My duty was to review Chapters 8 through 11, covering the period from 1772 to 1914. Over the years I have read quite a bit about Habsburg Hungary in this period and also about the political and intellectual currents among its Rusyn population, especially texts produced by Paul Robert Magocsi. But my expertise is limited: I have never done independent research on these themes. I feel on firmer ground when it comes to the Rusyns of the Austrian part of the Habsburg monarchy, which include the Lemkos of Galicia. I have conducted my own investigations of Rusyn Galicia, although with an emphasis on its more eastern parts, outside the area of Lemko settlement and often centered on the city of Lviv. As far as I am able to judge, these chapters provide the reader with an accurate and balanced account of the Carpatho-Rusyns under the Habsburgs and of the larger historical context. (My one quibble would be with the account of Habsburg enlightened absolutism. Magocsi states that Maria Theresa’s son Joseph, who became coregent with her in 1765, was the person who actually “inspired and implemented” many of the reforms (2015, 97); I would credit instead her brilliant chancellor Anton Kaunitz.)

We commentators were asked to assess whether the chapters assigned to us in With Their Backs to the Mountains have the potential to change perspectives in our fields. If I define my field as Ukrainian history, then I cannot deny that they challenge the mainstream. For most historians of Ukraine, what Magocsi calls Carpatho-Rusyns do not constitute a separate nationality at all but simply the westernmost fringe of the Ukrainian nation. Within the Ukrainian national historical paradigm, the emergence of a separate Rusyn identity has often been ascribed to backwardness, confusion, and especially foreign intrigue. Magocsi, incidentally, makes no effort to downplay the interest of various foreign powers in influencing the choice of identity of Hungarian Rusyns and Galician Lemkos.Footnote ¹ With Their Backs to the Mountains argues cogently that although a fully blown Carpatho-Rusyn consciousness emerged relatively late, the materials for that consciousness had already been created by long historical experience. Since the groping toward a national identity has also been a major theme of Ukrainian history, the story of the Carpatho-Rusyns is very relevant. There are thought-provoking insights in the book that can aid us to think more deeply about the formation of identity in the western borderlands of Eastern Europe. The major obstacles to a better assimilation of the lessons of Carpathian Rus’ by Ukrainian historians are the perception of a political imperative to unify the Ukrainian nation and a teleological perspective that sees Carpatho-Rusynism merely as a dead-end byway on the road to a fully developed Ukrainian consciousness.

We were also asked to consider what is open to critique in the book. I will take the liberty to reformulate this request as: What would I have done differently? Every historian has his or her own distinctive approach to researching, understanding, and writing about the past. So contrasting how I would have approached Carpatho-Rusyn history compared to how Magocsi has approached it is less a critique than a complementary perspective.

As evidence of how each historian develops a distinctive style, I submit that I could have briefly flipped through the pages of this book and, without having read a word of it, identified the author. One telltale feature is the maps. After having written so many reference works and historical atlases, Magocsi has developed his own characteristic way of composing and using maps. To me at least, his maps are instantly recognizable. And they are generously scattered throughout his book so that the reader never loses sight of the historical geography. By contrast, the illustrations—all small, all in black and white—are relegated to an appendix at the back of the book. Perhaps this was the publisher’s doing. But the author would have had responsibility for linking the text with the illustrations. For example, the Carpatho-Rusyn awakener Father Aleksander Dukhnovych is introduced and interpreted on page 124, but there is nothing that sends the reader to his portrait, Plate 22 at the back of the book. In some of his other works, Magocsi has paid more attention to the visual (especially photography), but here it is neglected.

In the Introduction, Magocsi states that “Carpatho-Rusyns […] have a historic homeland which over the centuries spawned a distinct and respectable culture” (2015, xvii). He promises that in the pages that follow he will deal with that culture: “A concerted effort has been made to provide a balance between political, socio-economic, and cultural (especially religious) developments” (xviii). But I find that the cultural aspect is underdeveloped. The formal institutions of religion are covered in detail, but not culture in the generally understood sense. For example, attention to the visual arts and music is altogether absent. And that is where I would have taken an entirely different tack, since the one topic in the history of Carpathian Rus’ I have worked on in considerable depth is its visual sacral culture of the early modern era (Himka Reference Himka2009; Berezhnaya and Himka Reference Berezhnaya and Himka2014). In the considerations that follow I have to wander beyond the four chapters assigned to me, but I hope these reflections will be useful.

