Authors

Discussion

This paper addresses the Ukrainian linguistic identity of the Hutsul literary elite, which stems from the celebration, not oppression, of their non-standard variety by a literary elite that speaks a more prestigious/standard variety of Ukrainian. I look at the early 20th-century Southeast Hutsul dialect of Ukrainian found within the Carpathian Mountains and compare the awakening of vernacular-written literature in sub-ethnic Ukrainian communities in remote mountainous regions that considered themselves Ukrainians, such as Hutsuls, with sub-ethnic Ukrainian communities in remote mountainous regions that came to take the path of a political entity, such as Carpatho-Rusyns. Ukrainian writers Hnat Xotkevyč and Myxajlo Kocjubyns’kyj, who originated from Russian-ruled Ukraine, incorporated Southeast Hutsul elements in their 1911 and 1913 texts, respectively. They showed proper understanding of culture, giving Hutsuls credit by learning the dialect. I argue that this helped make Hutsuls imaginable as a community within the broader Ukrainian community, which was later advanced by native speakers and authors of Southeast Hutsul, such as Onufrij Mančuk, Petro Šekeryk-Donykiv, and Paraska Plytka-Horycvit. With this respect, I focus on the language mentality of a native speaker in terms of Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue (see Lebedivna 2021) and show that the Southeast Hutsul literary elite perceived their native dialect as unfolding along the I‑Thou relation, integrating it into the national Ukrainian language. I analyze literary texts, letters, diaries, and opinion pieces. This approach helps explain the correlation between a (modern) strong sense of belonging to the broader Ukrainian community and a tendency towards including Southeast Hutsul phonological and phonetic features into prose writing in the 1920s–1930s within the Ukrainian national cause. Chronologically, this intersects with the Polish attempts to promote a separate Hutsul ethnicity (see Dabrowski 2021: 116–117 and Statut 1934: 4–6), which eventually proved unsuccessful. 

The Polish government, however, succeeded in cultivating a distinct Lemko (Carpatho-Rusyns) linguistic identity: having been funded by the state, the Lemko organizations took steps in standardizing the dialect so that the first primer (1935) and a reader (1936) were introduced to elementary schools (Magocsi 2015: 237–238; see Danylenko 2020). Carpatho-Rusyn demonstrates an opposite model, whence a more prestigious/standard variety approves the codification of another, less prestigious, variety. For example, before Poland it was Moscow that recognized “the new (Ruthenian) version of Church Slavonic,” which constituted the first Slaveno-Rusyn grammar (1788) (Danylenko 2006: 122).