Zośka Vieras

Biography

Zośka Vieras is a pen name in which, it is believed, her birthday is hidden: 30 September. Ludvika Sivickaja was born in 1892 in Medzhybizh, the daughter of Anton Sivicki, an officer and a native of Hrodna. The family spoke Polish at home; her maternal grandfather, Ludvik Sadouski, was a well-known beekeeper and gardener, and spoke Belarusian with the peasants.

She received her early education at home, in 1904 attended a private school in Kyiv, and from 1905 lived in Lutsk. After her father’s death in 1908 she moved with her mother to the family estate of Aĺchoŭniki. In 1912 she graduated from a girls’ gymnasium in Hrodna, and in 1914 in Warsaw she took a ten-month course in gardening and beekeeping and a military-style nursing course. In Hrodna, in 1909–1913, she was librarian and secretary of the Club of Belarusian Youth. She began to publish in 1907, in the Kyiv magazine “Podsnezhnik” (“Snowdrop”), and appeared in Belarusian in “Nasha Niva” in 1911. From 1915 she lived in Minsk: she was secretary of the local section of the Belarusian Society of Help for Victims of War, then worked in the Belarusian National Committee, the Central Rada of Belarusian Organisations and the Belarusian Socialist Assembly. In 1917 she took part in the First All-Belarusian Congress. She worked with the Belarusian Hatka (“Biełaruskaja chatka”), was a friend of Bahdanovič, and later wrote “Five Months in Minsk”. There she also met Fabijan Šantyr. In her letters and memoirs she called him her husband, but the relationship was never formalised.

At the end of 1918, because her mother was ill, she went back to Aĺchoŭniki. Her son Anton was born in 1919; in 1920 Fabijan Šantyr was arrested and shot. Here she wrote poems dedicated to her little son. In 1922 her grandfather died, and the estate had to be sold.

In 1923 she settled near Vilnius, then part of Poland, in a cottage in the woods on the Paneriai hills. In 1926 she married Anton Vojcik, and in 1927 their daughter Halina was born. In 1924–1929 she worked as administrator of the editorial offices of the newspapers of the Belarusian Peasants’ and Workers’ Union; in 1927–1931 she edited “Zaranka”, in 1934–1935 “Praleska”; from 1928 to 1939 she headed the Belarusian cooperative society “Pčala” (“Bee”), and in 1934–1938 she edited the beekeeping journal “Bielaruskaja borć” (“Belarusian Beehive”). She helped Belarusian political prisoners in the Lukiškės Prison: she smuggled out the poems of Michaś Mašara and published his first collection, “Drawings” (1928).

Botany was not a hobby. Her dictionary of 1924 remained the first Belarusian publication of its kind. She left a great many drawings of plants and medicinal herbs, assembled a herbarium, invited artists to draw in her garden and promoted folk medicine.

Her son Anton collaborated with the German authorities during the war; in 1946 he was arrested and convicted, and released under an amnesty in 1956. In 1948 her husband died. She later called those years a “lethargic sleep”.

In 1961 the philologist Arsieni Lis, who was working on his dissertation in the Vilnius archives, “discovered” her anew. Writers, literary scholars and journalists began to visit her, among them Uladzimier Karatkievič, Ryhor Baradulin and Larysa Hienijuš. From 1982 she was a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR. In 1989 she took part in founding the Society of Belarusian Culture in Lithuania. It seems to me that the most important of her late work is the letters and memoirs collected in the book “I Remember Everything” (2013).

She died on 8 October 1991 in Vilnius, at the age of ninety-nine. She is buried in the Paneriai cemetery, beside her mother, husband and son.