The Mountains and the Forests: Andrii Karabelesh and the Politics of the Memory

• In Event: Prešov as Peripheral Metropolis: Memory and Transcultural Identity

Abstract

In the 1950s, the Carpatho-Rusyn poet Andrii Karabelesh (1906–1964), who primarily wrote in Russian, shifted his focus to prose. After surviving five years in Nazi concentration camps, he emerged from imprisonment to discover that his homeland Subcarpathian Rus’, previously the easternmost province of Czechoslovakia, had been annexed by Soviet Ukraine. Under the aesthetic and ideological restraints of Communist Czechoslovakia, Karabelesh could not continue to pursue his distinct Romantic and Symbolic poetics that he developed in the interwar period; however, his short stories published in the magazine Duklia (1953-1957) and his unpublished collection In the Mountains and the Forests (V gorakh i lesakh, c. 1957) represents Carpathian Rus’ not only as a place but one situated in a particular time: the First Czechoslovak Republic. In doing so, Karabelesh uses memory as a tool to resurrect a world irreparably changed by Fascism and Communism.

Author

• Nicholas Kyle Kupensky, US Air Force Academy