Rusyns are well-known far beyond the countries they live in for their folk songs. This in turn, has made these pieces of music a major component to how Rusyns are perceived in our modern world. A rich source of popular wisdom is also in folk fairy tales created over the previous centuries. Generations of the native peoples of the Carpathian region heard them told by their grannies or – in more recent times – read them in books. These two would mesh to create a now nearly forgotten layer of folklore in ballad songs.

It appears that Rusyns were extremely fecund in creating ballads. Their thematic diversity is vast in scope. They often describe fantastic, historic, and heroic events, and very frequently have an unhappy end – be it redemption, love, or devastation. Ballads reveal the ethnic peculiarities of their personages; they describe customs, traditions, and everyday life within a certain historical epoch. One can learn a lot about the attitudes of the common people through these objects of culture. The Rusyn lands were happy to have a string of ethnographers who recorded and published folk ballads. Given the dearth of other sources, these are like a gift in a vast desert.

The first book that contained Rusyn ballads was published in Moscow in 1878 by Yakiv Holovatsky (1814–1888), a prominent Galician Ruthenian public figure of the Russophile camp and one of the founders of the Ruthenian Triad (Народные песни Галицкой и Угорской Руси / Folk Songs of Galician and Hungarian Rus. In 4 vol. Moscow, 1878).

In 1944, Andor Lovassy translated into Hungarian 27 Rusyn ballads collected by the Rusyn writer Luka Demian in Huszt/Khust, Ökörmező/Mizhhiria, Rahó/Rakhiv, and Volóc/Volovets and published them in Ungvár/Uzhhorod (Lovassy Andor, ford. Ruszin népballadák / Rusyn Folk Ballads. Ungvár, 1944).

Народні балади Закарпаття

Petro Lintur (1909–1969), a well-known Rusyn folklorist of the second half of the 20^th century, published a collection of Subcarpathian ballads in 1959 (Лінтур Петро. Народні балади Закарпаття / Lintur, Petro. Folk Ballads of Transcarpathia. Uzhhorod, 1959) that contained 44 texts, the editor’s preface and illustrations by prominent Subcarpathian artists Anton Kassay and Fedir Manailo. In 1966, Lintur published a new edition of the book, with 141 texts of the ballads (Народні балади Закарпаття / Folk Ballads of Transcarpathia. Collected, edited, preface and notes by P. Lintur. Lviv, 1966). Finally, in 2013 Ivan Senko, an ethnographer and assistant professor of Uzhhorod National University, published the third extended edition of Petro Lintur’s collection of ballads – this time with music notation, allowing to reproduce the actual sounding of the ballads (Народні балади Закарпаття у записах Петра Лінтура / Folk Ballads of Transcarpathia. Recorded by Petro Lintur. Uzhhorod, 2013).

It is worth mentioning that altogether Lintur recorded 600 folk ballads, and that he was not happy with his first book because of the ideological intervention into it: in the Soviet time, it was prohibited to publish specific Rusyn words (‘dialectisms’), for they allegedly “cripple the literary language.” Another worthy observation of Petro Lintur was that “he describes Subcarpathia as the centre of intersection of three Slavic cultures – Eastern, Western, and Southern Slavic.” (I. Senko). (Lintur was also an enthusiastic collector of folk fairy tales: He had found about 80 fairy-tale-tellers, collected and published their tales in three books.)

Lintur divided the ballads into several thematic groups: From the Time of Yore; About Turkish Bondage; About Opryshky, the Social Outlaws; and From the Recent Past.

A kakukknővér

Finally, the Subcarpathian Hungarian writer László Vári Fábián translated 76 Rusyn and Ukrainian folk ballads into Hungarian (Vári Fábián László. A kakukknővér / The Cuckoo Sister. Budapest, 2019). He selected ballads for translation from all the abovementioned collections; often the cause of his choice was to present the ballads similar by themes with or showing genetic affiliation to Hungarian folk ballads. “Ballads, as a rule, roam from one culture to another; their contents and motifs are similar too,” states the translator. Indeed, the text of one of the ballads recorded by Petro Lintur, «Дунаю, Дунаю, чому смутен течеш?» (Oh Danube, Danube, Why are you flowing so sad?), had been registered for the first time by Jan Blahoslav in his Grammar of the Czech Language printed not later than in 1571.

László Vári Fábián divides the ballads into five thematic groups: Love and Wedding; Witchcraft and Jinxes; Family Conflicts; War; and Outlawry.

The Pryashiv Rusyns also had a collector of their folk ballads. Orest Zilynskyj (1923–1976), born in Lemko Lands in Poland and lived almost all his life in Czechoslovakia, collected 482 texts and 240 tunes of ballads recorded in 119 Rusyn villages of Priashiv Rus. He finished this gigantic work in the 1970s, but the ballads were printed only in 2013 (Зілинський О. Українські народні балади Східної Словаччини / Zilynskyj, O. Ukrainian Folk Ballads of East Slovakia. Kyiv, 2013), with nearly 100 pages of the editor’s comments on the history, presence of suchlike plots in the ballads of neighboring nations, migration ways of the plots, etc. In 2018, the Slovak scholar Tatiana Pirníková published this collection of ballads in Roman transliteration, explaining this by the fact that nearly all Slovak Rusyns had forgotten their old Cyrillic alphabet. However, she managed to fully preserve all vernacular peculiarities of the ballads, but changed the title of the book to Balady Východného Slovenska (Ballads of East Slovakia), thereby hiding the ethnic origin of these pieces of folklore.

These are but a few of the many collections and examples of ballads connected to Rusyn culture. Even if they continue to fall out of interest in the wider community, there is great value in archiving them to preserve their viewpoint for future generations.

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More information for the curious reader on the collections of Rusyn folk ballads mentioned in this brief survey:

1. Головацкий Я. Ф. Народные песни Галицкой и Угорской Руси / Holovatsky, Ya. Folk Songs of Galician and Hungarian Rus. In 4 vol. Moscow, 1878.
2. Lovassy Andor, ford. Ruszin népballadák / Rusyn Folk Ballads. [Translated into Hungarian.] Ungvár, 1944.
3. Петро. Народні балади Закарпаття / Lintur, Petro. Folk Ballads of Transcarpathia. Uzhhorod, 1959.
4. Народні балади Закарпаття / Folk Ballads of Transcarpathia. Collected, edited, preface and notes by P. Lintur. Lviv, 1966.
5. Народні балади Закарпаття у записах Петра Лінтура / Folk Ballads of Transcarpathia. Recorded by Petro Lintur. Uzhhorod, 2013.
6. Зілинський О. Українські народні балади Східної Словаччини / Zilynskyj, O. Ukrainian Folk Ballads of East Slovakia. Kyiv, 2013.
7. Orest Zilynskyj. Balady Východného Slovenska / Ballads of East Slovakia. [In Rusyn rendered in Roman alphabet.] Prešov, 2018.
8. Vári Fábián László. A kakukknővér / The Cuckoo Sister. [Translated into Hungarian.] Budapest, 2019.