Yanka Kupala

Yanka Kupala (real name Ivan Dominikovich Lutsevich) was a Belarusian poet, dramatist, and publicist. A classic of Belarusian literature. Народный поэт of the BSSR (1925). Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR (1928) and the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1929). Laureate of the Stalin Prize, first degree (1941).

Childhood and youth

He was born on 25 June (7 July) 1882 in the village of Vyazynka (now in Molodechno District, Minsk Region, Belarus) into the family of Dominik Onufrievich Lutsevich and Benigna Ivanovna Lutsevich (née Volosevich).

The parents were impoverished Belarusian gentry who rented land on a landed estate. The Lutsevich family is known since the beginning of the seventeenth century. The poet’s grandfather rented land from the Radziwiłłs, but was expelled by them from his native places. This fact formed the basis of Kupala’s drama The Dispersed Nest. In childhood, the future poet had to help his father a great deal; although of noble origin, he was in fact among the landless peasants and was forced to cultivate rented plots, paying large sums in rent for the use of the land. After his father’s death in 1902, he worked as a private tutor, a clerk on a landowner’s estate, a shop assistant, and at other jobs. In a conscript questionnaire for Lutsevich Ivan Dominikovich, found in the National Historical Archives of Belarus, his religion is listed as Roman Catholic and his nationality as Russian.

Later Ivan took a job as an unskilled laborer at the local distillery, where he continued to toil. Although hard work took much of the young man’s time, he managed to find free hours for self-education; thus, before long the future Yanka Kupala had become acquainted with practically all the books from his father’s and the landowner’s libraries. In 1898 he graduated from a public school in the settlement of Belaruch.

In 1908—1909 he lived in Vilna, where