Либавские годы Ивана Луцкевича

ENThe paper focuses on the childhood and adolescence of Ivan Lutskevich, which he spent away from Belarus in the Latvian town of Lipawa (now Liepaja). Lipawa at that time was one of the bigger towns of the Kurlandguberniya, a trade and industrial centre, with a railway connection and a modern port on the Baltic Sea. At the end of the nineteenth century the town’s population was about 65 thousand, Half of which comprised of Germans and Latvians. There were also sizable communities of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Jews and Lithuanians. The Lipawa period in the life of Lutskevich started when he was ten, In 1887, And lasted ten years, Two of which he spent on his own. In 1890 he entered Mikolayevskie Classical High School. It was then that he started collecting antiques, got interested in history and politics. Following in the footsteps of the activists of the Belarusian liberation movement, He began to think about Belarusia’s national reconstruction. The school, the official language of which was German, had high quality teachers and high teaching standards. Many important figures of Latvian, Polish and Lithuanian nations graduated from this school. To commemorate them, plaques were put upon the walls of the buildingin which the school used to be. Ivan Lutskevitch should also becommemorated in a similar way.