Natallia Arsiennieva
Natallia Arsiennieva (also spelled as Arsenneva or Arsieńjeva; Belarusian: Наталля Аляксееўна Арсеньева; ; 1903–1997) was a Belarusian playwright, poet and translator who authored the lyrics to the hymn "Mahutny Boža” (Almighty God). She was married to Francišak Kušal. Origin and early life. Arsiennieva was born on 20 September 1903 into a middle class family in Baku, a major oil-producing centre of the Russian Empire (today the capital of Azerbaijan). In 1905 Arsiennieva's family moved first to Volhynia (Volyn) and then to Wilno (Vilnius) where she spent her childhood and graduated from the Belarusian gymnasium of Wilno in  1921. She later studied at the Arts Department of the University of Wilno. In 1922 Arsiennieva married Francišak Kušal, a prominent figure of the Belarusian independence movement and Nazi collaborator. During World War 2. Following the Soviet invasion of Poland, her husband, who was at the time an officer of the Polish army, was taken as a prisoner of war and spent a year in Soviet incarceration before being sent to Minsk in 1941. After Minsk was captured by the German army in 1941, he became a Nazi collaborator, rising to become a commander in the Byelorussian Home Defence. Arsiennieva  worked for a regional Soviet newspaper but was soon arrested and deported as a "bourgeois nationalist intellectual" to Kazakhstan with her two sons. However in early 1941 she was released after a petition by the Belarusian Union of Writers and moved to Minsk, where during the German occupation she also collaborated with the Nazis, working for the pro-Nazi "Belarusian newspaper". She wrote several librettos for operas and was engaged in translations. After World War 2. In 1944 Arsiennieva moved to Germany and in 1950 to the United States. She was involved in the establishment, and was a long-term  secretary, of the Belarusan-American Association. She was also  the editor of the newspaper Biełarus and worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the . Death and memory. Arsiennieva died on July 25, 1997 in Rochester, New York and is buried in a local cemetery. Arsiennieva's works were banned in Soviet Belarus, however she lived to see their return to her homeland. Since Gorbachev’s Perestroika her poems have gained popularity, especially "Prayer", which, set to music by composer Mikola Ravienski, has become the hymn "Mahutny Boža” (Almighty God). In 1991 the publishing house "Mastackaja litaratura" published her facsimile  Under the Blue Sky(“Пад сінім небам”), in 1996 in the series "Voices of the Belarusians Abroad" a collection of selected poems "Another Spring" (“Яшчэ адна вясна”) was published, and in 2002 a compilation of her selected poems was published. However since 1998 her works have been excluded from the school curriculum by the government of Lukashenka. In 2003, a monument was erected in her memory in the town of Staryja Darohi, Minsk Region, on the territory of a museum.