About the book: year / From the preface of the translator Valentin Taras: The play "Tuteishyya" ... cries out against the bookish Russian language, which completely kills its “Belarusianness”, obscures if does not remove one of its main motives: the passionate affirmation of the Belarusian national identity, the originality of the national culture, the Belarusian language “Tuteishy”. After all, the main character of the play, Mikita Znosak, is subjected to ridicule, scourged by Kupala for spiritual betrayal of his native people, of the entire Belarusian people, for the fact that he renounces the “Tuteishi” and poses as a “true Russian”. And when translating the play, it was necessary to find a language for Mikita that would emphasize his renegadeness. Therefore, I endowed it with a language full of Belarusianisms, adapted from Belarusian phrases, the language that, unfortunately, many Belarusians now speak, especially in cities - not in Russian, not in Belarusian, but in “Komarovsky”, which is translated completely justified, it seems to me, since the play takes place in Minsk. But since Mikita was a former official, hanging around in the office of the Russian governor, among the tsarist Russification officials, he still became a little proficient in Russian - therefore, many of his phrases and turns of phrase are quite “truly Russian.” The character opposing Mikita, the Belarusian teacher Yanka Zdolnik, speaks Russian better than him when communicating with Mikita, which, again in relation to translation, is justified by Yanka’s education - a Belarusian intellectual, he cannot help but know Russian. But he speaks Belarusian with people from his native village. Naturally, they also speak Belarusian: I did not translate the speech of purely folk characters, but only allowed myself to replace individual words, which would probably be incomprehensible to the Russian reader, with synonyms that are understandable even without translation. Where such replacement is not possible, explanatory footnotes are provided. The play by Yanka Kupala was written in 1922, the translation by Valentin Taras was published in the Neman magazine» № 7, 1989.