Rusyn Literature Will Succeed When Rusyn Is Unremarkable

It is no surprise that the Rusyn Literature Society is very interested in the development of Rusyn Literature. But are we, and the Rusyn community at large interested in just any Rusyn literature? Or should our goal be the promotion of literary masterpieces — which just so happen to be written by Rusyns, in Rusyn. It seems that too often, whenever there is news of a new book written in Rusyn, there is great celebration, before even reading the book, even more perplexing, by people who can’t read Rusyn or another Slavic language.

To be fair, it is completely understandable that when striving to promote a minority language, any progress, any work, anything that gets it out there in the mainstream, is an achievement. I do not wish to sound harsh or elitist. As a Slavist, you could show me a book in Rusyn about birdwatching and I’d probably fall in love with it.

But if our goal is for the Rusyn language to stand independently of other Slavic languages, not to be seen as a montane rural dialect, but a language no different than Ukrainian, Czech, or Slovak, then we need to apply the same standards and expectations of literary criticism to Rusyn works as we would to any other works.

In other words, perhaps it’s time to take a qualitative and not quantitative approach to Rusyn literature.

At first, in the beginning, when the first works began to be published in Rusyn, it’s understandable that this was exciting and anything published in Rusyn was indeed a great monument. After the communist dictatorships fell, and it was again possible to publish Rusyn works in relatively free societies, when Rusyn began to be used and studied at the University of Prešov and elsewhere, this was indeed cause for celebration, and — Glory to Jesus Christ — let’s continue to be grateful for all of this, and those who came before, that it’s possible now to freely publish in Rusyn. It’s good for us to be here, at this current moment, atop this shining mountain peak of possibilities where we were carried on the shoulders of giants like Dukhnovych, St. Alexis Toth, and the Ruthenian Triad. It’s good for us to be here, where we are now, in a place where we can look back at history and try to glimpse into the future and discuss where we should go from here. But that’s just the point. Though it’s good for us to be here, we can’t remain here. We need to go forward from here. As if mountain climbing, we reach one peak, stop and set up camp, only to set out again from there to the next peak, and what was before our previous high is now our former low as we keep moving upward to the summit of glory.

We have to keep progressing, advancing, and raising the bar, or otherwise, we’re caught in stasis.

How many people do you know of who can only think of their people’s culture in terms of village life 200 years ago? Be honest, how many modern Rusyn cultural works can you think of—not history books, or recordings of old songs, but modern works produced by living Rusyns.

It’s been 150 years since Dukhnovych wrote Vruchanie and this is still one of the only things Rusyns in the diaspora know how to say. And есмь is closer to Church Slavonic than the modern Rusyn єм, as it were…

This isn’t the early 1990s. Now there are even communities on the internet of people learning some of the most obscure languages in the world—including fantasy languages like Elvish! There are so many opportunities to publish material, even simply online, in Rusyn, and so I would argue we are now beyond the point where discovering something written in Rusyn should be awesome and shocking. Isn’t our goal to make Rusyn widespread and thus “normal”?

I once discussed this with our editor Starik and he said to me something like:

I’ll know we’ve succeeded when a book is written in Rusyn and it’s not a big shock, but people judge it just because of the quality of its content.

This encapsulates the issue. Our goal is not any literature written in Rusyn. It’s great literature written in Rusyn, and making that literature so widespread and available that it’s not a shock.

That’s the goal. We’ll know Rusyn literature has finally triumphed and has come out of its infancy and reached maturity, (or returned from its slumber depending on how you want to look at it) when Rusyn is simply — normal.

Paradoxically, we’ll know the struggle to promote Rusyn literature has been won when Rusyn becomes unremarkable, and instead, there are remarkable things written in Rusyn. In other words, the fact that it’s written in Rusyn is not amazing, but instead there are amazing, creative, and intelligent works in Rusyn. And a Rusyn work has been normalized to the point where it’s appearance is no great shock just as nobody is shocked that a book is written in any other language.

We must break free of the captivity of novelty which our cultural development has too long been under.

The fact is Rusyn culture seems to still be a novelty for many people. People are still in this state of discovering they’re Rusyn and then…telling people they discovered they’re Rusyn…and then…writing about discovering they’re Rusyn…

It seems many people in recent memory embraced their Rusyn identity.

And that’s wonderful! I am absolutely not judging or saying this is bad. Everyone has the right to experience and explore what they feel. One of the most basic principles of most philosophies from ancient times is the idea “Know yourself”.

That’s easier said than done. As a person who’s still learning about himself, and who learned a great deal and whose perspectives changed many ways in the last five years, I completely understand.

I do not presume to tell people they need to move on from the novelty of Rusyn culture or language. If it’s new to them that’s just a fact, it’s new, and it makes sense that it’s a novelty.

