Ryhor Baradulin, Belarus’s National Poet, is remarkable for the fecundity of his wit and imagination, his complex vocabulary, rich in rare words and neologisms, and his memorably vivid imagery. An extremely broad poet thematically and formally, his cycle of epistolary poems to his exiled friend Vasil Byka? in 2000 formed an emotional and philosophical high watermark in his expressive lyricism. In later years he turned mainly, but not exclusively, to religious verse.
Baradulin was born on 24 February 1935 into a worker’s family on the Vieraso?ka farm in Vuša?a district of the Belarusian region of Viciebsk. In 1959 he graduated from the Philological Faculty of the Belarusian State University. He worked on the …
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