Fedor Vico (1944- )

Fedor Vico in 2007.  Photo: Michal Maňas

Since the Revolution of 1989, the Carpatho-Rusyns have experienced a veritable national revival in their European homeland.  Within less than two years, they have been officially recognized as a nationality in Czechoslovakia, and they have created organizations in that country as well as in Ukrainian Transcarpathia and the Lemko Region in Poland, where new organizations are working to improve the cultural and political status of Rusyns wherever they may live.  Not surprisingly, all this "political" activity has been carried out by self-appointed leaders who, perhaps more often than is necesssary, take themselves too seriously.  Fortunately, the Rusyn movement, most especially in Czechoslovakia, includes activists who know how to laugh at themselves and at others aroudn them.

Among the best-known of the present-day Rusyn cultural activists in Czechoslovakia is the artist and caricaturist Fedor Vico.  Vico was born in 1955 in Šapinec, a Carpatho-Rusyn village in the Prešov Region of northeastern Slovakia where both his parents functioned as village school teachers.  Although his paternal and maternal parents both came from Rusyn villages (Vyšné Čabiny and Krajná Bystra), their profession as teachers required that they move often.  Thus, Fedor and his older brother began their lives and schooling first in Rusyn villages, but they later moved to western Slovakia (Bratislava and Zvolen) and farther still to Prague.

As a young boy, Vico was always interested in drawing, and to perfect his natural talents he was trained at the School of Industrial Arts in Bratislava.  Another of his talents was a sense of irony and the ability to poke satirical fun at the contradictions between the claims of Communist propaganda and the harsh realities of life in Czechoslovakia.  His first political cartoons began to appear already in the early 1960s, and from 1965 through 1970, Vico became extremely popular through his series, "Dereš," which appeared in the Slovak magazine, Roháč.  This series featured the legendary Slovak Robin Hood figure, Janošík.  In Vico's hands, Janošík became an instrument to criticize the foibles of life in Slovakia.

Vico became best known among Rusyns through his series of political cartoons under the title "Iľko Sova z Bajusova" (Iľko the Owl from Bajusov - an imaginary Rusyn village), which appeared weekly from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s in Nove žyttja, the Ukrainian-language weekly newspaper published in Prešov.  In fact, Vico's cartoons were form many years the only texts in that newspaper which appeared in the Rusyn language.

After an early life of "wandering" with his teacher-parents, since the mid-1960s Vico has made his home in Prešov, where he works out of a modest ground-level studio located opposite the Rusyn Aleksander Duchnovyč Theatre.  From this base, Vico is known by his cartoons throughout Czechoslovakia and abroad.  Since the 1960s, his work has been exhibited in all the major cities of Czechoslovakia as well as several times abroad, in Turkey, Greece, Canada, Japan, Belgium and the Netherlands.  He has also won several awards at art competitons in Yugoslavia.  Since the Revolution of 1989, he has drawn political cartoons for the best Czech-language newspaper in the country, Prague's Lidové noviny, and in 1991 he founded with his brother a satirical magazine, Bumerang, published in Slovak by the Rusyn Renaissance Society (Русиньска Оброда) and distributed throughout the country in over 40,000 copies.

Despite his fame throughout Czechoslovakia and his widespread popularity in Prešov (there has even been talk that he should run in local elections because he would probably be elected mayor of the city), Vico remains a Rusyn patriot committed to the current national revival.  In a recent interview with a leading Czech magazine (MF Dnes Vikénd), Vico responded to a question about his Rusyn origins: "A lot of people in Slovakia don't even know what the word Rusyn means.  Until now it was thought that we were Ukrainians... however, there is a difference between Rusyns and Ukrainians.  They are by no means the same."

When in the summer of 1991, it was decided to publish a newspaper, Narodnŷ Novinkŷ (Народны Новинкы - The People's News), in the Rusyn language of the Prešov Region, it came as no surprise that the publisher, the Rusyn Renaissance Society, turned to Fedor Vico for the masthead design.  Nor did he disappoint them.  The Rusyn-language Narodnŷ Novinkŷ is one of the most attractive newspapers on stands in Czechoslovakia.  And, of course, each issue is graced with a cartoon that pokes fun at current problems that face Rusyns: inflation, unemployment, displeasure with post-Communist political life, and conflict with the local Ukrainian intelligentsia.  Through it all, Fedor Vico makes his readers laugh at themselves and thereby helps them get through another day.

