I want to share through this article my experience and first impressions from reading and meeting the authors of the RLS website as someone who is from the Rusyn homeland.

The general sense of isolation of the Rusyn people of Transcarpathia, from their history, from the thought and worldview of their greatest ancestors, whose monuments adorn the Rusyn cities and villages of Transcarpathia today, after which many streets and squares of Transcarpathian settlements are named, was inherently known to me for many years now.

Meetings and acquaintances with our contemporary figures, writers, and historians, always left a feeling of incompleteness. I could not find a good enough answer to what would happen next with my Rusyn people in the history and modernity with which they introduced themselves to me.

Last year I got acquainted with the Rusyn Literature Society project. The authors who published there, for the most part, were familiar already. They drew my attention by the fact that in their articles and other publications, our common Rusyn heritage and knowledge about our future was present. Still, at the same time, there was always a grain of uniqueness in their attitude about our people, history, culture. 

My impression was such that it allowed me to hope for the development of Rusyns and not for decline and or maybe even stop of us altogether. On the RLS website, I met precisely these authors, who, from my point of view, are promising and turning the gaze of our people to its potential future like never before. 

As I previously assumed, knowing the history of Rusyns and the new era for our people, all the most important things have happened in the United States. To my great joy, this project also turned out to be American. In this period of history and 130-100 years ago, all the passionate energy of our people, it seems to me, can be realized only in the structural and ideological frame of the New World. But, of course, on the content and the essence of what our people have done in the Old World.

The aspirations and whole essence that our people accumulated and collected in themselves in the Old World by the beginning of the 20th century in a passionate way, had prospects to develop only in those of the diaspora far away across an ocean. It was necessary to see yourself, your people, and everything that is called national identity in a new way, throwing off the mental shackles of the Old World. Going beyond the “limits of what is permitted” by the Old World and its government.

Today, this insurmountable barrier from the Old World is a birth trauma of the Soviet-era mindset. The inability to recognize oneself as the subject of one’s own history, and the authority of making one’s own decisions in general. To build what the awakeners bequeathed to us, their students and spiritual children, then, 100 years ago, had to be in a free country.

America gave the Rusyns a chance to believe that they deserve freedom, are able to formulate and voice their own opinion, and have the right to be heard in their homeland. This is something we in the Old World do not always believe in. 

With such a rethinking, our labor migrants returned to Europe and built their own institutionalized “non-literary”, theoretical but practical, future. During the period of the Czechoslovak Republic, everything that was the initiative of our Ruthenian people itself, and not inspired by the government from Prague, was brought in from the New World by those who had returned from the mines and farmlands of America.

This “new ability to see the world and ourselves differently” inspired our people then, and this is what drew my attention to the publications of this site today. It is not answers to questions or ready-made programs that appear first in every important and successful business, but questions.

Questions that can hopefully help us unravel the web of failed undertakings of the past. Questions that sometimes take the form of uncertain answers or double questions: a question about a question.

Re-reading and trying not to miss new publications, to my great joy, I meet new questions that I have never asked myself before, and which I have not met with our modern Rusyn authors and activists. The main question that each author of the text of this project tries to answer in a different way, or it would be more correct to say, tries to ask himself in a different way: What do we strive to be? Who or what do we want to be in the future? Do we want to be those who will be able to find a place for our Ruthenian people in this global world of powerful, great cultures and peoples?

These magnificent questions, without which there is no hope that the future will take place, I give thanks to RLS and their authors for this. 

I dare say that this site, having gathered such a team, and building just such a policy of quality and orientation of publications, has earned itself the name “Awakener of the Rusyn people of the 21st century”. Many thanks to the founder. To all permanent and guest authors who have wanted to contribute. The Ruthenian world that you share in your publications is the world of the future. This is a dream world that you manage to make a reality in the life of our Ruthenian people by continuing to do what you do.

The fact that you manage to be together and further develop the project is a sign of unity and cooperation, which in turn shows that the “big house of the future for Rusyns” already has a foundation: RLS Publishing House is a project where the most important thing about yourself in the context of our Rusyn identity, can spread mutually to many and for many Rusyns around the world.

Some questions that have come from this site that I am especially grateful for:

• Who are the English-speaking Rusyns?
• Where is the reason for the informational separation of American and Transcarpathian Rusyns hidden?
• Do we need our real history, and not a destructive, unpromising, simulacrum?
• Tough political question:
• Can we Rusyns be the bearers of civil rights for our own identity, or is this an exclusive privilege that someone can graciously give or take away from us?
• How should one carry your identity to your children and grandchildren in the non-Ruthenian-speaking world?
• How to be a Rusyn who does not know the Rusyn language?
• How to read Rusyn books of the period of the Slavic-Rusyn, intellectual and journalistic, historical heritage of our people?
• How to relate to non-Ruthenian-speaking Rusyn-philes?
• How to defend your right to communicate in your homeland (in Transcarpathia) in the Rusyn language?
• Will I be able not to be ashamed of the sound of the Ruthenian language in Uzhgorod?

Thanks to all these questions, I began to believe more in the future of the Rusyn people throughout the world than I could have hoped for the realization of this future, before my acquaintance with the project of the Rusyn Literary Society.