A Comparative Approach to Belarusian Ethnicity

Abstract

The article is a scholarly review of the monograph “Faces of the Other in the Multilingual Belarusian Literature of the 19th Century” written by N. L. Bakhanovich. The book examines the image of “The Other” in Belarusian literature of the 19th century. Bakhanovich refers both to Polish-speaking romanticists (for example, A. Mickiewicz) and to some Russian-speaking authors to illustrate the main message of the book. From a methodological point of view, Bakhanovich follows the traditions of the Russian school of comparative literature and develops the thoughts of A. N. Veselovskii, Yu. M. Lotman, and others about the importance of describing the perception of “the other”, i.e., of a different cultural, religious, and ritual space reflected in literary works, for a more accurate understanding of the Belarusian culture and ethnicity. Although the book attempts to use the methodological framework of “imagined communities”, as presented by the British political scientist and sociologist B. Anderson, it is not convincingly justified. The book touches upon the difficult issue of cultural self-identification of the lands of modern Belarus; a number of the conclusions made by the author are controversial and in need of additional commentary, as is the terminological apparatus chosen to represent several political issues (for example, an attempt to consider the inclusion of the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania into the Russian Empire as an act of colonization). Such a publication is undoubtedly a significant contribution to the development of scholarly ideas about the formation of the Belarusian literary tradition in the 19th century.