The new book Халодны дзень і цёплы вечар (The cold day, the warm evening) of Taisa Supranovich, the Belarusian writer and employee of the National Library of Belarus, has recently gone out of print.
The collection includes 3 tales and 5 short stories, some of which appeared in the magazines Полымя and Маладосць. This event could not go unnoticed, since the author, perhaps, is the only writer in the Publishing House ”Zvyazda” for an adult audience, whose publication in 2017 is fully funded by the state.
Perhaps you remember the provocative German slogan that determined the role of women in Germany: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). This expression is attributed to the Kaiser Wilhelm II and contrasted with the “male three K”: Kaiser, Krieg, Kanonen (emperor, war, cannon). But sex gradually ceases to be fate: women overcome the boundaries defined by society and try their hand at various activities. Literature did not become an exception.
Today the feminine novel has grown to the “serious literature”, I dare say, rising to a qualitatively new level and certainly deserving the readers' attention. In their works, women talk about themselves, their problems, mental ups and downs, doubts and losses, philosophical and moral searches. However, most often they say about love, the vicissitudes of the relationship between a man and a woman, meetings and partings, joy and sorrow.
Taisa Supranovich is no exception. Her characters are common people, whose life for certain reasons varies significantly. Few of her heroes have been happy throughout their lives, but nevertheless they all find the most convenient way of living in this world, which allows them to re-realize the advantages and disadvantages of their own destiny.
Aleksey Ragulia, PhD, culturologist, professor of ethnology and arts of the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts, in the foreword to the book The cold day, the warm evening says that the “mental tree” of Taisa Supranovich is the experience of the vital activity of the Belarusian spirit of those people in Novogrudok district, among which the writer’s childhood and youth passed.
Let me remind you that the writer was born in 1956 in the village of Chereshlya, Novogrudok district, in a family of teachers. After graduating from the Minsk Institute of Culture, during 25 years she was the head of the children's library in Novogrudok. In 2005 she moved to Minsk, where she worked at the Ministry of Education, the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts, and at the present time – at the National Library of Belarus. Taisa Supranovich (Gurko) is the leading bibliographer of the scientific bibliography department of the National Library of Belarus, a member of the Union of Writers of Belarus. She is the author of three books: Мужчыны і жанчыны (Men and women), Матчын зарок (Mother’s pledge), and Халодны дзень і цёплы вечар (The cold day, the warm evening). Also she appears in Belarusian republican newspapers and magazines.
The natural question of how the book is born, on whom the author is oriented revealing her soul in the works, I addressed to Taisa Supranovich.
– I write primarily for adults, and I believe that my audience is well-educated people who know the history of the Fatherland well and are worried about it. By the way, besides Belarus, I receive feedback from Ukraine, Russia (up to Siberia), and even England.
It seems that the stories are simple, but what a huge work is behind them! Usually, how do women write? Lyrically, sentimentally, giving much attention to the description of nature, for example, interlacing the fall of leaves with the extinction of the senses... I'm a person of action in both life and creativity. I convey my vigor through the growth of the plot, the clearly outlined storyline of each of the characters. So I avoid moralizing because I hate reading morals. There are only my thoughts, and every reader is free to draw conclusions.
According to Aleksey Ragulia, Taisa Supranovich is today the only author who has been able to introduce to the literature the modern modifications of the antisocial type, previously embodied in Masheka and Bushmar. "In the prose of Taisa Supranovich it is shown how the wave of wildness and degeneration grows in the atmosphere of officialdom. In the Soviet society, the administrative career was the only way to get out of the social pit and crawl even to the middle floors of the party-caste hierarchy. The progress on this vertical was accompanied not only by the loss of the native language, but also the feelings of kinship with relatives. On the higher floors, your soul was also an extra load. The regulator was a cold careerist calculation".
How does the writer explain her creative find?
– I'm generally an inquisitive person , – Taisa Suprenovich says. – During my work as a head of the library, I met many people, I heard a lot of life stories, I saw happy and unhappy marriages, relationships in the family, different situations that heroes fall into in everyday life. And I have convinced that no one could come up with anything better than life itself. Therefore, I could only take a ready-made, "living" human character with all his actions, predictable reactions and transfer it into a work. And it's not my fault that they appear so cruel, ruthless and inexorable, covering the amputation of the soul with a social cover.
When reading feminine novels, you involuntarily wait: now, I’m going to see a happy love, a beautiful prince, a boundless sea of joyful feelings and the compulsory "they lived happily ever after..." However, a somewhat opposite picture is observed in the stories of the writer.
Taisa Supranovuch:
– For all my life I've seen many women's fates, and not every one of them was happy. So why should I create happiness where it almost did not exist? You know this expression: "or good, or nothing"? So, there is a continuation in it: "or the truth." Here I also speak the truth: the Belarusian women pull a heavy vital cart, bend, but do not break. No matter how many blows fate strikes them, they continue to live, and believe, and hope, and love again. If my heroines fall into the rigid grip of the "Procrustean bed", they do not bow their heads submissively, do not bend, but work calmly and diligently, raise children, in general, they still live with dignity.
Well, I'm on the author's rights, so to speak, Deus ex machine, nevertheless strive for a happy end, this is my attitude in general. You know, you can relish the horror, the cruelty (for example, the death of a person), and people seem to be able to try on these circumstances, in which the heroes turned out, survive personally all the negative. But the question arises: how does the author himself get out of this darkness and lead the reader? How to move to a life-affirming attitude? I'm not talking about the fact that it's much easier to describe horrors than, for example, to make people laugh. And I spare my reader, therefore I write happy endings.
At the end of the interview I would like to cite a reasonable conclusion of Aleksey Ragulia: ”The pictures of modern life in the prose of Taisa Supranovich are imbued with deep reflection and purity of emotional experience, sometimes bitter, but always life-affirming. Following the traditions of Belarusian classical prose, the writer opens new layers of vitality in the soul of the Belarusian ethnos. Her works define the vector of humanity in the complex conditions of modern times”.
In a word, the faith in a person and humanity is the warmth that will warm on any cold day!
Interview prepared by Elena Deshko, the leading librarian of the Internet portal maintenance department of the National Library of Belarus.
