Siarhiej Dubavec: Recollections of “A Belarusian from Holden Road” – Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum
Source: https://skaryna.org/siarhiej-dubavec-recollections-of-fr-a-nadson-2026
Archived: 2026-04-23 17:11
Siarhiej Dubavec: Recollections of “A Belarusian from Holden Road” – Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum
Siarhiej Dubavec
prepared this text for his talk at the “Nadson Readings” on 14 April 2026. We republish the text originally
published
in
Nasha Niva
:
“Alexander Nadson first came to Belarus after forty years in emigration. The youth of Minsk unexpectedly found in him something they had not seen in their own parents.Siarhei Dubavets writes about “a Belarusian from Holden Road.”
Alexander Nadson. Photo: budzma.org
There was much about Alexander Nadson that astonished me. More precisely, looking at him, I found myself surprised by many things within myself, discovering aspects I had not noticed before. For instance, that he was the same age as my father — born in 1926.
From the early 1980s, I was already acquainted with Belarusians in Vilnius — with Zoska Veras, and especially with her guide to the “Forest House”, Liavon Lutskevich, with whom we stayed on Architektų Street and with whom I maintained active correspondence. But all of that still existed within the framework of the Soviet Union.
Then came March 1990, when a man from the West was due to arrive in Minsk — Father Alexander Nadson, coming to assist those affected by the Chernobyl disaster. At that time, still unfamiliar with him, I tried to compare him with my own father, a fairly important official within the Soviet system. My father was a colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and headed a department of political and educational work.
It was obvious to me that in Soviet Belarus we simply had no prospects for the future… Formally, both my father and Nadson were veterans of the war, even on what might be considered the same side — that of the victors. Yet it was hard to say what could unite them.
By then, I had already made my own ideological choice — for a Belarusian, and therefore non-Soviet, Belarus. My father, a Soviet Belarusian, had no connection to Belarusian Belarus; rather, he stood against it. He rejected the Belarusian language, the historical truth about Stalinist repressions — this was his choice, formed within the Soviet army.
His mother, a village woman, was wholly Belarusian, and I would never have called her a “Soviet Belarusian”, which already set her apart from her son — a committed Soviet careerist and communist. In that sense, my father seemed to fall out of the continuity of generations, although he believed that it was I who had done so.
When my wife, Tania Sapach, announced that Alexander Nadson had arrived from London and that she would be interviewing him for her radio programme
Albarosika
, I realised that the interview would certainly appear in the next issue of the newspaper
Svaboda
, which I had just begun publishing. The first issue was thematic — “Freedom Day” — released in March 1990, on 25 March, as if timed to coincide with the arrival of our London-based non-Soviet Belarusian.
“Freedom Day” was printed in Latvia and sold in Minsk from a truck on Station Square. I remember the print run — 45,000 copies. Uladzimir Arlou contributed an essay titled “Independence is…”, and Siarhei Khareuski created the poster “Non-Iron Belarus”, which in itself explained what independence meant — without militarism, without tanks, without monuments to Lenin… The issue also included the three Constituent Charters and introductions to the leading figures of the Belarusian Democratic Republic.
Already in the following issue of
Svaboda
, the significance of Nadson’s arrival was conveyed in the text itself:
“At night on 10 March, the Hook of Holland–Moscow train crossed the Bug River. A man stood by the carriage window, gazing intently into the darkness outside. What did he feel at that moment? It is hard to say. Only his lips quietly whispered the words of Bahdanovich’s ‘Pahonia’… That passenger was the author of these lines, travelling to his homeland for the first time in more than forty years…
Returning to one’s homeland after such a long time was the fulfilment of a cherished dream, and I travelled there with deep emotion. However, the main purpose of my journey was not personal. It can be described in a single word: Chernobyl.”
Nadson writes that although it seemed that passions around the disaster had subsided and the tragedy no longer appeared so severe, this was not the case. He was particularly struck by children suffering from leukaemia — their needs were simply not being spoken about. Yet the scale of those needs was truly immense.
Nadson spoke about serving a liturgy at Kurapaty, about representing the Skaryna Library in London — open to all who are interested in Belarusian matters — and about attacks from propagandists who reproached émigrés for their wartime past.
He wrote:
“It is not difficult to find information about me, but it would be worth telling the whole story. I belong to a generation that grew up during a great upheaval of war, amid events whose meaning we often could not fully understand. I believe the time has come to write the history of this generation, as well as of those people who prevented us from perishing spiritually, striving to cultivate and preserve in us a sense of human and national dignity.