Philip Michaels

MLA Citation: Michaels, Philip. "Fedor Vico (1944- )." Carpatho-Rusyn American XIV, no. 4 (1991): 3

Alexander Duchnovyč (1803-1865)

Alexander Duchnovyč (1803-1865)

Every nationality has some great leader that is considered the father of his people.  Among Carpatho-Rusyns that person is Alexander Duchnovyč.  Because of his dominant role in the nineteenth-century Subcarpathian national renaissance, Duchnovyč has been remembered as the "national awakener of the Carpatho-Rusyns."

Duchnovyč was born in 1803 in the village of Topoľa (Zemplyn county) within the Rusyn-inhabited Prešov Region of present-day eastern Slovakia.  He attended the Greek Catholic seminary in Užhorod and was soon after ordained into the priesthood.  Like other students at the time, Duchnovyč was educated in the Magyar and Latin languages and was expected to be a Hungarian patriot.  The young clergyman realized, however, that his Rusyn people were linguistically and culturally related to other eastern Slavs and that they were in dire need of enlightenment.  He frequently stated that "a people without an education cannot call itself a people."  To help change this situation, he published a Reader for Beginners (1847), the first school textbook published in the local Rusyn vernacular (i.e., spoken speech).

The revolutionary years of 1848-1849 really allowed for the development of Duchnovyč's national activity.  He set up the first cultural organization for Carpatho-Rusyns (the Prešov Literary Society, 1850), published the first annual literary almanacs (Greetings for the Rusyns, 1850-1856), and wrote a popular poem ("Subcarpathian Rusyns, Arise from your Deep Slumber") which was to become the national anthem.  He also composed a grammar, a book on pedagogy, a history of the Prešov Diocese, and a history of the Carpatho-Rusyn people.

Duchnovyč wrote these influential works in different languages, depending on for whom they were intended.  In his poetry, plays, and school textbooks meant for the people, he used the Rusyn vernacular of his native region.  For his histories, critical essays, and sermons, he used either Latin or a language called Slaveno-Rusyn, which was Church-Slavonic mixed with some Carpatho-Rusyn vernacular and sometimes Great Russian words.

The Carpatho-Rusyn people have not forgotten the father of their nation.  After 1919, when Subcarpathia Rus' became a semiautonomous province of Czechoslovakia, statues to Duchnovyč were erected in Sevljuš (1925), Užhorod (1929), Chust (1931), and the largest in Prešov (1933), which still stands on the main square of that city.  Even Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants erected a statue to Duchnovyč in the nationalities park in Cleveland, Ohio.  Finally, at the one-hundredth anniversary of his death (1965), a three-day scholarly conference was held in Prešov, and one of his plays was revived for the repertoire of the local professional Carpatho-Rusyn theater.  Duchnovyč would have been pleased by such developments.  And he would have felt his life-long work was really worth the effort if his people and their descendants both in Europe and America could always really the opening lines to his most famous poem, "Vručanie" (Dedication, 1851):

I was, am, and will be a Rusyn

I will not forget my honorable lineage,

And will remain its son.

MLA Citation: "Alexander Duchnovyč (1803-1851)." Carpatho-Rusyn American 1, no. 1 (1976): 3

Welcome / Вiтайте

This blog is being launched on 26 October, coinciding with the day designated by the Carpatho-Rusyn Consortium of North America as Carpatho-Rusyn Day in North America.  The journal Carpatho-Rusyn American was published quarterly from 1976 to 1996 by the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center, Inc. as a forum on Carpatho-Rusyn ethnic heritage.

When it was first published, the Carpatho-Rusyn American had a great impact on the development of Rusyn scholarship in the English language, and was the main communication vehicle for the revival of a Carpatho-Rusyn cultural movement in North America.  Later, it brought news of the post-communist Rusyn cultural revival in Central Europe -- all the while bringing together American Rusyns separated by not only geographic distance, but also the forces of history that were described in its pages.

This project, to reprint Carpatho-Rusyn American as a blog and to give it new audiences, is guided by the first editorial, by Patricia Krafcik in 1976:

"But our interest in ethnicity is not limited to dreaming.  Now we can explore Rusyn ethnicity in academic surroundings, by observing and recording those traditions to which our people still cling in this country and in the old country, and by studying the language of our parents and grandparents.  The Rusyn cultural heritage is rich and varied.  It is a precious possession which we can preserve by sharing it with each other.  Let us, the young people, together with our parents and our grandparents dedicate this newsletter to that endeavor."

Carpatho-Rusyn American will post on Tuesdays and Thursdays, until the original content runs out.  To facilitate easy use of these texts in academic work, each post will be accompanied by an MLA citation from the original printed form.