Образы литовца и поляка в имагомифологии белорусов

The imagotypes of Lithuanians and Poles began to form in Belarusian culture relatively recently - at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, i.e. not earlier than the period of formation of the modern Belarusian nation. The features of ethnic stereotypes recorded in the forms of traditional rural folklore do not always correlate with the qualities assigned to them in modem culture. Presumably, the actual Belarusian imagotypes of the Lithuanian and the Pole are created by the author’s literature of the first half of the twentieth century. The main factors that influenced their formation as components of the national imagomythology of Belarusians are: The heritage of the multilingual literature of Belarus of the 19th century; the narratives of the Belarusian national revival; imperial Russian narratives, especially in terms of their anti-Catholic, anti-Polish and anti-Western components; the closely related narratives of the Soviet propaganda of the 20s-30s with their pronounced anti-Polish colouring and cultivation of the rhetoric of hatred; the late Soviet discourse, within the framework of which a wary attitude towards the Baltic peoples, although not openly articulated, was implied. The categories “Polish national character” and “Lithuanian national character” are components of the imaginary discourse of the Belarusian ethnic imagomythoi- ogy, within the framework of which they primarily serve in one way or another for self-description of Belarusians as a nation in comparison with other nations. The artistic images they produce are fictions, the fruit of writers’ fantasy, initially lying outside the paradigm of correctness/incorrectness. Like other national literatures, Belarusian literature not only fixes stereotypes in the artistic form and retranslates them, but also creates and modifies them.