The directory «Plots»

Biadula (Бядуля) Zmitrok
(1886—1941)

Zmitrok Biadula (real name Samuil Plaunik), was born in 1886 in the small town of Pasadziec (Vilna Province, now Mensk Province), of Jewish parents. His father worked as a forester and tenant farmer but was literate and taught his son to read before sending him to study in Talmudic schools, from which he was later expelled for writing poetry.
He was a poet and prose writer, cultural worker, and political activist of the movement for the independence of Belarus.

During his years in Jewish heder and yeshiva schools (he never completed the course), he began writing poems in Hebrew at the age of 13 that were verse prayers based on models of the 16th and 17th centuries. Later he was introduced by his cousin, Mera Gordon, to the possibilities of Belarusan as a literary language.

He began writing in Belarusan in 1910, mostly for Nasha Niva, where he worked first as a secretary, and later joined its editorial staff in 1912. He was one of the founders of the Uzvyshsha (Excelsior) literary movement of the twenties.

His poems are to be found in two collections: Under Our Native Sky (1922) and Poems (1927). In his later years, he turned almost entirely to prose; in this field he published a number of novels and stories and also an autobiography.

In his fiction, Biadula depicted the everyday life of small town people and their struggle for social justice, extolled revolutionary activity, appealed to Jews to help in the Belarusan Rebirth Movement, authored a brochure Zhydy na Bielarusi (Jews in Belarus; 1919), and wrote about the relationship between life and art.

He died in 1941, in the general evacuation eastwards from Belarus, during the Nazi invasion.

USSR, 1986, Zmitrok Byadulya