Who were the two characters who didn't drink in interwar Vilnius, how Zoska Veras was awakened from lethargy, and is the tale about Karatkevich and the restaurant true?
Halina Vojcik's book "Where I Am Not" contains many interesting details about Vilnius and Belarusians.
In spring, Skaryna publishing house launched the "Vilnius Series". It plans to publish works by Belarusian authors from Vilnius, both of the past and present.
The first book in the new series is "Where I Am Not", memoirs by Halina Vojcik (1927—2007). The author was a Germanist, Candidate of Philological Sciences, taught German at Vilnius and Hrodna Pedagogical Institutes, and worked at the Belarusian department of Vilnius Pedagogical University.
Halina Vojcik in the first half of the 1950s, photo from the archive of her son Yaroslav Vojcik
She was also the daughter of Zoska Veras and the wife of Liavon Lutskievich, author of the book "Journeys through Vilnius".
"Where I Am Not" is an excellent guide to Vilnius, just like her husband's "Journeys". One wants to take the book under an arm and go explore the places the author leads you by the hand.
Halina was born on July 1, 1927, into the family of Liudvika Sivitskaya (Zoska Veras) and Anton Vojcik.
The family then lived in Novaya Vilejka (today — Naujoji Vilnia) to the east of the city, in the so-called "Railway Colony", where quite a few Belarusians lived.
In 1940, the Vojciks moved to a farmstead west of today's Voŭčaja Lapa (in Lithuanian, this district is called Vilkpėdė). It was there that Anton Vojcik built a house, which later became the famous "Forest Cottage" of Zoska Veras, a pilgrimage site for the Belarusian intelligentsia.
The most interesting thing in the memoirs is the author's perception of the city and its people.
From 1920 to 1939, Vilnius was under Polish occupation, and Halina Vojcik writes that it was a very provincial and neglected city, unlike the capital Warsaw. Poles erected only a few buildings there. In 1939, Halina went on an excursion to Kaunas, which was the temporary capital of Lithuania from 1920-1939, and she was impressed by the European character and beauty of that city.
As for Vilnius, "now the composition of the population has changed significantly, but then the Jewish population predominated, followed by Poles. And Belarusians, Lithuanians, there were not many of them. Practically — the Belarusian intelligentsia. But the whole village around was Belarusian. And in the markets, only Belarusian was spoken, and those same Jewish market women also spoke Belarusian, because one had to speak with the peasants."
The author writes that people drank a lot. She jokes that in Vilnius in the 1930s, only the Atlases on the Tyszkiewicz Palace didn't drink, "because their hands were busy."
Tyszkiewicz Palace. The editorial office of "Nasha Niva" was located in this building in 1907-1909, and in the 1890s Frantsishak Bahushevich worked there as a lawyer. Photo: Nasha Niva
Vojcik describes how Christmas and Easter were celebrated. She writes that the family was not overly religious, but preparations for Christmas began in mid-October. Buying decorations for the Christmas tree was not a problem, but it was believed that they should be made by hand. The necessary paper was bought at Stanislaw Stankevich's ("bookseller's") bookstore, located at the corner of Ostra Brama and Subačiaus streets.
The girl first studied at a girls' school located at the corner of today's Barbora Radvilaitė and Maironio streets, opposite the entrance to Bernardine Garden. She remembered a theology teacher there, a Bernardine monk, who always wore bronze monastic clothing and sandals both in summer and winter. And he loved to joke. At the end of a lecture, he would start a proverb that needed to be completed.
"For example, the Bernardine would say, 'Who wakes up early...' We would shout in unison, 'God gives to them.' And he would smile. 'No. Not like that. That one wants to sleep all day.'"
Vojcik had no fascination with interwar Poland; for Belarusians, it was an unkind stepmother.
"In the 1930s, the fascization of Poland began. Belarusian organizations were closed one after another, newspapers were under strict censorship, and 'Christian Democratic newspapers' and magazines were supported. Belarusians often faced searches, looking for anti-Polish literature. Opposite our house lived a policeman, Maciejewski. He often warned our parents that a search was coming. And when the police arrived, they found nothing. True, once they took a brochure about pig breeding, because it had been published in Minsk."
"Materially, our lives got worse and worse. Father was unemployed. He took on any job. For some time, he had a consumer shop at the corner of Zavalnaya and Vialikaya Pahulianka (Pylimo and Basanavičiaus), but he quickly went bankrupt because he had no talent for gesheft (business). Mother grew flowers for seeds, which were eagerly bought by two shops, Kryuski's and Vilnishevsky's, both on Zavalnaya."
During the German occupation, Vojcik studied at the Belarusian Gymnasium. These were dark times. The end of World War II brought relief, but also repression. Dozens of Belarusians, cultural figures, and gymnasium teachers were exiled.
