Mixed Identity. Some Theoretical Aspects of Research on Eastern Carpathian Border Area

Abstract

The paper deals with relationship between Slovak and Ukrainian literatures and cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries in the Eastern Carpathian border area. The author considers this particularly multiethnic region as one of the relatively independent cultural areas of the Central Europe. The Slovak literature since the mid-19th century shows this space as a heterotopia. Narrative perspectives of a stranger, outcast, migrant in combination with the themes of border and conflict between local and strangers are characteristic for the literary image of the Eastern Carpathian border area in the 20th century. The paper explores the issue of parallel processes of ‘national revival’ (such as Slovak, Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Hungarian) in the ethnically heterogeneous area of eastern Slovakia where the process of cultural and ethnic self-identification followed a much more complex trajectory compared to the ‘core’ areas inhabited by the respective ethnic groups. The Slavonic ethnic groups failed to conclude this process in the course of the 19th century or, indeed, even in the first half of the 20th century. Following the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the establishment of Czechoslovakia, the new state’s liberal national policies encouraged greater competition between certain cultural and linguistic orientations among the inhabitants of eastern Slovakia (pro-Ukrainian, pro-Russian and pro-Ruthenian orientation). This situation was also reflected in works of Slovak and especially Czech literature. Slovak-Ukrainian cultural contacts are currently receiving many new ideas and their research can be based on theoretical background of postcolonialism, selfcolonization theory and geopoetics.