Nelly Bekus-Goncharova

BELARUS ON SCALES OF REALITY

A Tourist and a traveller as victims of provocation

From the beginning, the trip did not promise particular amazement, because everything there was to see merely extended the same habitual reality in which my everyday life went on. Both the place I was leaving and the one we were leaving for was Belarus.
Our route went through remote corners of her western part, and in my uninformed vision it differed from the eastern one but in later years of joining, which has long become a pure fact of history. Hence, the meaning of the trip as and “event” was formed for me, to a larger degree, through the need to go — to leave for a while the well-lived-in dwelling space in Minsk — rather than a chance of arriving somewhere. “To arrive” in the sense of discovering something new, something unknown; to objectively see changes in space about — as real evidence of a way.
However, the very first day, spent on the road from Minsk via Smorgon via Oshmyany and ended in Gervyaty (180km away from Minsk on the speedometer), brought such evidences.
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In Bertolucci’s film ‘Sheltering Sky’ the characters discourse on a difference between a tourist and a traveller: for them, it was their different attitude to time.
A tourist knows in advance the time he will spend in a location, where he feels and behaves “like a tourist”, while nothing is known to a traveller: whether he will stay long there where he was brought by his path — zig-zagging and measured by no-one but himself. A traveller is one who may never come back altogether.
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Behind this seemingly different degree of being informed and worried about one’s nearest future and its timetable there stands stark contrast between the tourist’s and traveller’s attitudes. Time programmed by a tour, return tickets, or merely by the tourist’s mentality enforces the “right” mode of relating to reality, selects the “necessary” scale of perception of what is happening: it does not allow to get distracted by trivia or waste time without viewing or doing anything (unless, of course, “not-doing-anything” is the tour purpose) and generally organises the visible, taking care of its integrity: display windows, postcards — which really are like windows, unveiling life for touring guests to ensure familiarisation with best views even if they are unlucky with the weather. Unlike it, a traveller, without a clear boundary of his stay, simply becomes for some time a voyeur of reality, and it appears in front of him often “undone”, on an arbitrary scale, from aspects unseen by anyone else. In return, he obtains freedom of will: to either see nothing at all or, contrary, see whatever and however he likes, not caring about its integrity.
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One who passively sets off on a trip, not asking what will become of it, what its status in reality will be, can land in a trap prepared by the territory itself.
A lot depends on the quality, the inner state of your area of destination. It can be organised like a tourist stronghold – which immediately turns you into a tourist with an according behaviour model.
Or it can not react to your presence at all, thus saying that you are a mere traveller for it.
Ironed pictures of everydayness, lightly slipping away under any alien look in a West European country with plenty of historical monuments are deliberate provocation and a highway to cultural tourism. Order in-itself, inherent to those places, is not intended for the intrusion by the Other with his own interest, looking into the “undeclared” (that is, not prepared for exhibition) places. And it is a question yet unanswered whether such places actually exist in those territories. 
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Belarus is a territory made up entirely out of such places: in depth and on the surface alike, there is little evidence of care about a possible Other. This almost automatically determines the corresponding status of anyone on a trip around Belarus by showing elementary, fundamental impossibility of him as a tourist, thus forcing him to try on a dusty disguise of a traveller. Well of Belarus’ “non-touristicity” speaks a lack of glossy postcards with her sights: this feature, not shortage of money or quality printing facilities makes for the dull and unattractive items on Soyuzpechat news stands. A traveller needs no such beauty. While the content of a tour is dictated by external parameters and needs all this infrastructure, a traveller himself fills up his way by imagery content, to his own taste and view.
Perhaps, the sole thing Belarus did in favour of her appearance (and something she can supply to a chancy visitor) is a literary image of herself as a blue-eyed one.
Belarus The Blue-Eyed is the favourite definition for the realm in most poetic contexts, called upon to raise patriotism in the population’s mentality. The image as such is interesting, as it conveys original presumption of beauty that exists and is therefore not to worry about.
So, when I agreed to go on a week-long journey around Belarus, I was least concerned about the genre, that is, the form of organisation of the trip. My thoughts were directed at things more practical and functional, such as the presence of petrol at filling stations, hot (if any) water at places we stayed at for nights – if we could find a place at all. In most settlements nobody expects visitors who come to “see the land”, like we did, rather than as guests of somebody particular who provides hospitality. Looking for suitable living conditions on the road or trying to find joy in their absence eclipsed for a while the question about the meaning of what was happening, as those down-to-earth issues kept jeopardising the very happening every once in a while.
Meanwhile, Belarusian reality pre-assigned us a status at its own discretion, and there was no doubt about it: we were travelling space with no tour.

