Fallacious images of imperial periphery

Русины Австрийской империи в дневниках и воспоминаниях русских офицеров — участников Венгерского похода 1849 года / cост., вступ. ст. и комм. к. и. н. М. Ю. Дронова. — М., 2020. — 160 с.

Abstract

The review is devoted to a collection of memoirs of Russian officers of the mid-19th century, compiled by Mikhail Yu. Dronov. The author of the review comes to the conclusion that these memories not only describe real Rusyns, but also broadcast, sometimes far from reality, the image of the imperial periphery (although Galicia and Ugrian Rus’, which the officers wrote about, were not part of the Russian Empire directly, they not only bordered on it, but were also culturally associated with it, due to a significant share of the East Slavic population). The degree of distortion of these images was different. One of the officers even attributed the “Carpathian Slavs” to the Slovaks. Another officer tried to decipher the long speech of the alleged Rusyn addressed to him in Hungarian, from which only the phrase “Wallachian faith” was understood, etc. The review notes that similar cases of Russians ignoring basic information about the peripheral regions of the empire that were observed in other places, for example, in the Caucasus, and even gave rise to a series of anecdotes in the Cossack regions. A publication of similar collections about other areas of the periphery of the Russian Empire seems to be an interesting and promising area of research.

Received: 11.11.2021.

Citation
Peretyatko A. Yu. Fallacious images of imperial periphery // Slavic Almanac. 2022. No 1–2. P. 447–455 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31168/2073- 5731.2022.1-2.5.03