National Awakeners in Carpathian Rus’

Session Submission Type: Panel

Affiliate Organization: Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center

Brief Description

Carpatho-Rusyn writers who have worked for the cultural, material, or spiritual improvement of their people are often called “national awakeners,” a term that the historian Tomasz Kamusella has argued “hinges on the tacit assumption — without any evidence to this end — that nations are near-eternal or near-natural entities” that simply “fell asleep” and conceals the role that “education, the printing press, societies, and statistics” played in the formation of modern nations. This panel will categorize how the national awakener model has been applied to Carpatho-Rusyn activists from the eighteenth century to today. Rita Lyons Kindlerová will analyze a newly discovered Spivanyk (1798) compiled by Ivan (Ioann) Yuhasevych, who collected both sacred and secular songs of Carpathian Rus’. Marta Watral will establish a typology of Carpatho-Rusyn national awakeners from the poet Aleksander Dukhnovych and novelist Vladymir Khyliak and will demonstrate how the contemporary Lemko poet Petro Trokhanovskii / Murianka writes himself into this tradition today. Tomas Kalynych will explore the phenomenon of spatial awakening in the cartography of the Lemko writer Dymytrii Vyslotskii. And Michal Pavlič will explore the relationship between memory and activism in the poetry of the contemporary writer Iurko Kharytun, who calls upon future generations to remember the Carpatho-Rusyn villages flooded during the creation of the Stariná reservoir.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Patricia Ann Krafcik, Evergreen State College

Papers

• Ivan Yuhasevych’s (1798) Spivanyk: Rediscovery in the Slavonic Library, Prague - Rita Lyons Kindlerova, National Library of the Czech Republic (Czech Republic)

• Paradigms of Awakening in Lemko Literature - Marta Watral, Jagiellonian U (Poland)

• Spatial Awakening: Dymytrii Vyslotskii’s Maps of Carpathian Rus' - Tomash Kalynych, U of St Andrews (UK)

• Iurko Kharytun’s Poetry of Trauma - Michal Pavlič, U of Prešov (Slovakia)

Discussant

• Patricia Ann Krafcik, Evergreen State College