are two kilometers apart. He was looking for someone and went to the farm where her mother lived, and they got to know each other better when his brother Mikhas married her sister Marya. The parents were still writing to each other and got married in 1945," the daughter recounted.

In the Mir registry office, instead of a kind word of congratulations, they were warned that divorce would cost three thousand rubles. The post-war wedding: on the table were vinaigrette and moonshine, the dowry consisted of a blanket and a pillow.

"Our father is an optimist, and I am a pessimist. I am an optimist only in the forest, when I am completely alone," she told her children. She meant the forests around Krynichny, along the Neman, on the border of the Minsk and Grodno regions, where the Bryls had a small house.

She was "strict" in the family; her husband was assigned the role of "good cop." Daughters recall how their father flew across the entire apartment, knocking the phone to the floor on his way, to break up their only childhood fight in their entire lives. The parents themselves never hit the children. The worst punishment was when they wouldn't talk to them. For what could they impose an ostracism? For correcting school grades in the diary, for example.

Sometimes, his mother wouldn't speak to his father for a week. Although they had a friendly relationship and didn't quarrel.

"No one imposed anything on us; everyone chose their own path — my sister and I are humanities majors, and our brother is a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences. Relationships in the family were equal and calm; we could approach our parents with any question," say Halina and Natallia.

"Mom was a person of the old school: she could sew, embroider; if it was lunch, there had to be a first and second course. She even finished driving courses. Father laughed: 'You only lack tailoring courses.' He himself really wanted to drive, but he wasn't given a license because of his eyesight."

"The First Normal"

Writer Volha Ipatava, Bryl's countrywoman from Mir, who, as an orphan, had to experience an orphanage, remembered Bryl's family as "the first normal one" she had ever seen.

Though the childhood of the writer's descendants from house #36 was not particularly remarkable. "Someone's father was a worker, someone's a teacher, ours was a writer. We perceived it as normal," says the daughter. She recalls how the children used to crowd into Yanka Maur's apartment to watch the first TV in the building. The children's writer had to endure it. The widow of the classic Uladzislava Frantsauna also had to endure the children's raids on Yanka Kupala's museum (it was then located next to the old House of Writers, opposite the "Pioneer" cinema).

Павялічыць

Children from house #36 attended Minsk School #2, which stood on the site of the current hospital on Engels Street. Children of party leadership also went there: Pyatro Masherau, Syarhey Prytytski, Vasil Shavury. But director Uladzimir Lyaposhkin treated everyone "equally."

"Not everything was said..."

Their mother studied, then worked, their father wrote — and the Bryls hired nannies for their daughters. There was no shortage of staff: village girls then escaped from the collective farm to the city whenever they could. When a son was on the way, their nanny quit, because, as she said, she didn't like very young children. And — karma — she couldn't find work and was eventually forced to look after twin infants. Their nephew, his brother's son, who was living with the Bryls at the time, loved to play with little Andrei. "The Bryls hired a governess for their son!" the neighbors whispered.

Nina Mikhaylаvna half-jokingly reproached her husband: "Did you raise the children? You were always traveling somewhere." But her role in the family was not limited to organizing children and grandchildren. She was among the first to read — and edit — manuscripts of new works. Nina Mikhaylаvna was especially ruthless towards Bryl's miniatures and lyrical sketches — "only every tenth one is interesting." They lived together for more than half a century.

In 2003, at the dacha in Krynichny, his wife suddenly suffered a stroke. After that, she fought for her life for another 80 days.

"She also told her daughters in the hospital that she would have a conversation with me. And I waited for that conversation, sometimes even with jealousy towards the children and grandchildren, consoling myself that this was probably normal compared to six decades of our shared fate, when, of course, as in every human couple, things happened differently. The exceptional conversation she hinted at, unfortunately, did not happen. There was a strong handshake of her right, unparalyzed hand, there was silence, and my uncontrollable, terrible, and happy cry... Not everything was said..."

His Own Samurai Code

Yanka and Nina Bryl are buried in the cemetery in Kalodzishchy. Every August, Yanka Bryl's descendants also travel to Zagora and Malaseltsy to tidy up their ancestors' graves.

As a People's Writer, Bryl was "entitled" to a place in the prestigious Eastern Cemetery. But his wife died first. Colleagues from the Union of Writers appealed to a high-ranking official of the city executive committee with a request to allocate a burial plot for her, explaining that Ivan Antonovich would want to be buried with her, as this was his rule. "And who is she to be buried in the Eastern Cemetery?" the official dismissed them. They were not allowed to bury the People's Writer's wife in the Kalvaryja Cemetery either. And Bryl was not one to strive for a better place. In Kalodzishchy — then in Kalodzishchy: "And there, too, is Belarusian soil."

Павялічыць

Bryl remained faithful to his samurai code of honor until the very end.

Yanka Bryl outlived his wife by three years, falling just short of 89. Towards the end of his life, the writer had poor eyesight and hearing. Contacts with the outside world became limited. He had almost no friends left at that age, refused to give interviews, bitterly experiencing the state's policy of Russification.

His joy was reading, Tolstoy, and traditional Saturday family gatherings. It was a ritual: children and grandchildren would gather, and Grandpa would allow himself a small glass of wine...

"When mom died and he was left alone, everything at home was read," his daughter testifies. Relatives searched Minsk for the books he requested.

When Bryl became a widower, his daughters took turns, every other day, coming to cook him lunch and eating with him. This continued for all three years, every day.

Did Bryl himself consider his life a happy one? No one can say.

The material uses interviews by Irena Katyalovich with Yanka Bryl's daughters, Natallia Semashkevich and Halina Bryl.

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