YANKA KUPALA AND YAKUB KOLAS IN NASHA NIVA
Abstract
The article explores ideological foundations of Yanka Kupala’s and Yakub Kolas’s literary work in the early 20th century and how they were influenced by Nasha Niva, a newspaper. The author comes to the conclusion that the main motive of the both writers’ literary work in that period was to show the importance of struggling for Belarusian statehood. Also, the author proposes a hypothesis to explain that the pseudonym of Yanka Kupala used by the poet Ivan Lutsevich derives from the name of the Biblical prophet, John the Baptist: the word “Baptist” is translated into Church Slavonic exactly as “Kupala”. Moreover, according to the Bible, John the Baptist sees his mission in preparing his people for the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Similarly, what Yanka Kupala’s literary work sought was exactly for the Belarusians to believe in their unique mission and be prepared to establish their own independent state. The article also explored Yakub Kolas’s poem, The New Land, that points out the problem of land in Belarus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the context of the struggle for the Belarusian lands between Poland and Russia.
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