Natallia Arsiennieva
Natallia Alyakseeyna Arsiennieva (September 20, 1903 – July 25, 1997) was a Belarusian playwright, poet, translator and writer. She wrote the words for the hymn Mahutny Boža (Almighty God). She was married to Francišak Kušal.
She was born in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, into a middle‑class family. Her family moved to Volhynia and then Vilnius, where she grew up and finished a Belarusian gymnasium in 1921. She studied at the Arts Department of the University of Wilno (Vilnius).
In 1922 she married Francišak Kušal, a Belarusian nationalist leader who would later be connected with Nazi collaboration. After the Soviet invasion of Poland, Kušal was taken as a prisoner of war and later sent to Minsk. Arsiennieva herself was arrested by the Soviets as a “bourgeois nationalist intellectual” and deported to Kazakhstan with her two sons. She was released in early 1941 and moved to Minsk, where, during the German occupation, she also worked with the pro‑Nazi Belaruskaya Gazeta and wrote opera librettos and translations.
In 1944 Arsiennieva moved to Germany, and in 1950 she settled in the United States. She helped build the Belarusian diaspora community, serving for a long time as secretary of the Belarusan-American Association, editing the newspaper Biełarus, and working with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Belarusan Institute of Arts and Sciences (be-tarask).
Her works were banned in Soviet Belarus, but they gained popularity after the Soviet era began to loosen. Her poem Prayer, set to music by Mikola Ravienski, became the hymn Mahutny Boža.
Key publications include a 1991 facsimile edition Under the Blue Sky, a 1996 collection Another Spring, and a 2002 selection of poems. Since 1998, her works have been kept out of Belarusian school curricula by the government of Alexander Lukashenko. A monument to Arsiennieva was unveiled in 2003 in Staryya Darohi, Minsk Region, but was removed in November 2022.
Natallia Arsiennieva passed away in Rochester, New York, in 1997 and is buried there.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 17:38 (CET).