For me, one of the truly distinctive and beautiful aspects of Carpatho-Rusyn culture is its sacral iconography. The icons of the Lemko Region and Prešov Region are very closely related. A thick swath of rural churches on both sides of the mountains are decorated with images of the same subjects painted in a very similar style, a testimony to a shared religious aesthetic. Of course, these icons form part of the general iconographic universe of Eastern Christendom. But the icons of the Lemko and Prešov regions are, firstly, most closely related to each other; then to the icons of the Polish/Galician Boikos and the Rusyns of Subcarpathia; then to the icons of Moldova, Galicia, and Volhynia; then to the icons of Russia and Serbia; and then to the icons of Greece and Bulgaria. In the iconography we can see the kind of concentric cultural circles that surround Carpathian Rus’. This is somewhat analogous to the place of Carpathian Rus’ in the realm of national identity: the central circle being Subcarpathian Rus’; the larger circle Ukraine; and the largest circle East Slavdom, Rus’, or Russia. The question is always: at which circle do we make the cut? With Their Backs to the Mountains deals well with the concentric circles of national identity, but I think considering other large cultural relationships would have enhanced the discussion.

In my opinion, it is relevant to the formation of a distinctive Subcarpathian-Rusyn culture that in the late 17th and 18th centuries the eparchy of Mukachevo in historic Hungary drew heavily upon artists and models from the Greek Catholic Przemyśl eparchy in Poland. Although I think the closer resemblance between the iconography of the Lemko and Prešov Regions stems primarily from intercourse between the populations of both sides of the mountains, the artistic leadership of the Przemyśl eparchy created a specific sacral culture shared by the Lemko and Prešov Regions, Subcarpathian Rus’, and the Boiko region in Galicia. In light of these considerations, I would have included references to the literature on Rusyn icons in the section “For further reading” near the end of the book. There are excellent studies on Lemko icons (by Janina Kłosińska, Romuald Biskupski, Jarosław Giemza, Mirosław Kruk, and Agnieszka Gronek) and the icons of the Rusyns of historic Hungary (by Heinz Skrobucha, Bernadett Puskás, and Vladislav Grešlík).Footnote ²

But surely it is not only icons that can give us food for thought. What is the inventory of musical instruments in the Carpatho-Rusyn regions and neighboring regions? Do the Lemkos use Galician or Subcarpathian chant in their services? Do they share the same songs and dances? What about patterns of vernacular and ecclesiastical architecture? Are the Carpatho-Rusyns eating the same dishes on both sides of the mountains? Or are the diets of the “Galician” Lemkos and “Hungarian” Rusyns more like that of their non-Rusyn neighbors? Culture, of course, is not some kind of finished, enclosed unit, and it is not necessarily determinative, but cultural factors do contribute to a feeling of kinship and, to some extent, to the formation of national identities.

With regard to the question of dietary culture, I should mention that Magocsi does propose an interesting hypothesis about the difference between Carpatho-Rusyns and Ukrainians based on the alcoholic beverages they traditionally consume. In all regions of the Carpatho-Rusyn homeland, grapes are grown and wine is made. Wine promotes “human interaction and social tolerance.” In much of Ukraine, however, hard alcohol is drunk instead, leading to “extremes of opinion, short tempers, and physical violence” (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2015, 9).

From my perspective, the most intriguing question about Carpatho-Rusyn nationality is why are the Galician Lemkos of historic Poland combined with the Subcarpathian Rusyns of historic Hungary, while the Boikos of Galicia are excluded? If it were simply a matter of a relative commonality of culture produced before the age of nationalism, I think it would be possible to argue that the Galician Boikos should also be included. And indeed, as Magocsi notes, this is one of the central arguments used by Ukrainian, and for that matter Russian, opponents of the Carpatho-Rusyn idea:

For those, often called “primordialists,” who view nationality as the natural product of the evolution of human cultures, this constitutes a powerful argument. For their intellectual opponents, the constructivists, with whom I have more sympathy, preexisting cultures are rather malleable and can be harnessed by activists to justify and produce a particular nation. The question I have is: why did the Carpatho-Rusyn national activists make the choice they did, that is, to unite the Galician Lemkos of historic Poland and the Subcarpathian Rusyns of historic Hungary but exclude the Boikos of Galicia?

The reason I could not remain within the four chapters assigned to me is that I found there too much tension between the history of the Lemkos and the history of the Rusyns of Habsburg Hungary. The book presents their histories in separate sections, and one wonders: if their historical experiences were so different, what unites them into a single nationality? Of course, the same question could be asked of Ukrainian history, since the historical experience of Red Rus’/Galicia was very different from that of the central and eastern Ukrainian lands for very long periods (at least from the mid-13th century to 1569 and from 1772 to 1939). This indicates that the business of defining what a particular nationality includes and excludes contains arbitrary elements. And the arbiters, ultimately, are the national activists who conceptualize the nation and who may have to defend their conceptualization against those who conceptualize differently, who make different choices with regard to exclusion and inclusion. This is the debate between the Ukrainian idea and the all-Russian idea and between the Carpatho-Rusyn idea and the Ukrainian idea.

