CRITICALLY ONTOLOGIZING THE NATION: ULADZIMIR KARATKIEVICH’S ZYAMLYA PAD BYELYMI KRYLAMI

Abstract

Uladzimir Karatkievich’s long essay Zyamlya pad byelymi krylami (1972/1977) tries to teach its readers about the Belarusian nation. In the following, it shall be posited that this teaching can best be understood as enacting critical ontologization — a mode of developing potential for critical thinking out of identifying oneself with the essence of a national past. This concept is taken from a reading of Frantz Fanon’s idea of a national culture as formulated in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Here, Fanon envisions a mode of locating oneself within a national history that opens up critical potential in the present — it is the core postulate of this text that Zyamlya pad byelymi krylami follows a similar model. The main part of the article will make this argument productive; in a close reading of Karatkievich’s essay, several of the key aspects of the text will be discussed in this context: the relation established between the text’s narrator and his listeners, the way in which the text positions Belarus as all-encompassing, and the way in which such a positioning opens up critical possibilities for interrogating the relationship between Belarus and its place in Soviet discourse. The aim of such an operation is to demonstrate how in Zyamlya pad byelymi krylami two apparently contradictory tendencies become the same: an authoritarian way of national writing that identifies a national essence within its reader — and a critical impetus to empower the reader to break his present and create something new.