David’s current research explores the development of the Belarusian literary language and particularly its orthography and lexical inventory through the history of the three earliest translations of the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz’s 1834 epic Pan Tadeusz into Belarusian. The project reconsiders the history of modern Belarusian literature as an outgrowth of Polish Romanticism and the Russian imperial ethnographic tradition, and seeks to make a broader argument for understanding the cultural history of Belarus-Lithuania in the 19th and early 20th centuries, beyond national canons, in regional terms. The project has larger implications for the reconstruction of cultural transfer and literary exchange in Russia’s so-called “Western borderlands” and aims to address a serious gap in the Slavic and European literary fields in examining the nested translational dynamics between various understudied minoritarian and majoritarian traditions.
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