The Historical Romanticism

The Neo-romanticism at the turn of the 21st century, after the Republic of Belarus gained its independence, became in demand and topical at the new wave of patriotic enthusiasm. The art works reflected the idealized romantic perception of the distant past as a counter-balance to the critical and denunciatory vision of more recent decades.

The notion ‘historical romanticism’ is used usually for the phenomenon characteristic for the period of transition from the 19th to the 20th century. However, in the 1980s and the 1990s, Belarusian artists associated their creative activities with recollections of the national culture events, depiction of their birth-places, with the traditional culture, philosophy, history, mythology, Bible themes. The present was depicted in the light of the past, while the past was perceived from the point of view of the present.

The subject of many works by M. Selyashchuk is the wandering, which is one of the most widely used themes in romantic culture.. The People’s Artist V. Sharanhovich in his illustrations to the romantic poem ‘Pan Tadeusz’ by A. Mickiewicz depicted a broad picture of the life of Belarusian szlachta (gentry). The attention to the inner world of a picture’s character is typical for works by V. Toustsik. The main task set by artists was poeticizing reality, and striving for ideals. The pictures are composed in two dimensions. One is real, informative, and limited to a particular time and place, as in the works by U. and M. Basalyhas, R. Sitnitsa, and F. Yanushkevich. The other dimension is surreal, appealing to the emotions, to memory, and to the hardly perceptible changes in one’s state of mind. It is often used by U. Kozhuh, U. Savich, M. Selyashchuk.

The Historical Romanticism of the 1980–1990s was a fully outlined and a clear phenomenon in the national culture. However, it has not developed into a fixed term because it designated not so much concrete stylistic modifications as general characteristics, the ‘spirit of time’. It was developing as an alternative to naturalism, as a break from routine existence towards elevated, sometimes idealized superreality. This formed a cultural image of that particular period of time. However in the 21st century, Historical Romanticism has not petered out entirely. It still triggers creative initiatives and reveals itself in works by many contemporary artists.