To recognise the known, cognise the familiar

So, having naturally and spontaneously appeared, the travellers’ spirit allowed us to use our sight freely. Well at ease, it caught not regularity, not logic, nor parts of the totality, but fragments of a mosaic that was not to fall into integrity, at least, not at the moment. A priori particular, subjective observations were time to time becoming stages of cognising new reality that uncovered itself in strange and unusual facts we ran across on the road. For one example, fried eggs for breakfast: in those parts turned upside down and fried on both sides, which, as far as I know, nobody does in Minsk. People, almost unanimously speaking three languages, not including Belarusian, however: Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian. If anything implies Belarus in their talk, it is their accent – the only thing that retains something Belarusian in individual sounds on the edges of an unconscious form of a content foreign both grammatically and lexically.
A lot of these little things, if put together and classified, could compile a pretty good load of observation, something that seasoned travellers used to bring home from far away journeys in centuries bygone. Such a deed, however, would take both the energy of a traveller and passion of a collector – which I lacked. So I had to confine myself to the first stage of any collecting, that is, acknowledging facts noticed in various areas, especially since the latter, with their wealth of unique peculiarities, were replacing one another in front of our eyes like pictures in a kaleidoscope in the hand of a playing child.
Every new day spent in travelling Belarusian roads, each new village or town became stages of paradoxical “cognition of the already known”.
How do we become assured that we know the country we live in? Apparently, we are so little convinced by any answer which snaps in our mind. Take, for instance, weather forecast that comes off TV screens in the evenings, listing various towns “of ours”. In reality, however, this pure repetition, this “meteorological spell” does not imply any knowledge of what is happening in other ends of the country, what it looks like there and what it is going through.
Our certainty started wearing out leaving behind itself a strange sensation of an optical metamorphosis: as if some giant lens of incredible magnification landed on a geographical map of Belarus (the look of which I had been getting used to through the whole of my life, taking it for reality) and miraculously turned schematic lines and dots into real roads, towns, and villages with all their important and unimportant details, pleasant and other features.
This metamorphosis, aesthetically conditional as it was, conveys the status of the event that occurred during the trip, and there is no other way to grasp it, impressions being so much stretched in time and pulverised in space.
The imaginary (mapped) Belarus was slowly fading away, while the real one was slowly winning its place in my perceptive experience of “one on the road”. Lost yet again in country-tracks, we would meticulously peer into square centimetres of the map, and then cautiously move our eyes to the houses, woods, and knolls — looking for a confirmation of the incomprehensible fact that we were dealing with one same reality differently scaled by human perception.
Peter Greenaway in ‘The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist’ tells how in ancient times maps were connected with travels. The main concern of a traveller in those times was managing to make his way across some space before it vanished from paper. A pencil-drawn map got rubbed off as the traveller advanced along his route — leaving blank sheets behind it. Intriguing is, by the way, that a map as a graphical carbon copy of space began to have effect on time — of one particular person connected with that space.
In addition, this fact speaks about a special balance between a map and real world. Through a basic physical and historic fact (short lifetime of pencil records and draughts) there shows unexpected depth of this interrelation. By wiping off a map — i.e., by travelling — one makes one’s choice in favour of reality.
One can go nowhere and keep an unused map sound and whole, hanging framed on a wall as a piece of décor (a pretty widespread form of decoration, as Greenaway showed in this film).
By making one’s choice and setting off on a journey, one went farther than sacrificing the aesthetics of a map as part of one’s décor: a traveller exchanged it for the unknown and unexpected, awaiting for him in an encrypted map of reality.
In our time this interrelation has lost its former fatality: maps are printed typographically and, at the expense of their original crisp paper newness, survive longest journeys. However, the custom to hang maps on walls survived, too — as an atavism of bygone pricelessness of a hand-drawn map, which testified for its owner’s sacrifice in which reality was thrown on the altar of a defenceless drawing.
Our map’s transition into the reality of the trip was, of course, without fatal irreversibility, and still bore a certain intrigue, rooted in the nature of maps.
Maps, due to their innate schematicity and some special indifference to what they denote, conceal a lot. For example, the maps of France, Mongolia, and Belarus differ only nominally and at a closer look, while the very cartographic reality pictures the globe in a monotonous language, like visual shorthand. To grasp the visible one has to make an effort to turn on imagination, build a perspective, and fill it up with pieces of knowledge from geography and other earth-related disciplines. However, no-one takes the trouble when seeing a globe. Considering a map as a self-sufficient phenomenon, a product of a special logic of relation with earth’s space, it is easy to fall victim of a misconception concerning the form and content of life here and there.
Furtively, the trip was filling the “map” with content, which wasn’t, of course, the aim of our journey, but was happening anyway. Along with that, the monotone of the map’s schematic talking, which rendered Minsk identical to Lida, was being dispelled. At the same time my subjective perception was losing the self-evidence of the fact that I lived in Belarus; or rather, I lost the belief that I knew which exactly Belarus I lived in.
Arithmetic singularity of that image gave way to plurality.
Belarus in Minsk, Belarus in the Traby village, in the Dyatlovo settlement and in Novogrudok proved different. And it is not so much a cause to think of the integrity of the country herself, as an opportunity to grasp the strange irrelevance of those differences that enabled each point to retain uniqueness at the verge of falling out of space. It can happen that the image of Belarus created by the information streams of today’s life will leave out Belarus herself.
She can be proud of her capacity of evasion — she keeps succeeding in it, and goes further than just being clad in an information space-suit tailored out of various write-ups and reports on her life. Before that, she has slipped away from at least seven cartographers, which is precisely the number of Belarus maps we had along with us, none apt to giving us information trustworthy and exact thus making us venture our way by blind guessing.
The logic of evasion (from being photographed for tourist postcards, from exact definition, from basic mapping) is not abstract strife for liberty and freedom. A gap that remains between a drawing on paper and reality itself is a kind of chance for obtaining the meaning of existence that a whole nation lost in multiple redivision of its territories and reacquisition each time by new authority from within. What falls into this gap is rather not the originality of Belarusian provinces (actually, not threatened at all but cherished by the national TV and radio) but a consistent image of Belarus which she is unable to hold on the borders of unstoppable and diversely flowing life.
Each point in space suggests its own interpretation of Belarus as such, and it is legitimate inasmuch as this point is within her territory.
Such diversity can embarrass the most democratic mind; however, it isn’t in fact jeopardised because countless differences are screened by the only apparent frontier that divides Belarusian reality in two truly different parts: Minsk and not-Minsk.

