Yakub Kolas

Yakub Kolas, whose real name was Kanstantsin Mikhailavich Mitskievich, was one of the most important Belarusian-language writers of the first half of the twentieth century. He lived through the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet period, and his work helps explain how Belarusian became a modern literary language and how rural life moved to the centre of the country's literature.

He was born in 1882 in Akinchytsy, in Minsk Governorate, into a forester's family. He trained at the teachers' seminary in Nesvizh and in 1902 began teaching in a village in the Polesie region. Taking part in an illegal teachers' congress in 1906 cost him his post and three years in prison in Minsk. After his release he worked as a journalist for the newspaper Nasha dolya, where he began signing his pieces with the pen name "Kolas", meaning "ear of grain" in Belarusian.

During the First World War he was called up. He trained as a warrant officer in Moscow, served in Perm and in 1917 was sent to the Romanian front, from which he was discharged on health grounds. In 1921 he returned to Minsk to work at the newly founded Institute of Belarusian Culture, which became the Academy of Sciences in 1928; he became a member there and later its vice-president. In 1926 he was named People's Poet. During the Second World War he was evacuated to Russia.

His writing focuses on the Belarusian peasantry, which he portrayed with sympathy without idealising it. He worked in poetry, prose and drama. His early poetry collections, Songs of Captivity (1908) and Songs of Grief (1910), reflect the mood of their time, while poems such as A New Land and Simon the Musician deal with rural life and social change. Later he wrote The Fisherman's Hut, about the struggle after Belarus was united with the Soviet state, and it earned him Stalin Prizes in 1946 and 1949.

He died in Minsk on 13 August 1956. He is remembered as one of the central figures of twentieth-century Belarusian literature, and a square and a street in the centre of the capital still bear his name.