The Transnational Slavic Lyric

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

While geographically located in the heart of Europe, Ruthenia — both the region of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and the East Slavic lands ruled by the Habsburgs, historic Carpathian Rus’ — has culturally been a liminal space between larger, more powerful cultural centers, whether Moscow, Krakow, Vienna, Prague, or Budapest. This panel will survey the ways East Slavic poets in this region have drawn from and influenced the literary traditions of their more powerful neighbors. Erica Camisa Morale analyzes how the Belarusian writer Simeon Polotskii introduced Catholic, Latin, and Polish elements to Muscovite poetry in his Lament (1669), which contributed to the emergence of self-consciousness and of lyric selfhood. A century later, when Carpatho-Rusyns living in the Austrian Empire sought out poetic models to express their own national culture, they first turned to East Slavic writers like Simeon Polotskii when they adopted syllabic versification. David Powelstock will examine how the poet Aleksander Dukhnovych cultivated a transnational Carpatho-Rusyn lyric subjectivity in the collections Greetings to the Rusyns (1850-1852), which were indebted to Russian Classical and Romantic sources. Dukhnovych's model of the Carpatho-Rusyn lyric inspired twentieth-century writers in interwar and postwar Czechoslovakia. Nick Kupensky will identify the features of the modern Carpatho-Rusyn lyric subjectivity in the poetry of Andrii Karabelesh, whose Russian-language verse published in the collections In the Rays of Dawn (1929) and In the Carpathians (1955) interrogates the relationship between an alienated poet and his homeland.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Nicholas Kyle Kupensky, US Air Force Academy

Papers

• Simeon’s Lament: An Instance of Transnational Culture - Erica Camisa Morale, Stanford U

• Transnational Selfhood?: Aleksander Dukhnovych’s Carpatho-Rusyn National Identity as a Mode of Lyric Subjectivity - David Powelstock, Brandeis U

• Dawn, Wind, Mountains: Andrii Karabelesh's Lyrical Subject - Nicholas Kyle Kupensky, US Air Force Academy

Discussant

• Elaine Rusinko, U of Maryland, Baltimore County