The district centre uniform vs. history

Not-Minsk as a phenomenon of the Belarusian tradition can be easily discovered by driving some ten-odd kilometres away from Minsk. Per se, it reflects the homogeneity and, in this respect, even some superficial solidity in the organisation of inhabited space. It is the omnipresence of the district centre’s architectural uniform. Absolutely similar small squares with a Lenin monument (and probably named after him), same buildings filled by different people who, however, perform same functions in the state machine.
Of course, through all this one does see internal perspectives of “private stories” of towns and boroughs, where everything at once become unique and individually meaningful. Usually, in yards or on the outskirts of modern urban life there remain some original buildings or fragments of streets, in which another and somehow authentic life of each small town is glimmering. Thus, an architecturally unusual 19th century synagogue in Oshmyany has been converted into an immense bottle recycling station (judging by its size, it must be servicing the whole town or few). Vice versa is also possible: the village of Survelishki (five kilometres from Lithuanian border) turned its cinema into a Catholic church by putting onto the blocky brick house a few religious architectural attributes taken from a proper church whose ruins are beyond reconstruction and lie bleeding nearby.
And it’s not even about the strangeness of this interchange between the laic and clerical lives; it is about a broken line along which the past of Belarus flows into her future breaking all known laws of temporal perspective.
The present time hardly squeezes itself into the frame of its own history. And although the latter also languishes in misery here, it somehow supports the present and, perhaps, thanks to it the towns and villages of Belarus remain themselves.

