Heavenly pilgrim

To the 135th anniversary of the birth of Yazep Drazdovich

Yazep Drazdovich — a traveller in his native land, artist, teacher, discoverer-astronomer, archaeologist, folklorist. Wandering and pilgrimage in our tradition were never condemned, and the wandering artist, who painted bright ‘dyvans’ to decorate huts, and in his free time looked at the stars, was, of course, revered as a person with oddities, but harmless. Yazep Nartsizavich Drazdovich was born in 1888 on the Punki farm in the Vitebsk Region, into a poor noble family, which, as usual, had many children. He lost his father early, and Yazep’s mother raised her six sons alone as best she could. What did he get from his mother? A naive saying from an exhausted woman who dreams of a good future for her children: ‘Study and experience the orbits of heaven...’ This is exactly what Yazep Drazdovich later called the first and most famous book on astronomy — Orbits of Heaven.

Oleg Karpovich

Humanist

He received little education — three classes of primary school in the city of Disna, Drazdovich’s studies continued in Vilna in 1906, he studied what attracted him most — drawing. The Vilna Drawing School, where the famous Itinerant artist Ivan Trutnev taught, became his home for several years. In 1908, to his luck, he made acquaintance with publishers who published Belarusian books in Vilna. This is how Drazdovich first declared himself as an artist, designing the book of poems by Konstantia Builo Kurgannaya Kvetka and many other publications, made drawings for the Belarusian primer... Communicating with writers, he himself began to compose a little — all this would later result in the creation of the stories Garadolskaya Pushcha, Relics of the Past...
In 1910, Drazdovich was drafted into the army, he, being kind and compassionate by nature, took paramedic courses and served in an outpatient clinic. The World War I finds him in a reserve battalion, where every day the wounded are delivered from the front, on some days half a thousand people at once. Bloody bandages and amputated limbs, typhus and Spanish flu, the endless measure of human suffering caused by the war, forever turned him away from any militarism. All his life he then dreamed of an era of mercy, “And the time will come when most of the inhabitants of our planet will refuse to participate in wars. 
And all the technology and scientific achievements will be spent not on shedding blood, but on the opposite. To support life...”

Box with a self-portrait image

Enthusiast

After the World War I, he ended up in Minsk — he taught drawing, worked as a book illustrator and decorator in the theatre, and made sketches of the city, which preserved for us the appearance of the capital of that time. In Minsk, his passion for archaeology develops: Drazdovich studies the bed of the Nemiga River, conducts excavations in Zaslavl and Svir. Upon returning to Western Belarus, the artist finds himself in territory actually occupied by Poland. On the other side of the demarcation line, where the Belarusian was mercilessly eradicated for about 20 years, his ideas and aspirations are not only unnecessary — they are recognised as harmful. He is trying to open a school for Belarusian children in the village of Stolitsa — the Polish authorities close it three months later. He teaches drawing at the gymnasiums of Glubokoye, Novogrudok, Radoshkovichi — and everywhere he finds a trail of unreliable rebel.
At the same time, Yazep immerses himself in the history of his native land, collects folklore for the Vilna Belarusian Museum, describes the life of peasants, makes sketches with his precise artist’s pen, and participates in archaeological excavations of Slavic settlements. It is these years, despite all the difficulties, that become fruitful for literary work and for his development as an artist. From his expeditions he brings dozens of unique graphic albums, makes archaeological discoveries, plunges headlong into the life of the Belarusian peasantry — and is horrified by the poverty and misery in which people live under the lords.
Drazdovich publishes prose and paints pictures, and for the first time gathers together his ideas about astronomy — and begins to dream about space travel and the fact that man is not alone in the Universe. This dream is reflected in his paintings — this is how the paintings Life on Mars, Life on Saturn and Life on the Moon appear...

Welcoming Spring Coming on Saturn. 1932

Prophet

Yazep Drazdovich is called everyone today — both the Belarusian Tsiolkovsky and our Leonardo da Vinci. But during his lifetime he remained an unrecognised prophet: his brilliant insights as a talented amateur, decades ahead of official science, seemed to his contemporaries to be either naivety or madness. He himself said, “Most of my visions are not a creation of fantasy, not self-deception, they are a real gift of clairvoyance.”
Having completed short-term teaching courses after the annexation of Western Belarus to the BSSR, he works in schools in Glubokoye and Luzhki, teaching everything from drawing to astronomy and from history to botany. And in his free hours, plans for an expedition to the Moon, a diagram of a multi-stage rocket and various aircraft appear on the pages of his diaries. Many of Yazep Drazdovich’s insights are now recognised discoveries of other scientists: such is the fate of all amateur geniuses who draw horizons for science that are too distant, boundless in the present.

Prophet. 1931

Traveller  

The Great Patriotic War horrifies the middle-aged artist. These years he lives on a distant farm, hiding in the friendly house of Yanka Pochupka from the Nazis, whom he perceives as evil incarnate. Back in the 1930s, when Hitler broke through to power in Germany, Drazdovich painted two paintings The Spirit of Evil and The Spirit of Darkness, foreseeing the troubles that would befall the world.
In occupied Belarus, he painted pictures and composed his last fundamental work on astronomy, The Theory of Motion in Cosmological Meaning, for the first time setting forth a concept close to the later theory of black holes. True, after the war, the Soviet Union does not need fabrications about the celestial spheres, and even so fantastic and, in the eyes of that time, insane, but the working hands of builders and the strong backs of grain growers. He is refused publication in both Minsk and Moscow, and he takes this refusal hard. Drazdovich is also not accepted into the union of artists — his art is too strange and incomprehensible, too unusual, unusual.
In a changed world, it is increasingly difficult for him to fit into society: the old way of life is destroyed, swept away by a storm, smashed to pieces by bombs, and the new one, being built on ruins and ashes, is unfamiliar and alien to him.
Drazdovich’s friend, poet Maksim Tank, would later write about him in his memoirs, “This is an original and talented person. Unfortunately, he could not find his place in our living conditions... His original paintings, written in ink, watercolour and oil, not only surprise with their vision of the world, but also make us think about topics that have not yet been solved that surround a person.”
In 1954, peasants find the wandering artist unconscious on the road and send him to the hospital, where he dies. Yazep Drazdovich is buried in the village cemetery in the village of Leplyany. The heavenly pilgrim and homeless person returned to his home... 

By Irina Ovsepyan
Photos by drazdovich.by