By Yuri Chernyakevich
In all, 25 volumes of works by the writer are to be published, prepared by the Department of Belarusian Literature and Culture of the Belarusian State University, under the guidance of candidate of philological sciences Anatoly Vorobey. The whole collection should have been released by 2020, to mark the 90th anniversary of the birth of the author of King Stakh’s Wild Hunt and other well-known works.
The presentation gathered readers and researchers of Vladimir Korotkevich, as well as his family members. Yelena Sinkevich, the niece of the writer, notes that the edition is extremely good. “We could say that I’ve contributed a little, having been asked details about Vladimir Semenovich’s life. I’ve read books from Korotkevich’s library, which bear his notes.”
The new editions contain many interesting facts unknown even to meticulous readers and researchers. Mr. Vorobey tells us that the volumes of poetry being released contain some verse unpublished in Korotkevich’s lifetime — such as Aspens Rustling Over the River..., For An Enthusiast, A Word to Mickiewicz, Land of Our Grandfathers, and Ode to Our Motherland. These also include Christmas greetings from the writer to outstanding figures of Belarusian science and culture, and epigrams about them.
The new edition contains verse, fairy tales, stories, legends and narratives, while the sixth volume will include the novel Impossible to Forget. The seventh and the eighth will feature Ears Under Your Sickle, while the ninth will contain Christ Landed in Grodno. The tenth will be The Black Castle of Olshany. A volume of dramatic works is also planned, alongside two books of journalistic works, essays and criticism, two volumes of epistolary heritage, a book of translations, a volume of drawings by the writer, and three books of scenarios and librettos. The set will feature diaries, notebooks and dedications, as well as journalistic works, essays and criticism. There will even be a compact disc of the writer speaking.
“We’re ready to publish five volumes a year,” says Victor Shnip, the Editor-in-Chief of Khudozhestvennaya Literatura. “However, time will tell. This set of works, in my opinion, will considerably differ from those published earlier. Here, we see another Korotkevich: one we are discovering anew. I think both readers and researchers will be heading for many interesting discoveries in these books.”