Man is man to man, or Big City Optical Delusions

Everybody knows that the country and the city are different forms of life organisation. Away from the city, communication laws are different (everyone knows each other), an individual is dependant on the environment in a different way, and society itself is differently composed out of individuals.
Once, during a small village church mass, I was suddenly struck by amazing similarity of all the women in it. Their like clothes, hair-dos, similar tied kerchiefs with similar ornaments, faces with one expression that is roaming from face to another within this village, all this created an impression of their close kinship. This momentary observation puzzled me when I tried to imagine how, for example, a husband, brother, or son of one of those women enters that church and immediately find his wife, sister, or mother. In order to naturally and instantly distinguish from this visual unity his vision must function differently. Which means it is based on a different knowledge of a person barely connected with that person’s look and oriented either to the inner, or to finer grades of individuality.
Obviously, compared to city life, that in the village is based on its own foundation: the concern about one’s look for the Other is different. Probably, because the “Other” is quite permanent and the timeless character of communication (timeless as day in, day out, year by year) is oriented towards more stable references than clothes that run down, hair that grows and turns grey, or ageing features. Everyone is exposed to the Other’s view through absolute openness, expressed in the lack of interest in one’s look as personal. It has, in fact, nothing personal; moreover, the less it stands out the better, the less “smart” clothes are different from casual ones the easier it is to put them on.
Against this backdrop, life in the city with its strife to spruce up and embellish is entirely oriented at limitless new encounters, each of which requires outer mobilisation; their fleetingness binds one to care about maximum effect reinforced not the least by garment, make-up, and gear. Additionally, in the city appearance is a key that enables to find one’s way around in the crowd, single out identical social background and, if so desired, stay within its boundaries. All this would be meaningless in the village. That what is usually called rustic quiet and stillness, and what is often sought by city romantics, can be equally applied to the lack of literal aural disturbances and to the absence of tiresome daily problems of social identification: here they are resolved once and forever.
Sociality is at rest here.
Recalling architectural uniformity of Belarus, I thought that maybe a lack of interest in outer differences and the desire to create an atmosphere of stability through universal likeness, so justified and appropriate in country life, has entered architecture along with country migrants who moved to the city by whole generations.
Urban uniform becomes a consequence of the country’s psychological expansion to the city.

Belarus in a circle

Much like the inner is exposed and defenceless in front of the outer in the life of a single person, the same occurs in the organisation of the entire way of life. Villages or small towns reveal the actual state of affairs in Belarus: given the absence of visual effects nothing confuses the observer. There, it seems, is where true Belarus lives. In the streets of Minsk expensive western cars, glossy advertising boards with sonorous and expensive brand names, and lots of other “details” create an image of a country moving towards civilisation. Anyone walking the street can easily contract a misconception that, although it has not yet affected his way of life, the surrounding objective reality is positively changing for better and sooner or later this process will enter my life (my flat), too. One can linger in this delusive expectation for decades, unless, of course, he makes it to those strata that create the paraphernalia of the optical delusion. From the economic point of view, this layer of life (most often based on borrowed capital or ideas) is quite hermetic in Belarus, inhabited mostly by those who work for it. Essentially, it is a form of subsistence farming enlarged to the city scale.
The principle of natural economy — a closed circle of life — has gradually become a metaphor of life in Belarus.
One of the qualities of this geometrical figure is known to be the absence of exits to the outer space, i.e. any perspective. The exit to the future is one of such perspectives, apparently beyond human control, as it exists objectively in time; paradoxically, in some points of Belarus’ territory even life itself loops back into a circle. Big villages with schools no-one goes to, while the youngest (those under 60) are apparently doomed to walk the closed circle of their lives until the last inhabitants drop out of the track.
One of the possible ways of breaking a circle is its vanishing.

