The virtual journey with Yanka Maur

Is it possible to make a journey to a country without visiting it? Yes, it’s quite possible. Readers can go to such a travel with the books of well-known Belarusian writer Yanka Maur and illustrations of Belarusian and Russian artists.

His books, created almost one hundred years ago, still impress the reader with improbable adventures and vivid descriptions. The works of Yanka Maur written in the early 20th century allowed the reader to visit such exotic corners of the Earth as New Guinea (the story In the country of the Paradise Bird / “У краіне райскай птушкі”, 1926), Tierra del Fuego (the story The son of water / “Сын вады”, 1927), Java (the novel Amok / “Амок”, 1928), and also to attend the most beautiful places of the Belarusian Polesse (the story Palesse Robinsons / “Палескія рабінзоны”, 1929).

This author wrote the first in Belarusian literature books in the genre of adventure and fantasy. Yanka Maur didn’t hesitate to depict flora and fauna, customs and life of local residents of those faraway countries. The reader can even believe that the author not only visited those lands, but also had lived there for a long time.

And really, the fact that Yanka Maur had never been far abroad is quite surprising. Indeed, he made a journey from Warsaw in the West up to Baikal in the east, from Murmansk in the north up to Caucasus in the south, but he had never visited the countries described in his books. However, his mastery of the esperanto - the universal artificial language created on the basis of the Latin , - allowed him to communicate with researchers from the world over and learn in details the life of indigenous people of Indonesia, Borneo, Sumatra, New Zealand or Australia.

Whence did this love of travel and exotic countries begin? Most likely from the writer’s childhood when his mother had remained alone with the small son on her hands, without home or land, and had to search for work in different villages moving from one place to another. Probably, that moving had wakened in the boy the love of changing places and traveling, in which there is always the expectation for something new and the presentiment of something improbable.

That which the adult considered as severities the children’s soul perceived as an adventure. Yanka Maur says in his autobiographical book Away from the Darkness / Путь из тьмы:
“…Somewhere in the suburb we have found the bewitched country. Adult people would tell that it was but a small rushy lake, but for us it was the big and mysterious world. We knew that somewhere near there was the sea, but we hardly saw it. It was on the other side of the city where there lived another people in beautiful houses, and that place was not for us. Anyway we didn’t need the sea at all, because the lake was much better. Its water is warm, dense and green. You can stand in it, or you can lie down, it’s always warm and soft. And rush and sweet flag rise everywhere, and they grow not chaotically but in lines as if in the city streets. So you creep in the middle of such a street, and high walls tower around so that only the sky is visible. And the trace drags behind you on the green water, and this is a good thing too: it means that you are the first to make the way here”.

Later, when Yanka Maur was the pupil of a vocational school, he had a dream: to get a boat and cross all the rivers and the seas, all continents…

The aspiration to discover the world and an extraordinary force of imagination allowed the author to find the answer to the question how to write and about what. There is the way, as he said, he got an idea to create the first adventure book: “When I have written my first amateur story The man is coming, Yakimovich has liked it very much and have published it in Belaruski pijaner in 1924. Then Tishka Gartny has invited me to the publishing house and said that the Belarusians do not have the Main Read of their own and that I need to write the adventure book. But how to write it? “Just look attentively at the map”, – Gartny tells me. Then I have come home. Here so a task: look at the map of the world and get something adventure. So I started with the islands where Miklukho-Maklay formerly was. I have started to pore over it, to work, and that way the story In the country of the Paradise Bird appeared.

Henceforth many short stories, the story The Son of Water and the novel Amok were written. Sadly, Yanka Maur was and still remains the only representative of Belarusian adventure literature of such a scale. Answering the natural question “Why?”, Yanka Maur said: “The secret is very simple. To reap a crop, you need years of preparation. My records are the result of a laborious preliminary work”.

And to present day we read with pleasure the fascinating works of one of the brightest and most original Belarusian writers – Yanka Maur.