If that’s where we are, that’s where we are. And it’s important to experience everything we have to, that’s part of the journey, that’s how we learn and grow both as individuals and nations.

But if this observation is true, that much of Rusyn culture is still in a state of novelty, than I am merely purposing to have a clear vision that the next step for Rusyn culture, is to go from novelty to normality and from normality to immortality.

We need to bring Rusyn literature to the next level.

Our goal is not to have just some vernacular dialects, debates as to whether we should write дякую or дякуву, or a description of rural localities in Rusyn, we want acclaimed works of history, fantasy, philosophy, science, and many other things in Rusyn.

Our goal is to produce a Rusyn Dostoyevsky, or Tolkien, or Dickens.

In Theology, I would say there have always been great Rusyns, (many great Rusyn church figures are saints who haven’t left us with many written works) but once again there is so little written in Rusyn in this field, even by then.

I would like to see a Rusyn Georges Florovsky, or Alexander Schmemann, or Seraphim Rose.

I would say a Rusyn Thomas Hopko — but he was already a Rusyn.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, however, to have his works translated into Rusyn, such as his On the Orthodox Faith, so that Rusyns could learn about their faith in Rusyn, from a text written by a Rusyn, but not just for these reasons — because he’s Rusyn or to simply have it in Rusyn — but because it’s one of the best catechistical works available.

Our interest in the development of Rusyn literature is really an extension of our interest in the development of Rusyn culture.

Development is the key word, as we are not simply talking about conversing, or preserving antiquities, that what we already have, but precisely progressing and developing Rusyn culture, in particular both high cultures, and—(I may regret saying this—even pop culture.

The fact simply is that modern Rusyn culture finds itself in this stasis, it can even be said to be nearly fossilized. That is to say, almost all aspects of Rusyn culture we see displayed for the world to see, tends to be these village stereotypes, national costumes from previous centuries, old folk songs, displays about mountain shepherds using tools of bygone years.

It’s still stuck in the village so to speak.

And do not mistake me, I say it is good for us to be here, in the Rusyn village. It is a good and pious thing that the village, and in particular the village church and monastery was, is, and should always be the heart and soul of the Rusyn community. Rusyns are some of the last people in Europe to truly preserve the millennia-old Christian village; where other nations including Russia have fallen into secularism, the living traditions of the village have preserved the fundaments of Rusyn culture which always began with their Cyrillo-Methodian faith.

So, I say again—it is good for us to be here—but we can’t stay here, not always. We need to take the light of this beautiful tradition and deliver it from the Carpathian village to the entire world so they can see it themselves.

As a traditionalist, I certainly do not mean Rusyn culture should break from the village and its roots and God-forbid “modernize” and “secularize” along the path of the modern west. To be clear I think that would be the death of Rusyn culture. But Rusyn culture cannot remain in a fossilized 19th-century form reflecting the vernacular culture that was, and is no more. It must preserve the essential elements of the culture and present it to the world in a modern living form.

This means not just copying the past and essentially “cosplaying” as Rusyn villagers, but promoting the living Rusyn tradition and culture, and using modern technologies and mediums to deliver it to the world.

We need to see living Rusyn culture— grounded in the same core values and elements that make it Rusyn—but renewed in new and creative forms.

The Rusyns of the 19th century did not dress and live identically to those of the 16th. Indeed, it’s simply our lack of understanding of history that we assume all those time periods were similar, but of course, there was great innovation and development in 200 years! And if we in the 21st century, only know and preserve the culture of the 19th, and don’t develop anything new, it would essentially be as if Rusyn culture died 200 years ago and we just commemorate it every so often.

This would be a great crime. This is also exactly why, I think, so many young Rusyns in Transcarpathia, for example, don’t exactly know how to engage their culture even if they wanted to, because for many people, Rusyn is just the archaic people of the past, and the modern culture surrounding them is different, evolved. So, when they use their smartphones or watch TV, or do anything else modern young people do, nothing is in Rusyn, and it’s no wonder many people think Rusyn was just an archaic culture or ethnonym, and that they’re just speaking a regional dialect of Ukrainian because there’s hardly anything modern, produced in living Rusyn for them to connect with.

For this to change, there needs to be not simply the preservation of Rusyn village culture — though this is good and should be done at the same time — but also the development of new 21st century Rusyn culture in art, music, fashion, literature. And I believe this can be both traditional and modern simultaneously.

And there are many more ways to discuss this broader topic.

