For the first time, I heard of Alexander Bonkalo from Aunt Margareta (Gita), my Mom’s cousin’s wife. Her maiden family name also was Bonkalo; she was born in Vekyky Bychkiv (Nagybocskó) a year after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, and Alexander Bonkalo was her uncle. Aunt Gita used to recall the family legend about their French ancestor who had come to the Carpathian Highlands (during the Napoleonic Wars?), got married and settled there, among the Ruthenians/Hutsuls, and got the nickname which later became the family name owing to frequent repeating the French word bon (-kalo is a suffix used in Ukrainian and Rusyn to denote a person that usually does the action shown in the root of the word, for instance, hoikalo (гойкало) = he who shouts (тот, шо гойкать), although the lexicologist Pavlo Chuchka in his dictionary Family Names of Transcarpathian Ukrainians (available on our archive) asserts that ‘o’ in the family name Bonkalo is in fact a broad pronunciation of ‘ы’ in bynkalo (Бонкало ← Бынкало) which, in its turn, means ‘a bell hung on a sheep or a cow.’ Well, apart from being proud of her legendary French great-grandfather, Aunt Gita liked to recall another member of her family – and this time it was a real person, Alexander Bonkalo, a renowned Rusyn linguist and researcher of the ethnography and the idiom of the Hutsuls, literary critic and translator, known in Hungary as Sándor Bonkáló.
Before proceeding to his biography, I would like to mention that during the Soviet time, his name had for a long time been withdrawn from academic circulation, mainly due to his adherence to the notion of the ‘Magyar Orosz,’ i.e. Hungarian Ruthenian ethnos, historically and culturally close to Hungarians and politically loyal to the Hungarian state.
Alexander Bonkalo was born on January 22, 1880 in Rakhiv/Rahó, Maramorosh/Maramoros County, Austria-Hungary. This town was and remains the centre of Subcarpathian Hutsuls (the rest of this sub-ethnic group of historical Rusyns that now identify themselves with Ukrainians live across the Carpathian overpasses – in Halychyna/Galicia). He studied at Ungvár/Uzhhorod Piarists’ Gymnasium School and Greek Catholic Seminary (in many Rusyn families, it was a tradition to send the eldest son to study for priesthood). In 1906, he graduated from the Latin, German and Slavic Department of Péter Pázmány University in Budapest; then he continued his education at Leipzig and St. Petersburg Universities (in the latter, he was a disciple of the famous linguists Aleksey Shakhmatov and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay). Until 1916, Sándor Bonkáló worked as a teacher in several Hungarian cities and towns. Meanwhile, he acquired the qualification of a tutor of Russian language and literature and a PhD degree in Slavonic Studies. In 1919, he became a lecturer in the newly-established Department of the Rusyn Language and Literature at Péter Pázmány University, where he worked until the dissolution of the Department in 1924. Sándor Bonkáló served as an expert on the Rusyn issue during the short period of the autonomous Ruska Krajina (1918–1919), proclaimed by the First Hungarian Republic after the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy. In 1920, he continued to work as a Rusyn expert for the Hungarian delegation for the Peace Treaty in Paris. From 1924 to 1939, he worked as a teacher of Russian commercial correspondence at the Commercial Academy in Budapest. From 1939 to 1944, Sándor Bonkáló edited the Druzhestvo, the official magazine of the National Central Credit Cooperative issued in Rusyn.
For a short period of time after the end of WWII, Sándor Bonkáló worked as a lecturer of Ukrainian language and literature at Péter Pázmány University (he also taught History of Russian Literature and Russian Folklore), but soon he was dismissed by the demand of the Soviet Control Commission for his alleged ‘contemptuous references to the Soviet Union and its rulers.’
Sándor Bonkáló’s academic interests were focused on Rusyn, Ukrainian and Russian languages and literature. He authored the two-volume History of Russian Literature (1924), was a co-editor of the World Literature Classics series (1925–1938), and reviewed pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russian writers. In newspaper articles, he criticized the anti-religious policy of the USSR and the newly-appeared Stalinism. Sándor Bonkáló translated the works of Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky into Hungarian.
A vast part of Sándor Bonkáló’s creative legacy was devoted to the language, ethnography and culture of his native people – Rusyns. Let us mention some of his works on this theme (all the works were written in Hungarian unless otherwise stated):
Descriptive Phonetics of Rakhiv Little Russian Dialect (1910), a dissertation
Hutsul Folk Tale (1911). In this article, the author explained the need to study Hutsuls because “they are an interesting folk which differs from other Little Russians not only in appearance and customs but also in the language; besides, no one has studied the Hutsuls’ language so far.”
