Poetry
Евангелле ад Мамы
Not translated into English
Ryhor Baradulin · 1995
Synopsis
A collection of poems of remembrance devoted to the poet's mother, Akulina Andreyeuna, a peasant woman who could not read and whom he regarded as a woman of great wisdom. The verses retrace her life as a hard-working widow, the labour and hunger of the post-war village, and make the mother, the Belarusian language she passed on to him and prayer the three values of the book, in which the word "mother" recovers its first meaning.
Context
The collection appeared in 1995 in Minsk, from Mastatskaya Litaratura, in a volume of 462 pages; its title, which might be rendered as "The Gospel According to Mum", is a son's tribute to his mother. It belongs to a body of work of some seventy books, begun in 1959, in which the native land, memories of the war and the defence of Belarusian keep returning, and which Ksty, put forward for the Nobel Prize, would later crown. The linguist L. V. Zhuravskaya counts nearly five hundred words coined by the poet in it. The book has been translated into neither French nor English.
Who it is for
To hear, through the portrait of a peasant mother, a great poet's love for the Belarusian language.
Prizes and reception
Two Belarusian academic studies regard it as a singular phenomenon, both in the national literature and in the poet's life.