Transnational Selfhood?: Aleksander Dukhnovych’s Carpatho-Rusyn National Identity as a Mode of Lyric Subjectivity

This paper extends a set of hypotheses about lyric subjectivity, developed on the basis of a more or less traditional canon of modern European poetry to a very different case, that of a figure whose cultural fame was defined less by his poetic prowess than by his championing of the interests of a small, marginalized people living in the borderlands of Eastern Europe, known as the Carpatho-Rusyns. A preliminary finding is that Dukhnovych uses tropes in his poetry that metaphorize and dramatize the emergence of Rusyn identity into the broader imagined community of Europe. Moreover, these tropes imply a model of national identity that is more open and fluid than the majority of European models that emerged in the same time period.