For me, such people were the teachers of the Belarusian Teachers’ Seminary in Nesvizh, where I studied from the autumn of 1942 until the end of May 1944, and which gave me not only solid knowledge but made me a convinced Belarusian for life. One may hope that the Union of Belarusian Youth, to which I belonged along with many of my peers, will also one day find its objective historian. Attempts to forcibly turn us into German soldiers met with little success. Already on the third day after arriving in France, most of us found ourselves in a French forest.”
Alexander Nadson, 1950s. Photo from his archive
Why have I included these biographical lines? Because no one made me into a convinced Belarusian for life. I was being shaped into a Soviet person, yet within my own lifetime the Soviet person turned into nothing — like the Soviet passport my father had taught me to value.
The most important thing is that the authorities — especially the current ones — considered it subversive to nurture Belarusian identity in a person.
Yet at that time, during the Chernobyl years, there was a feeling in the air that something had to happen to us and to our history after the Soviet period. Belarus had to become itself — with its thousand-year history, language, and culture… In other words, Nadson and I had much to talk about.
Chernobyl was not something we, Belarusians, perceived as our own problem at the time — “not ours”. What was ours was only just beginning. A privately owned flat, a car… We were surprised by these things, because we had never had anything of our own. Not even ourselves. We belonged to the system, not to ourselves. How could this be understood? Oleh Ablazhei wrote: “I is a word cleansed of we”, and Siarhei Astravtsou opened the first issue of
Nasha Niva
with the story “Washed Apples” (playing on the phrase “We are those…”). In one way or another, this was either a statement or a protest — against understanding oneself as part of a system that was, in fact, its own kind of Chernobyl.
Some were more cautious, others burned within it, fused with it for life. Yet we were all still together, looking in confusion at sick, bald children. In villages, no one complained of such things — such illnesses had simply not existed there before. People died simply and without understanding. This sense of intangibility was reinforced by the invisible nature of radiation — something that could neither be seen, nor touched, nor comprehended.
It seems it was 1998, when a major anniversary of the Belarusian Democratic Republic was being marked in London. Alexander Nadson invited me, and together with Vincuk Viačorka we found ourselves among “our own people”. It was an extraordinarily representative gathering — entirely non-Soviet Belarusians and non-Belarusians — where one could see the whole of “our world”. We struck up a friendship with Liavon Shymanets — Simanek in the French manner — while I was called Dubavek, and we even tried to persuade the artist Navumovich to join this playful game under the name Navumavek.
Nadson, incidentally, enjoyed such things — he clearly had a friendship with humour. I was struck by the student-like atmosphere in London: freedom, rows of cups on the wall, and невероятно inventive meat-free culinary experiments…
My next visit was private. My wife and I came for Trinity in 2005. I asked Father to baptise me and to marry us. The translator Vera Rich took care of us, gifting us a magnificent Trinity cross. Our godparents were Iryna Dubianetskaya and Ihar Labacevich. As a result, later finalised in Vilnius, a collection of my wife’s poetry was published in English.
I told Father about our trips into the very heart of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where we had managed to obtain permission to go. I described a village where little remained… On our second visit, everything looked like chaos: collapsed roofs, leaning walls, and in one kitchen a turtle clattered among the utensils… On our next visit, however, the village was gone — replaced by a smooth, young, чистый forest, as if prepared for painting studies. In other words, pure harmony had arisen from chaos and disorder. And the conclusion: harmony is not born of order.
I believe he was interested in my stories. Sometimes he would uncork a bottle of Italian grappa, and our conversations would continue well past midnight.
It seems to me that we prayed to the same gods, the first among them being Larisa Heniush. I saw that Nadson lived according to her life’s credo:
“I will not renounce my single aim,
Nor will my heart grow faint:
If I am to live — I live for Belarus,
Without it, I cannot live at all.”
No one expressed this credo more precisely. Nadson carefully preserved Heniush’s prison shirt from the Gulag.
I see a deep connection between people like Heniush and Nadson. “When it is hard, but not hopeless,” she once wrote to me in her book. What did she mean? Nadson would surely have explained it with humour. He always used humour.
One day we will remember the Belarusian emigration of the war years — the one that continued the traditions of
Nasha Niva
, the BNR, and the Belarusisation of the 1920s. They carried it through to our days. And into tomorrow.”