It is my position that video games have the potential to be in fact one of the best art forms, as they combine all other artforms humanity created before such as storytelling, literature, visual arts, music, etc. And here we can also see interesting possibilities for Rusyn cultural development. If we take for example, The Witcher 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, we see two works clearly inspired by Slavic (Polish and Czech) settings, the former fantasy, the latter historical fiction, and they proved to be masterpieces that display the beauty of the Slavic world. But, they didn’t do this by simply screaming in the face of the player that these are Polish and Czech works. They were simply extremely well made, and beautiful, and thus, they conveyed the beauty of the cultures that made them without the need for them to emphasize it.

In the same way, we look forward to seeing both academic, intellectual, and creative works from Rusyns which are excellent by their own virtue. Excellence sells itself.

And to this extent, is it extremely important to raise money both from within and outside the community to promote Rusyn cultural development and directly support talented Rusyn creators.

And despite all its worth, almost nobody is doing this today. Nobody is paying to have Rusyn computer interfaces translated, to have modern practical clothing that people would actually wear made with Rusyn patterns. Certainly, nobody is making Rusyn video games. Because there’s no money in it, and nearly all the work is being done by poor artists and people who simply love their culture.

And if young Rusyns can’t make a living among their own people and within their own cultural world, it’s only natural that they leave to other places, become assimilate, and the culture dies out.

People cannot simply expect great cultural works to produce themselves. Serious professions cannot work for free, and if nobody is supporting the creation of Rusyn content, it will always remain in a small and weak position, as bright and talented Rusyn creators will leave for better prospects.

For centuries, in past ages, great statesmen poured considerable wealth into the development of culture simply because they felt it was not only valuable but necessary. If people want Rusyn culture to exist, especially considering we are talking about a stateless people, they need to fund and support it.

When looking at great renaissance works of art, we often forget that many of these masterpieces were sponsored by noble benefactors and rulers who believed that such art in and of itself good for society and very much worth spending money to promote. We shouldn’t forget to support the things we think are beautiful, important, and valuable for society, and we can’t take them for granted.

The love of that which is truly beautiful is the highest virtue for as a great man once said:

Beauty will save the world

Matfey Shaheen

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Alex on October 20, 2021 at 2:20 pm

You lay out a great map here to direct Rusyn cultural growth. The Rusyn people are in a bit of a bind, unfortunately. Like you say, there is a dearth of wealth and a dearth of cultural consciousness, and these are our two key issues. Without both, it is difficult to create a contemporary Rusyn culture, and old ideas are recycled, repeated…

You are right, Rusyns need a contemporary culture; one that is rooted in our history, converses with our present, and imagines our future. For “new” Rusyns, that have just discovered their identity though, this is essentially impossible: one cannot write a song for piano without first learning to play “Chopsticks”. The same goes for culture: one must have a thorough understanding of the history, art, language…before the ability to create a cultural treasure. And while novelty can be useful *practice* for the individual (just like “Chopsticks”), for the collective I see it as a treacherous detour towards caricature.

The problem for new (anglophone) Rusyns (including myself) is the inaccessibility of knowledge. This is a massive roadblock that makes continuing past the point of novelty for the individual incredibly arduous. Identifying where the knowledge you want may be stored and then actually locating it has the potential to be a full-time job or an all-consuming pastime. Yet, this process is a necessary first step in order to later create cultural works of greater value.

This is where I think modern technology and collective action are key solutions to our problems. Open-source technologies like wikis have the potential to provide collaborative spaces to collect, consolidate, and share knowledge and history in an organized manner (organized as opposed to a disorganized glut of posts on various social networks). Leveraging similar technologies like git may also facilitate collaboration on data-based research into Rusyn demography, economics, or possibly even artistic endeavors. At the heart of these strategies is the concept that where one person may not have the money or time to see a project through, a group of people can.

Tying into this is the ability to crowdfund social and cultural projects, which increasingly simple through the internet, but also smaller, more targeted, and less organized than typical philanthropic organizations. Both are necessary to channel wealth from Rusyns who are established financially to those less so. And while it’s a shame there are no bezos-tier Rusyn art patrons, the collective wealtch of the middle class is still an invaluable resource.

Now, once past the point of novelty, it’s important not to stray along the path of imitation. (Though I know you didn’t mean this so literally) I disagree with the idea that we need a Rusyn “Dostoevsky”, we need a Rusyn original. Similarly, we don’t need Rusyn hip-hop, rock, or pop music, (though I love all these genres) we need something all our own. This may be an extreme example, but what if the Rusyn literature of the future has not one author, but several? What if it is not even a book in the typical sense? Rusyns are not typical people, after all. Why should we seek to work within the confines of other Europeans’ cultural archetypes? This is the kind of imagination I believe is crucial for building a Rusyn avant-garde.

I believe, ultimately, that a successful, modern Rusyn culture must look away from (though not become ignorant of) mainstream Western and Slavic European culture, look at our past, and say, “What if?”

Thanks for the great read, as always.