“Нам балюча, а значыць – мы ёсць”: пратэстная лірыка Насты Кудасавай (2020–2021 гг.)

The purpose of this article is to analyze the role of poetry and poets within the ongoing Belarusian 2020 revolutionary protests through the prominent example of Nasta Kudasava’s protest poems written between August 2020 and April 2021. In order to carry out the aforementioned analysis, we contextualize the concept of protest poetry within literary history in general and Belarusian language history in particular and also examine several extracts from Kudasava’s poetry (both pre- and post -2020) from a technical, lyrical, and problematical point of view. Our findings concerning the poet’s images, rhetorical figures, and formal patterns of choice, as well as the changes that her treatment of social and political issues has undergone over the latest years, have revealed the evolution of new tendencies within her works (specifically, of socially engaged poetry which was not significantly present in her texts before). This fact confirms our hypotheses that socio-political changes directly affect the development of literature and poetry in particular, while poets take on the role of society’s spokespeople through their art.