Spiritus flat ubi vult. Poems 1945-1947

Larisa Geniush’s poetry collection Spiritus flat ubi vult (“The Spirit blows where it wishes”) restores the poet’s voice, recovered after decades from manuscript poems she collected and bound in the first post-war years.

Today, we are recreating this manuscript in facsimile, reading and interpreting it in the 21st century—a time very similar to the one when Larisa Geniush wrote her lines and bound the pages into a slender book.

Written in emigration, the poems of 1945–1947 are a painful and sublime hymn to her homeland and loved ones, a poetic chronicle of national catastrophe and personal loss, and a vivid testament to the poet’s free and indomitable spirit. It is also the beginning of the Belarusian-language post-war samizdat and tamizdat.