Aleś Razanaŭ

In October 1968, BSU philology students, led by Ales Razanaŭ, Viktar Yarac and Leu Bartash, sent a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus addressed to Piotr Masherau (the letter was signed by several hundred students) demanding the return of teaching in Belarusian.

And when Ales Razanaŭ, Viktar Yarac and Valyantsina Koutun visited Zelva to see Larysa Hienijuš, the first two were expelled from the Belarusian State University in the winter of 1969 (allegedly, due to failure to pass the military training test; before that they were excellent students).

Thanks to the support of Siarhei Husak, Rector of the Maksim Tank Belarusian State Pedagogical University and Uladzimer Kaliesnik, Head of the Belarusian Language and Literature Department of this university, Ales Razanaŭ continued his studies at the Faculty of Philology of the Brest Pedagogical Institute, graduating in 1970.

After graduating there in 1970, Razanaŭ worked as a teacher of Belarusian language and literature at the middle school in the village of Kruhel of Kamianeс district.

Although many poems that had been published earlier did not appear in this collection, and others were ruthlessly censored, the book received a wide public response.

The publication of this book gave Razanaŭ the opportunity to become a member of the Belarusian section of the Writers' Union of the USSR in 1972, returning to Minsk, to the creative community in the capital.

He left this position in 1999 due to political pressure and increasingly accepted invitations from abroad, from Germany, Austria, Finland, Sweden and Slovenia.

[3] In 2003 he lived in Graz as a scholarship holder of this network, in 2007, as in 2001, he was a guest at the International Literature Festival Berlin and a Fellow in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

He was considered a master of landscape poetry with deep philosophical and psychological content, a classic of free verse and one of the founders of Belarusian haiku.

He has translated from many languages, including the comedy Сон у Іванаву ноч ("A Midsummer Night's Dream") and two other comedies by William Shakespeare (1989), from Lithuanian the novel Час, калі пусцеюць сядзібы ("Time of the Desolate Courtyards") by Jonas Avyžius (1989) and poems selected from Latvian by Uldis Bērziņš (2013).