Belarus in a memory square

Our trip was set along certain historic parameters: it went through precisely specified places that had played one or another role in the history of Belarus (like Novogrudok or Zaosye, Adam Mickiewicz’s birthplace) or families that used to have deep roots there, cut in space after their emigration but surviving in people’s minds. My companion was a descendant of a noble house that had lived in Belarus until 1939. The aim of our trip — to visit the places where that life went on, to see them with our own eyes — gave reality an unusual condition.
The dialectics of the old and the new, the past and the present, and finally the imaginary and the real created endless twists in the plot of our journey. However, most often the entanglement, culmination, and denouement repeated themselves.
From a mere forced form of motion in space, the road was turning, thanks to our conversations filled by plenty of facts, details, and images, into an intellectual part blank of the future event. On the spot, reality would usually fall short in the capacity we were interested in, so that the on-the-road image replaced what we were looking for and became the actual event.
In this respect, the travel was needed not as a way to conquer space. The road gave us the opportunity to experience proximity, as “being near” that what has long gone from everywhere except human memory and imagination.
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The map of Belarus, dotted with points of personal or family attachment we were to visit (be it family tombs, former manors, church books or people’s memories) was taking on in this context new historical meaning and support that arrived in “the present” from far abroad in the person of my companion. The Belarus of his imagination bore memory of another life, another time, other relationships in which his ancestors were inscribed like Belarus was in their lives.
This strange symbiosis of a family with a territory grew especially important when it was formulated in real questions, concrete items of information in quest of which we travelled often impassable country tracks. The genuine and surprisingly energetic interest in those places imparted peculiar cogency onto the temporal perspective in which we considered Belarus, the people inhabiting her, and the houses that were built and fell apart on this land.
The architecture of a house, facts from a manor’s life, lime paths, ponds and the people who had built them existed precisely as long as it took us to arrive at them. Wheels spinning, fuel from the tank being spent, the picture changing outside the window (if noticeably), all this was giving us hope which, we must confess, did not come true one single time. Most often nothing waited for us at the place we arrived in, sometimes there were ruins, and very seldom we found whole houses — put to modern life’s use. How exactly those houses were “adapted” to the present is a separate subject; as a rule, they were refitted into places of asociality (asylums for the handicapped, the aged, alcoholics, etc).
Working with this space, against its own will to wipe off the old differences, the Soviet regime for some reason did not level out traces of former social boundaries and even reinforced them in its own manner. However, before they followed the lines of aristocratic estrangement, whereas now they single out the lowest social extreme.
In a mental asylum, during a cursory inspection of a former estate, one of its present inhabitants showed strange courtesy and offered to see us to the one we needed. My companion answered pure truth with sudden seriousness that the one we were after did not, unfortunately, live there any more.
Encrypted in it, this brief dialogue contained a whole story worth cinematography: of a family who once owned the estate, was thrown out of it, and scattered around the world, of its descendant who comes here were he might live (who knows?), of a clinic patient meeting him in his “own” home, as well as of the estate itself that was, by the power of its pendulum-like fate flung from one — aristocratic — extreme to the directly opposite one.
Another encounter happened in a hospital stationed in a still picturesque, if half-rotten, estate with recently restored ponds. The story of the house, complete with press-cuttings and hand-written copies from various books telling about its former owners, was carefully kept in a file among patients’ clinic records whence it was proudly drawn out by head physician, obviously enjoying by the effect he could read on our faces. Indeed, the very fact of interest in history held by someone who had to deal with numerous other daily issues surprised us. Moreover, this was a manifestation of an intricate form of interaction between the past and the present, peculiar to our land.
The gesture that took out this special file from a stack of similar files with different content was a move, serious in its symbolism, towards the demonstration that there is one foundation under different tangles of human destinies in this territory…
And even the history of Belarus has no privilege here, it just has its own lacunas, its ways of hidden presence, it can even camouflage as the present simulating contemporaneity. And all because being so contradictory and inconsistent it is an unreliable foundation for today’s truths; like everything, it can deceive and refute what it shouldn’t at the most inappropriate moment.
The history of a noble family among clinic records is not a simple way of storing information: it reflects the extreme alienation of a place to what happens in it. The consequences (the records) will anyway be stored in the same cabinet with glass doors through which it is easy to see the uniformity of files.
In it there is special wisdom of the Belarusian land that has unshakeable reserve to sustain whatever happens on it, takes a position from which nothing deserves an explosion of passion: everything will eventually take its place on a shelf in a cabinet behind clear glass.
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If anyone takes history into account, it is the people, and not only those who left their possessions and retained them in the memory of their hearts. With not less significance, history takes part in the lives of those who were born and grew up nearby. As time goes, these old walls, roofs, and ruins turn more and more into symbols, like wreckage and carcasses of perished ships, and as such “remains” they constantly send us to the past, i.e. to “another” time, different from the present not just in dates but in content.
Talking to people we found out that many of them remembered themselves as owners of their land, citizens of another state, speakers of another language. In their perception, Belarus bore an imprint of another life, another regime, and another time. It looks as if they had time to notice themselves differently, from another side (border), and now have to constantly attach this vision-remembrance to the image of Belarus.
One’s “private history” every time proves longer than that of Belarus in these places.
In people’s mentality there lingers an everlasting trace – like a suture scar, almost unnoticeable, not remembered, not aching – which does not allow to forget the Soviet vaccination done many years ago.
In fact, each such person in his daily life performs a kind of arithmetic operation: distracts the feeling of ownership from life and raises to the second power the feeling of Belarusianness that inscribes him into the state he lives in.

