History and ethnography as magical instruments in Zmitrok Biadulia’s work

This article analyses how the Belarusian writer of Jewish origin, Zmitrok Byadulya, used history in two works of different genres: the ethnographic study Jews in Belarus (1918) and the novel The Nightingale (1928). It shows that Byadulya, by referring explicitly or more cryptically to authentic examples of Belarusian history and ethnography, not only demonstrated, in a rather subversive way in the Soviet context, the historicity and moral superiority of the Belarusian and Jewish cultures, but also attributed to Belarus as a region and a nation the magical power to unite its oppressed ethnic groups and resist the oppressive influence of foreign forces.