The Hutsul Springtime of Nations by Kajetan Abgarowicz: the discourse of the borderland as a state of culture awareness

Abstract

This literary study of the Carpathian manifestation of The Springtime of Nations (1848-1849) is based of the short story “At the Hunting Campfire” from the collection “Rusini” [The Rusins] by Kajetan Abgarowicz (Abgar-Soltan), a Polish writer of Armenian descent of the late 19th - early 20th century. The imagological reflection of public sentiments of the 19th century is analysed through the lens of the discourse of the borderland as a state of culture awareness: the Polish (“ours” from the perspective of the Polish author) and “theirs” (i.e. Hutsul). The authors determine the Carpathian society before The Springtime of Nations as cultural borderlands of the Polish, Hutsul, German, Jewish, and Gypsy ethnic groups coexisted in daily life, with their fundamental values unchanged. They argue that the Hutsul community unconditionally accepted the imperative the Austrian highlanders, the model of neighborhood with the Poles, and trusting relations with the gypsies, but infernally mythologized of the Germans in the person of the local officer and his entourage. The focus is placed on the peculiarities of the Hutsul reception of news about the uprising against the Habsburgs outside the Carpathians and the development of the revolutionary events of the local “strange spring” in the contezt of the confrontation between the highlanders and the local authorities during the Carpathian stay of the Hungarian army, which rebelled against the Austrian emperor. The impact of revolutionary events on the HutsuL community is analyzed within their cultural identity awareness as of representatives of a separate ethnic group with its own history of resistance in in the context of opryshoks, an unusual, non-Polish cultural landscape, axiology, and ontology. In his “At the Hunting Campfire”, Kajetan Abgarowicz creates a literary version of the The Springtime of Nations in the Carpathians, with a new Look on the dialogue in the relationship between “our” and “their” cultural universes.