Russophile Agitation and Rusyn Issue (1912)
To the Issue of Russian/Great Russian and Rusyn/Little Russian or Ukrainian Literary Languages (1925)
On Ukrainian Word Research (in German; 1916)
The Hungarian Ruthenians (in German; 1921)
Subcarpathian Ruthenian Literature and Culture (1935)
Rusyn Literary Language (1941)
Russian Literary Language (in Russian; 1941)
His book The Ruthenians/Rusyns (1940; translated into English by his son, Erwin Bonkáló, and published in New York as The Rusyns in 1990) is worth special attention. In it, the author provided his personal interpretation of the history of the Rusyn people; determined the area inhabited by Rusyns (from Poprad in the west to the upstream of the Tysa/Tisza River in the east); classified the Rusyn sub-ethnic groups as Dolyshniaky (‘People of the Valleys’), Verkhovyntsi (‘Highlanders’), Hutsuls, Boikos and Lemkos; wrote about Rusyn culture, customs, literature and folklore, the political and economic situation in the Rusyn lands, and the history of the Greek Catholic and Orthodox denominations among the Rusyns.
Some of Bonkáló’s views were erroneous, but his linguistic observations have remained valuable until now. He described Hutsuls as “the smallest and the most valuable Rusyn tribe” that arrived at Subcarpathia from Galicia and Bukovyna in the 16th – 19th centuries; Hutsuls’ language and everyday life significantly differ from those of other Slavic peoples – partly due to their geographic location, and partly due to the long cohabitation with Romanians and Hungarians.
I would like to mention here one of the distinctive features of the Hutsul idiom described by Sándor Bonkáló that has survived until now. It is the abbreviated form of the Vocative case: brá instead of bráte (‘hey, brother!’); chló instead of chlópe (hey, man!); Yvá instead of Yváne; Pe instead of Petre. Bonkáló explained this shortened form of address by the fact that Hutsuls lived at big distances from one another and their communication was organised by shouting from one hill or valley to a neighbouring hill or valley, and then only the stressed syllables would be heard by the addressee of such communication (compare with the trembita, a long wooden trumpet that had primarily been used as the only means of communication between the shepherd pasturing sheep high in the alpine lawns, polonynas, and the village, and as the announcer of a birth, a wedding or a death for the neighbours).
Sándor Bonkáló was among those linguists who denied the previously widely spread opinion that Rusyn and Ukrainian were only dialects of the Great Russian language. He substantiated the genetic affinity between Subcarpathian Rusyns and Little Russians / Ukrainians, although, in his opinion, due to the geographic (and political) factors the former had not had connections with the latter for centuries, which is why the Subcarpathian literature had many peculiarities of its own. Bonkáló criticised the publications of Subcarpathian Russophiles, asserting that those were using too many Russian words which Rusyns did not understand, and demanding that newspapers and books should be written in the ‘folk language.’ In his article distinguished with an award of the Leipzig University (1916), Bonkáló wrote that the Rusyn language had about 2,000 Hungarian lexical borrowings.
In the document dated February 1946 (found by the contemporary Hungarian researcher Attila Salga), Sándor Bonkáló announced his academic plans: 1) to reveal Hungarian borrowings in written documents, fiction literature, and in Subcarpathian, Galician and Bukovynan dialects; 2) to write a history of Ukrainian literature; 3) to analyse the Rusyn notes written on the margins of Old Slavonic texts of the prayer books and lessons (passages from sacred writings) archived by the Hungarian National Museum.
Sándor Bonkáló died in 1959 in Budapest. He is buried at Farkasrét Cemetery.
Erwin Bonkáló, a son of Alexander Bonkáló and the English translator of his book The Rusyns, wrote in his father’s Biography published as the preface to this book that Alexander Bonkáló had been an apolitical personality, whose biggest desire had been to protect his native Rusyn language and culture. However, his personal view was that the survival of these people was possible only within the borders of Hungary rather than in some Slav state.
Sources:
Є. Барань. Шандор Бонкало – дослідник української мови, діалектології та літератури. Studia Slavica Hung. 63/1 (2018) 9–18.
Bonkáló Sándor. A ruszinok. Budapest, 1940.
Erwin Bonkáló. Biography of Alexander Bonkáló // Alexander Bonkáló. The Rusyns. Translated by Erwin Bonkáló. – Columbia University Press, NY 1990. p. XI–XVIII.