Between Poetics and Reality: Anatol Sys’ Early Period

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the early works of Anatol Sys (1959–2005) – one of the founders of the literary community “Тутэйшыя” [“Natives”], a great Belarusian poet with a tragic fate. Even during his lifetime, and especially after the death of Anatol Sys, many myths and legends about his extraordinary personality and work began to appear. One of these such myths is the idea that there are no early, student poems in his works, which would testify to the poet’s later work on mastering literary skills and artistic comprehension of reality. The author of the article analyses poems from the poet’s manuscript archive found in 2011 by Ales Bialiatski and Eduard Akulin and comes to the conclusion that most of Anatol Sys’ student poems written from 1978 to 1982 are artistically imperfect student texts with clear signs of imitation of Maksim Bagdanovich. Only a few poems, such as Я ўваходжу ў каляю... [I’m Getting in the Rut...], Застолле [Feast], У сасновым лесе [In the Pine Forest], and Усявышняму [To the Almighty] can be considered as indications of future wonderful works from the collections of poems Агмень [Hearth] (1987), Пан Лес [Mr. Forest] (1988) and the unpublished collection Ягамосць [Gentleman] (early 1990s). The paper demonstrates the evolution of Sys’ work from keeping in line with the principles of poetics and traditional versification, to the presence of the tragedy of Belarusian history and modernity – from copying poetic samples and templates to existential experience of reality and its reflection through original artistic images.