Tags from the story
Centenery of Fr. Aleksander Nadson
,
Fr. Aleksander Nadson
,
Memoirs
,
Siarhiej Dubaviec
0 replies on “Siarhiej Dubavec: Recollections of “A Belarusian from Holden Road””
Language
Language
Siarhiej Dubavec
prepared this text for his talk at the “Nadson Readings” on 14 April 2026. We republish the text originally
published
in
Nasha Niva
:
“Alexander Nadson first came to Belarus after forty years in emigration. The youth of Minsk unexpectedly found in him something they had not seen in their own parents.Siarhei Dubavets writes about “a Belarusian from Holden Road.”
Alexander Nadson. Photo: budzma.org
There was much about Alexander Nadson that astonished me. More precisely, looking at him, I found myself surprised by many things within myself, discovering aspects I had not noticed before. For instance, that he was the same age as my father — born in 1926.
From the early 1980s, I was already acquainted with Belarusians in Vilnius — with Zoska Veras, and especially with her guide to the “Forest House”, Liavon Lutskevich, with whom we stayed on Architektų Street and with whom I maintained active correspondence. But all of that still existed within the framework of the Soviet Union.
Then came March 1990, when a man from the West was due to arrive in Minsk — Father Alexander Nadson, coming to assist those affected by the Chernobyl disaster. At that time, still unfamiliar with him, I tried to compare him with my own father, a fairly important official within the Soviet system. My father was a colonel in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and headed a department of political and educational work.
It was obvious to me that in Soviet Belarus we simply had no prospects for the future… Formally, both my father and Nadson were veterans of the war, even on what might be considered the same side — that of the victors. Yet it was hard to say what could unite them.
By then, I had already made my own ideological choice — for a Belarusian, and therefore non-Soviet, Belarus. My father, a Soviet Belarusian, had no connection to Belarusian Belarus; rather, he stood against it. He rejected the Belarusian language, the historical truth about Stalinist repressions — this was his choice, formed within the Soviet army.
His mother, a village woman, was wholly Belarusian, and I would never have called her a “Soviet Belarusian”, which already set her apart from her son — a committed Soviet careerist and communist. In that sense, my father seemed to fall out of the continuity of generations, although he believed that it was I who had done so.
When my wife, Tania Sapach, announced that Alexander Nadson had arrived from London and that she would be interviewing him for her radio programme
Albarosika
, I realised that the interview would certainly appear in the next issue of the newspaper
Svaboda
, which I had just begun publishing. The first issue was thematic — “Freedom Day” — released in March 1990, on 25 March, as if timed to coincide with the arrival of our London-based non-Soviet Belarusian.
“Freedom Day” was printed in Latvia and sold in Minsk from a truck on Station Square. I remember the print run — 45,000 copies. Uladzimir Arlou contributed an essay titled “Independence is…”, and Siarhei Khareuski created the poster “Non-Iron Belarus”, which in itself explained what independence meant — without militarism, without tanks, without monuments to Lenin… The issue also included the three Constituent Charters and introductions to the leading figures of the Belarusian Democratic Republic.
Already in the following issue of
Svaboda
, the significance of Nadson’s arrival was conveyed in the text itself:
“At night on 10 March, the Hook of Holland–Moscow train crossed the Bug River. A man stood by the carriage window, gazing intently into the darkness outside. What did he feel at that moment? It is hard to say. Only his lips quietly whispered the words of Bahdanovich’s ‘Pahonia’… That passenger was the author of these lines, travelling to his homeland for the first time in more than forty years…
Returning to one’s homeland after such a long time was the fulfilment of a cherished dream, and I travelled there with deep emotion. However, the main purpose of my journey was not personal. It can be described in a single word: Chernobyl.”
Nadson writes that although it seemed that passions around the disaster had subsided and the tragedy no longer appeared so severe, this was not the case. He was particularly struck by children suffering from leukaemia — their needs were simply not being spoken about. Yet the scale of those needs was truly immense.
Nadson spoke about serving a liturgy at Kurapaty, about representing the Skaryna Library in London — open to all who are interested in Belarusian matters — and about attacks from propagandists who reproached émigrés for their wartime past.
He wrote:
“It is not difficult to find information about me, but it would be worth telling the whole story. I belong to a generation that grew up during a great upheaval of war, amid events whose meaning we often could not fully understand. I believe the time has come to write the history of this generation, as well as of those people who prevented us from perishing spiritually, striving to cultivate and preserve in us a sense of human and national dignity.
