Society & Culture / Literary Studies & Writing / Poetry & Drama Studies

How One Poet Weaponized Folklore to Save a Forbidden Nation

Janka Kupała: Der Sänger des weißruthenischen Volkstums

Michael Moskalik

Can folklore and songs defeat an empire? In the 19th century, the Tsarist regime outlawed the very name of Belarus, stripping millions of their cultural identity. Then came an uneducated farmhand who decided that language alone could awaken an enslaved people. This presentation explores the profound findings of Michael Moskalik in his groundbreaking 1959 work, Janka Kupała: Der Sänger des weißruthenischen Volkstums (Janka Kupała: The Bard of Belarusian Folk Identity). Moskalik reveals how Ivan Lutsevich, writing under the pen name Janka Kupała, transformed rural customs, ancient solstice rituals, and peasant suffering into an explosive weapon of national resistance. Slide 1: The Crime of Existing. Tsarist decrees silenced a culture for generations. Speaking the native tongue was branded rebellion. Slide 2: University of the Fields. Kupała had no elite education. He read by firelight after brutal days in distilleries and plowing muddy soil. Slide 3: Folklore as Defiance. Wooden plows, woven flax, and solstice bonfires were not mere traditions. They were concrete proof that a forgotten people possessed a living soul. Slide 4: The Poem That Shook Empires. When his masterwork Who Goes There? echoed across Europe, it delivered a devastating demand from millions of silent peasants: to be treated as human beings. Slide 5: The Silent Price. The Soviet terror of the 1930s crushed his contemporaries. Imprisoned and interrogated, Kupała attempted suicide behind bars with a metal spoon rather than betray his people. Discover how sheer cultural memory can outlive empires, and why a single voice grounded in folklore became impossible to erase.