Her brother Tonik (Anton Shantyr — Zoska Veras's son from her first partnership) also disappeared. He "reappeared" only in 1958, returning sick and exhausted from Siberia. He was not allowed to live in Vilnius, so he lived somewhere in the suburbs.
The girl entered Vilnius University to study Germanistics, but in her fifth year, she was offered a job at Hrodna University. The thing was that the lecturers of the Belarusian Studies department in Hrodna had been arrested by the Soviets and sentenced to 10 years in camps. There was no one to teach the students, and the administration turned to Vilnius for help.
"They gave me phonetics for the first to third years, theoretical phonetics for the fourth, and lexicon for the third. So, I, a fifth-year student, was teaching third-year students! I was 22, but I looked younger. I wore a short black skirt and a black-and-white checkered blouse. Well. Quite a girl."
The 1950s were a time of rapid development for Vilnius. Halina Vojcik pursued an academic career during this period, completed her Germanistics degree, and traveled to the GDR several times. She married Liavon Lutskievich, who had returned from exile. Belarusian life slowly revived, people returned from the camps.
Yurka and Liavon Lutskievich. Second half of the 1950s.
And in the 1980s, the Lithuanian revival began. And after it, the Belarusian one. Vojcik recounts an interesting fact.
"Meanwhile, perestroika was underway, things became freer, conditions emerged for the revival of Belarusian national life, for the organization of communities. Shamefully, perhaps, but it must be admitted that the initiator of the first Belarusian community was a Lithuanian, the narcologist Dr. Valdas Banaitis. He worked in Novaya Vileyka (Naujoji Vilnia) in the psychiatric hospital where Tsiotka once worked. He became interested in her personality and the Belarusian revival movement of the early 20th century, mastered the Belarusian language, and created a Belarusian book corner in a bookstore. He even brought books himself from Astravets. He began organizing the first meetings with Belarusian figures. Once, he invited literary scholars Adam Maldzis and Uladzimir Marhel. With Banaitis's easy hand, an initiative group was formed to organize the first Belarusian community in Lithuania."
Psychiatric hospital in Naujoji Vilnia, where Aloiza Pashkevich (Tsiotka) worked at the beginning of the 20th century. During World War I, she worked at the city hospital on today's Kaunas street. Photo: Google.maps.
In 1997, when Halina Vojcik's husband Liavon Lutskievich passed away, Vytautas Landsbergis said a few warm words about him, Ivan, and Anton Lutskievich at the funeral.
The author debunks an apocryphal tale about Karatkevich. In Vilnius, on St. Ignatius Street, there is a restaurant called "Bočų". And there is a belief that Karatkevich loved it so much that he rhymed "On the way to Bočų, I will never stray."
But the thing is, Uladzimir Siamionavich often visited Vilnius to work in the archives and regularly stayed with his friend, archivist Hienadź Kisialiou, who lived there. Also, there was an archive where Karatkevich worked. So, "on the way to Bočų" also meant "on the way to the archive."
Currently, in place of "Bočų", sung about by Karatkevich, is the Boheme restaurant. Photo: Google.maps.
And the author also tells a touching story about her mother Zoska Veras and Arsen Lis. The poet, publisher of children's magazines, Zoska Veras, wrote and published nothing from 1939 onwards. The times were dangerous.
But in Minsk, a young student named Arsen Lis, who later became a renowned researcher of West Belarusian literature, was studying. He came across Zoska Veras's publications in the Minsk archives. He found out that she lived in Vilnius and visited her.
Zoska Veras
"Later, Lis recounted that his mother once told him, 'you awakened me from a lethargic sleep.' And indeed, from 1939, Zoska Veras essentially busied herself with her home, garden, and vegetable patch, writing nothing. Now [after Arsen Lis brought her name back], scholars and writers, artists and journalists, students and schoolchildren began to visit her. And to each, she gave something new, enriching them spiritually."
Or here are warm recollections of Klaudzi Duzh-Dusheŭski, the author of the white-red-white flag:
"K. Dusheŭski, a renowned Lithuanian architect and Belarusian activist, was arrested in 1940, released from prison when the Germans occupied Kaunas, then ended up in a German concentration camp, and after the war, back in a Soviet prison — he was freed in 1954. Arrests, prisons. The abuse did not break him. He was not afraid to write letters to the guys in Kolyma."
At the end of the book, Halina Vojcik, summarizing her life, writes:
"Who am I? I never liked it when I was introduced as 'Zoska Veras's daughter,' 'Liavon Lutskievich's wife' — that's not my merit. I always wanted to be myself, to achieve not status — that didn't interest me — but honor and respect for my work, first as a Doctor of Science in Germanistics, and in recent years in the field of Belarusian culture. What I managed to achieve, let others judge."
The book can be purchased, for example, in the Vilnius Belarusian shop "Kropka", priced at nine euros.