For me, such people were the teachers of the Belarusian Teachers’ Seminary in Nesvizh, where I studied from the autumn of 1942 until the end of May 1944, and which gave me not only solid knowledge but made me a convinced Belarusian for life. One may hope that the Union of Belarusian Youth, to which I belonged along with many of my peers, will also one day find its objective historian. Attempts to forcibly turn us into German soldiers met with little success. Already on the third day after arriving in France, most of us found ourselves in a French forest.”
Alexander Nadson, 1950s. Photo from his archive
Why have I included these biographical lines? Because no one made me into a convinced Belarusian for life. I was being shaped into a Soviet person, yet within my own lifetime the Soviet person turned into nothing — like the Soviet passport my father had taught me to value.
The most important thing is that the authorities — especially the current ones — considered it subversive to nurture Belarusian identity in a person.
Yet at that time, during the Chernobyl years, there was a feeling in the air that something had to happen to us and to our history after the Soviet period. Belarus had to become itself — with its thousand-year history, language, and culture… In other words, Nadson and I had much to talk about.
Chernobyl was not something we, Belarusians, perceived as our own problem at the time — “not ours”. What was ours was only just beginning. A privately owned flat, a car… We were surprised by these things, because we had never had anything of our own. Not even ourselves. We belonged to the system, not to ourselves. How could this be understood? Oleh Ablazhei wrote: “I is a word cleansed of we”, and Siarhei Astravtsou opened the first issue of
Nasha Niva
with the story “Washed Apples” (playing on the phrase “We are those…”). In one way or another, this was either a statement or a protest — against understanding oneself as part of a system that was, in fact, its own kind of Chernobyl.
Some were more cautious, others burned within it, fused with it for life. Yet we were all still together, looking in confusion at sick, bald children. In villages, no one complained of such things — such illnesses had simply not existed there before. People died simply and without understanding. This sense of intangibility was reinforced by the invisible nature of radiation — something that could neither be seen, nor touched, nor comprehended.
It seems it was 1998, when a major anniversary of the Belarusian Democratic Republic was being marked in London. Alexander Nadson invited me, and together with Vincuk Viačorka we found ourselves among “our own people”. It was an extraordinarily representative gathering — entirely non-Soviet Belarusians and non-Belarusians — where one could see the whole of “our world”. We struck up a friendship with Liavon Shymanets — Simanek in the French manner — while I was called Dubavek, and we even tried to persuade the artist Navumovich to join this playful game under the name Navumavek.
Nadson, incidentally, enjoyed such things — he clearly had a friendship with humour. I was struck by the student-like atmosphere in London: freedom, rows of cups on the wall, and невероятно inventive meat-free culinary experiments…
My next visit was private. My wife and I came for Trinity in 2005. I asked Father to baptise me and to marry us. The translator Vera Rich took care of us, gifting us a magnificent Trinity cross. Our godparents were Iryna Dubianetskaya and Ihar Labacevich. As a result, later finalised in Vilnius, a collection of my wife’s poetry was published in English.
I told Father about our trips into the very heart of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where we had managed to obtain permission to go. I described a village where little remained… On our second visit, everything looked like chaos: collapsed roofs, leaning walls, and in one kitchen a turtle clattered among the utensils… On our next visit, however, the village was gone — replaced by a smooth, young, чистый forest, as if prepared for painting studies. In other words, pure harmony had arisen from chaos and disorder. And the conclusion: harmony is not born of order.
I believe he was interested in my stories. Sometimes he would uncork a bottle of Italian grappa, and our conversations would continue well past midnight.
It seems to me that we prayed to the same gods, the first among them being Larisa Heniush. I saw that Nadson lived according to her life’s credo:
“I will not renounce my single aim,
Nor will my heart grow faint:
If I am to live — I live for Belarus,
Without it, I cannot live at all.”
No one expressed this credo more precisely. Nadson carefully preserved Heniush’s prison shirt from the Gulag.
I see a deep connection between people like Heniush and Nadson. “When it is hard, but not hopeless,” she once wrote to me in her book. What did she mean? Nadson would surely have explained it with humour. He always used humour.
One day we will remember the Belarusian emigration of the war years — the one that continued the traditions of
Nasha Niva
, the BNR, and the Belarusisation of the 1920s. They carried it through to our days. And into tomorrow.”
Tags from the story
Centenery of Fr. Aleksander Nadson
,
Fr. Aleksander Nadson
,
Memoirs
,
Siarhiej Dubaviec
0 replies on “Siarhiej Dubavec: Recollections of “A Belarusian from Holden Road””
Language
Language