King Stakh's Wild Hunt

I sought my people and began to understand, as did many others at that time, that my people was here, at my side, but that for two centuries the ability to comprehend that fact had been beaten out of the minds of our intelligentsia. That is why I chose an unusual profession for myself — I was going to study and to comprehend this people.

I graduated from high-school and the university and became an ethnographer. This kind of work was only in its beginning at that time and among the powers that be it was considered dangerous for the existing order.

But everywhere — and only this made my work easier for me — I met with aid and attention. Many people helped me: the clerk of our small district, a man of little education, who later on mailed me and Romanov notes on tales; the village teacher, shivering for his piece of bread; and (my people lived!) even the governor, an exceptionally kind man, a rarity, gave me a letter of recommendation in which he ordered under threat of severe punishment that I should be given the aid I needed.

My thanks to you, my Belarusian people! Even now I offer prayers for you. What then can be said about those years?

Gradually I began to understand who I was.

What was it that made me understand?

Perhaps it was the warm lights of the villages, and their names, which even to this very day fill my heart with warmth and a kind of pain: Linden-Land, Forty Tatars, Broken Horn, Oakland, Squirrels, Clouds, Birch-Land Freedom.

Or perhaps it was warm nights when tales are told and drowsiness is stealing up on you under the sheepskin coat together with the cold? Or the intoxicating fragrance of the fresh hay and the stars shining through the holes in the roof of the hayloft? Or not even this, perhaps? But simply the pine needles in the teapot, the smoky, black huts where the women in their warm, long skirts made of homespun material, sing their song, an endless song more like a groan?

All this was mine, my own. Over a period of two years I had travelled — on foot or in a carriage — across the Miensk, Mahiloŭ, Viciebsk provinces and part of the Vilnia province. And everywhere I saw blind beggars and dirty children, saw the woe of my people whom I loved more than anything else in the world — this I know now.

This region was an ethnographic paradise then, although the tale, especially the legend, as the most unstable products of a people's fantasy, began to retreat farther and farther into the backwoods, into the most remote, forsaken corners.

There, too, I went. My legs were young, and young was my thirst for knowledge. And the things that I saw!

I saw the ceremony, an extraordinarily important one, called in Belarusian “załom”, that is, if an enemy wished to bewitch somebody's field, he tied together a bunch of wheatears into a knot.

I saw the stinging nettle yuletide, the game “pangolin” (lizard), a rare one even for those days. But more often I would see the last potato in the soup-plate, bread as black as earth, the enormous eyes of the women crying their eyes out, and I would hear the sleepy “a-a-a” over the cradle.

This was the Byzantine Belarus!

This was the land of hunters and nomads, of the black tarsprayers, of the quiet and pleasant chimes coming across the quagmires from the distant churches, the land of lyric poets and of darkness.

It was just at this time that the long and painful decline of our gentry was coming to an end. This death, this being buried alive, continued over a long period, a period of almost two centuries.

And if in the 18th century the gentry died out stormily, in duels, in the straw, squandering millions, if at the beginning of the 19th the dying out bore a quiet sadness for the neglected castles in the pine groves, there was already nothing poetic or sorrowful about it in my days; it was at times rather loathsome, at times horrifying even in its nakedness.

It was the death of the sluggards who had hidden themselves in their burrows, the death of the beggars, whose forefathers had been mentioned as the most distinguished nobles in the Horodlo privilege; they lived in old, dilapidated castles, went about dressed mostly in homespun clothing, but their arrogance was boundless.

It was a running wild without any hope for better times: abominable, and at times, disgusting deeds, the reasons for which one could have sought only in their eyes set either too closely or too far apart, eyes of wild fanatics and degenerates.

Their stoves faced with Dutch tile they heated with splintered fragments of priceless Belarusian 17th century furniture; they sat like spiders in their cold rooms, staring into the endless darkness through windows along which small fleets of drops floated obliquely.