Transnational Selfhood?: Aleksander Dukhnovych’s Carpatho-Rusyn National Identity as a Mode of Lyric Subjectivity

• In Event: The Transnational Slavic Lyric

Abstract

Elaine Rusinko has convincingly argued that Carpatho-Rusyn national identity as conceived by Rusyn’s “national awakener” Aleksandr Dukhnovych (1803-1865) was essentially non-exclusionary, non-hierarchical, and polyglot, which is to say, in a certain sense, transnational. This paper attempts to grapple with the ramifications of such a conception for Dukhnovych’s lyric practice, and by extension, for the literary discourses of other stateless Slavic peoples as refracted through the ideal of Pan-Slavism. At a time when Dukhnovych’s contemporary lyric models for the lyric (notably, the Russians) already participated in Romantic (and even post-Romantic) modes of subjectivity–with an emphasis on national and psychological individuation–what kind of subject do his lyrics present? To slice it in one of several possible ways, does his lyric look to the past, to the present, or to the future?

Author

• David Powelstock, Brandeis U