Larisa Heniyush’s poetry collection *Spiritus flat ubi vult* (“The Spirit blows where it wills”) restores the poet’s voice—recovered after decades from handwritten poems she had gathered and bound herself in the early post-war years.

Today, we are reproducing this manuscript in facsimile, reading and interpreting it in the 21st century—at a time strikingly similar to the era when Larisa Heniyush penned these lines and bound the pages into a slender volume.

Written in exile, the poems from 1945–1947 constitute a poignant and soaring hymn to her homeland and loved ones, a poetic chronicle of national catastrophe and personal loss, and a vivid testament to the poet’s free and unyielding spirit. They also mark the beginning of post-war Belarusian-language *samizdat* and *tamizdat*.