Alyaksandr Fiaduta has started part-time employment in the Department of Literary Culture of the Borderlands, inside the Polish Studies section. As a research fellow with associate-professor status, he told Nasha Niva he can again write about the Belarusian-Russian-Polish borderlands, the Philomaths he values, and people connected with Adam Mickiewicz.
He said that after prison he feared he might no longer be able to work fully in scholarship and wondered whether confinement had cost him his remaining mental sharpness. Encouragement and favourable comments from colleagues showed him that his capacity was intact.
His opening paper examines what became of Adam Mickiewicz's legacy in the files of Russia's nineteenth-century political police. It ran in Pamiętnik Literacki, among Poland's most respected literary journals, and was awarded the highest mark available, 100 points.
Fiaduta described a national points scheme in which each article receives a score based on the language of publication, the outlet, the country and related factors. Those scores are later combined, and they influence both an individual researcher's standing and the standing of the department and the university.
He is now preparing several further papers: the Lithuanian strand in Alexei Tolstoy's dramatic trilogy, the fortunes of the Radziwills and the Nesvizh archives, and the career of Józef Przecławski, a noted Polish journalist born in Ruzhany.
He drafts in Russian, and colleagues assist with translation. He speaks and reads Polish; the dean has told him to stop apologising for Polish the dean considers acceptable. Even so, Fiaduta wants an experienced translator to handle scholarly texts.
A later shift from his part-time departmental post to a full-time one is not excluded. For the present, extra part-time work matters to him, and he intends to keep lecturing in Poland and in neighbouring countries.