In my assigned chapters, covering the years from 1772 to 1914, I did not notice any expression by Rusyn nationalist activists of a particular unity between the Lemkos and the Rusyns south of the mountains. I had to read ahead to the aftermath of World War I to find the first, and in my reading of it rather hazy, formulations of this sense of unity and to the collapse of Communism to find the complete and well-articulated program. It was not really until the late 1980s that Carpatho-Rusynism made the leap, to paraphrase Marx on the working class, from something an sich to a movement für sich. Lest there be any misunderstanding, I do not equate late arrival with invalidation. All of those phenomena which we call national consciousness have arrived rather late on the historical scene.

The exclusion of the Galician Boikos from the Carpatho-Rusyn collectivity is the other moment that calls for reflection. Magocsi confronts this issue head on, and with more than wine and vodka. Not surprisingly, the master of maps adduces a geographical explanation, one that seems very sensible to me: the mountains and the mountain passes are much lower on the Lemko region/Prešov region border than on the Subcarpathian Rusyn/Galician Boiko border, so people and cultural phenomena travel more easily back and forth across the former rather than across the latter (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2015, 11). I know from my own research that among the feudal obligations imposed on some Lemko villages was the duty to drive a cart across the Hungarian border to purchase barrels of wine. But I also know that Lemkos would travel to the Galician Boiko region on foot (it would take two or three days) to buy livestock in the spring to feed over the summer and sell in the fall. I think it would be interesting to explore such comings and goings in depth.

But beyond cultural links and geographical obstacles, it seems that a major factor forming the particular Carpatho-Rusyn constellation is political, namely the attitude to the Ukrainian orientation. The Galician Boikos accepted that orientation fairly early, certainly no later than the end of World War I and the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918–1919. But there had been at least a long-standing reluctance to accept and often an outright rejection of Ukrainian identity in the Lemko and Prešov regions and Subcarpathian Rus’. In these regions the Ukrainian orientation was not entirely absent, and Magocsi is dutiful in recording its institutions and periodicals, but it always had strong competition from the Magyarone and alternative East Slavic identity conceptions. Rusyn awakeners in the Hungarian Kingdom such as Aleksander Dukhnovych envisioned their people as part of a larger Rus’ in the east, that is, not just Ukraine but the whole Eastern Slavic Orthodox realm. The latter realm was subsequently transformed into proletarian Russia, especially for Lemkos in North America (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2015, 184–185).

With Their Backs to the Mountains continues its discussion of attitudes to the Ukrainian orientation. In interwar Subcarpathia “supporters of the Rusyn orientation at times suggested that the Carpatho-Rusyns were a separate Slavic nationality; usually, however, their ideology did not get much past the stage of negation, i.e., rejecting the Russian and Ukrainian viewpoints for an indefinable something else” (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2015, 212). The interwar Prešov region had closely related Russo- and Rusynophile movements; what was clear was the rejection of the Ukrainian orientation from Galicia and its “jargon” (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2015, 229). In interwar Poland the Lemko Apostolic Administration was decidedly anti-Ukrainophile (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2015, 238–239). Magocsi argues further that the Lemko Apostolic Administration created in 1936 sprang from internal challenges of the Greek Catholic church in the Lemko region partly generated by the success of the Ukrainian orientation elsewhere in southeastern Poland and that this was not just a Polish plot as Ukrainian historiography tends to maintain. The political antipathy to the Ukrainian orientation, an antipathy which had been powerful in these regions in the age of national awakening, played an important role in the emergence of Carpatho-Rusynism.

Interesting questions come out of this perspective. How did Carpatho-Rusynism survive four decades of Communist rule in which the Ukrainian orientation was imposed by all the regimes that ruled Carpathian Rus’? From reading the book, I draw the conclusion that the Lemkos and Rusyns of North America, who preserved a non-Ukrainian identity institutionalized in church structures and fraternal organizations, were important in reviving Carpatho-Rusynism in Poland, (Czecho)Slovakia, and Ukraine. This would not be unlike the important part the Ukrainian diaspora in North America played in reviving national and nationalist mindsets and institutions in Ukraine after 1989. And then there is this large question begging to be answered: what was it about the Ukrainian orientation that the Carpatho-Rusyns found off-putting?

There is no way that so many questions can be addressed in these brief comments. What is absolutely clear, however, is that an interesting book gives rise to interesting questions, questions that one hopes will set young scholars going for many years to come.