The Quest for the Rusyn Soul: The Politics of Religion and Culture in Eastern Europe and in America, World War I, 1890 by Keith P. Dyrud

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The Rusyns are East Slavs living in Europe on the border between East and West. In the present study, Keith P. Dyrud portrays the Rusyns as a people in search of identity. Until the sixteenth century, the Rusyns were Eastern Orthodox Christians, but in the 1500s they came under the jurisdiction of Poland and Austria-Hungary. With this new jurisdiction came a new religion, as they were united with Catholic Christianity. Divided by the Carpathian mountain range, the Subcarpathian Rusyns were influenced by Hungarian and Slovak culture, while those in Galicia (on the north side of the Carpathians) were influenced by Polish and Ukrainian cultures. The development of nationalistic movements in Eastern Europe and the migration of many Rusyns to the United States were critical experiences in the evolution of the Rusyns' ethnic cultural awareness. After the revolutions of 1848, the Rusyn intellectuals became intensely interested in their national and cultural identity. Those in Galicia could choose from among a Polish, Russian, or emerging Ukrainian identity, while the Rusyns in Subcarpathia were pressured to adopt a Magyar (Hungarian) identity. In the 1850s and 1860s, many Rusyn intellectuals turned to Russia for a literary language and a cultural identity. The Subcarpathian and Galician Russians, however, were unable to establish a common cultural identity beyond a flirtation with Russian culture. In Galicia at the turn of the century, the Ukrainian movement became a popular movement, but this movement was never accepted among the Subcarpathian Rusyns. The Subcarpathians searched for an identity compatible with their experience, but such an identity did not emerge until after the First World War. Frustrated by the Latin bishops, the early Rusyn immigrants to America rediscovered Orthodoxy and became candidates for conversion to Russian Orthodoxy and thus a focus for the reemergence of Pan-Slavism. Conversion to Orthodoxy meant adopting the Russian cultural identity. S

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