Narrative
Two Souls
Дзве душы
Maksim Haretski · 1919
Opening lines
Памешчык сярэдняй заможнасці пан Абдзіраловіч заўдавеў у 1890 годзе дужа трагічна.
The landowner of middling wealth, Pan Abdziralovich, was widowed in 1890 in a very tragic way.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from knihi.com
Synopsis
During the revolution and the civil war, Ihnat Abdziralovič, a former student with democratic ideas who has become an officer, learns at twenty-seven from his mother, Malanna, that he was born Vasil, son of peasants: she had swapped her child for the lord's orphan to ensure him a better life. At the front, he sees people killed for no reason; he rejects the Reds and the Whites alike, seeks love without fighting for it, and passes from one camp to another, from the communists to the nationalist students, calling himself in turn Belarusian and Russian.
Context
The story was written in 1919 in Vilnius, where the author had just settled, and is dated to that year, sometimes to 1926, the year of a volume edition. Its unorthodox portrayal of the revolution, critical of Bolshevism, led to its being long sidelined and played down by Soviet criticism. The image of the two souls takes up a 1914 essay in which the author held all men to be double. A reissue appears in Minsk in 2008, and the first English translation in 2024.
Who it is for
A narrative in Belarusian; translated into English in 2024 under the title Two Souls, not into French.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a new development in Belarusian prose, which it nourished thereafter; its author is said to be the country's first existentialist.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.