Performative dilettantism: The pilot project of Belarusian literature (1840-50s)

In the middle of the nineteenth century in the North-Western provinces of the Russian Empire, a set of Polish and Polish-Belarusian texts and meta-texts suggested the outlines of a newdiscursive entity – "Belarus" – which offered new symbolic locations for local poetry. The proposed research initiative explores this translingual poetic pilot project "Belarus" and its centrepiece, the work of Wincenty Dunin-Marcinkiewicz (1808-1884). I will explore this corpus as a particular phenomenon of literary sociology which can be defined as performative dilettantism. The projected inquiry will not only develop an innovative approach to the emergence of the region’s literature, underrepresented in German scholarship, but will also contribute to the understanding of literary dilettantism, a category whose implications for literary theory, history, and aesthetics in and have not yet attracted sufficient attention in and beyond Slavic studies.