On the Genesis of the West Polesie Ethnopolitical Movement: From the Unpublished Publicistic Heritage of F. D. Klimchuk (1950s – 1960s)

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the publicistic poetry of F. D. Klimchuk (1935–2018), the famous Belarusian philologist and a specialist in the field of Slavic dialectology. Poems by F. D. Klimchuk, written in the dialect of his native village of Simonovichi (Drogichin district, Brest region, Belarus), were deposited in the funds of the State Archives of the Brest region. The works manifest the ideas of ethnocultural identity of the West Polesie region, the need to preserve the unique dialects of the region, and in a cautious and veiled form declare the possibility of political self-determination of West Polesie. Thus, the main postulates of the participants of the West Polesie ethnopolitical movement under the leadership of N. N. Shelyagovich (second half of the 1980s – first half of the 1990s) were already formulated by F. D. Klimchuk in the 1950s – 1960s, but at that time there was no opportunity to present them publicly. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, F. D. Klimchuk supported exclusively the cultural component of the West Polesie movement, dissociating himself from N. N. Shelyagovich and his associates, who sought to artificially politicize ethnicity in order to obtain symbolic and power capital. Publicistic materials by F. D. Klimchuk are important for understanding the genesis of the West Polesie ethnopolitical movement in Belarus and may also be of interest to philologists studying Slavic literary microlanguages.

Received: 27.08.2024.
Revised: 15.10.2024.
Accepted: 18.03.2025.

Citation
Kazak O. G., Sereda A. S. On the Genesis of the West Polesie Ethnopolitical Movement: From the Unpublished Publicistic Heritage of F. D. Klimchuk (1950s – 1960s) // Slavic Almanac. 2025. No. 1–2. P. 443–455 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31168/2073-5731.2025.1-2.22