A journey 60 years later

Jan Bulgak “Travels of a photographer in word and image”
The thought of a strange form of being in time (that “heals” so slowly and reluctantly in these areas) found yet another confirmation upon our return to Minsk. In 1920s, Jan Bulgak, a well-known Polish photographer, wrote an essay titled “Travels of a photographer in word and image”, and his route apparently went through the same places as ours: his photographs left no doubt about it. From the first look at the pictures it becomes clear that 70 years later these places have not changed the least. In his travel notes he in his own way assessed this timelessness, the meaning of which is that the nature of this land is beyond the power of progress and civilisation with their ambition to control and transform.
“Our landscape is deserted, primeval, wild, unruly, it exists for itself in endless expanses and distances, the sculpture of surface full of expression and charm, muffled up in thickets, bush, and groves. It is in unbounded dimensions, in solitary quiet and inner meditations about the element and eternity. It contains immeasurable spontaneous force; compared to it man with his trifle affairs is but a minor addition which is accepted gently and condescendingly. In some places people managed to wield nature and change landscape to their manner, fit it to their arguable aesthetic taste. In our realm, man did not manage it, did not even try to enter the a priori unequal struggle with the unsurpassed master; instead, man yielded himself slave on his own free will”. (Jan Bulgak “Travels of a photographer in word and image”).
Nature that exists on itself, man that does not leave traces in it and does not even try to be practical but simply lives on this land content with bare necessities – all this immediately deprives such areas as history, politics, or culture of their familiar meaning.
The time of history, the events of politics, the meanings of culture lose their relevance and attraction, are erased by secretly working earth rhythms, dissolved in clean spring water that comes out to the surface to, having run for a while, go back down into earth and take with it everything excessive, unnecessary, or superficial.
The way of life under which man is an organ, earth a body, and nature co-organises them and allows for missing whole centuries, not to mention decades that flow rather on the TV screen (and who will take them seriously there – “not-life”, “not-reality” there, like “not-Minsk” here).
It is the life form in which these images appear that, evidently, allows human memory to find its own way of communicate with reality – its time, content, value, and meaning.
Apparently, it is a shared fate – of the land, nature, country, one of manifestations of which is the human lot.
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A trip through Belarus suddenly turned out to be a travel in time, even if that of various people, not different epochs.
All in all, it only showed us that differences in people, even if they live in one state, goes far beyond habitual ideas based on a language they use in daily life, food they cook (in an oven or on a gas stove), clothes they wear, and things they talk about.
People relate differently to the land they live on, hear differently the songs of birds that wake them at dawn, and, possibly, wake up differently to their lives, more so as everybody has his own life.