Folklorica FULL 2025


  Reviews  123 
 

FOLKLORICA 2025, Vol. XXIX       

Krafcik, Patricia A. Witnesses to Interwar Subcarpathian Rus’: The Sojourns of 
Petr Bogatyrev and Ivan Olbracht. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2024. Notes. 
Bibliography. Index. Map. x + 317 pp. $130 (hardback). $117 (e-book). ISBN 
9781666931709 (hardback). ISBN 9781666931716 (e-book). 
 

This richly detailed volume offers literary and scholarly biographies of two 
figures who did significant work in and related to the Subcarpathian Rus’ region 
of Czechoslovakia (Transcarpathia in other nomenclatures) in the interwar period. 
It will not replace full biographies, which are otherwise lacking for both figures 
in English, but it offers a rich contextualization of their work on the region in 
relation to their larger life trajectories and political and social contexts and serves 
as a comprehensive introduction for folklorists and specialists with an interest in 
Rusyn studies. 

Petr Grigorievich Bogatyrev (1893–1971) came to Prague in 1921, 
following a brief time in Berlin, already a graduate of Moscow University and a 
budding ethnographer and folklorist. He took a position as a translator with the 
newly established Soviet Embassy through the mediation of his close friend 
Roman Jakobson (37) but soon began ethnographic expeditions to the 
Subcarpathian Rus’ region through the support of the Czech Academy of 
Sciences. The theoretical ideas that underlay his interpretive practice coalesced 
within the Prague Linguistic Circle (est. 1926) with its structuralist approach. He 
continued his fieldwork in the 1930s while teaching at Comenius University in 
Bratislava and only returned to the Soviet Union in early 1940 (to rejoin his wife 
and child, who had left in 1928). As Krafcik and others portray him, Bogatyrev 
had great sympathies for the folk, but his scholarly concerns and interests 
superseded politics. He remained largely apolitical even as he was eyewitness to 
the tumult of the century (his first return to Prague was in 1968 and was 
interrupted by the Warsaw Pact invasion).  

In contrast, Ivan Olbracht (pseud. of Kamil Zeman, 1882–1952) was a 
journalist and brilliant writer with strong political convictions. A co-founder of 
the Czech Communist Party in 1921 (he visited the Soviet Union for six months 
in 1920) and chief editor of its news organ Rudé právo from 1926–27, he was 
expelled in 1929 for his anti-Bolshevik views (118-124). He first visited the 
Subcarpathian Rus’ region in 1931, eager to investigate conflicting accounts of 
the economic transformation there pursued by the Czechoslovak government, and 
continued to visit frequently until 1936, publishing ethnographic reportage and 
literary works set in the region and portraying its Rusyn and Jewish inhabitants 
(his Jewish mother had converted in order to marry, 181). Olbracht hid in a small 
village in southern Bohemia during the Nazi occupation, readopting his given 
name, which was not associated with his communist political activities, as cover 
(258), and worked on screenplays and story adaptations for children. Following 
the war, he rejoined the Communist Party, became a member of its Central 
Committee for the remainder of his life, and served as Minister of Information 
from 1945–49 (277). 



  Reviews  124 
 

FOLKLORICA 2025, Vol. XXIX       

Bogatyrev and Olbracht may have crossed paths in the Prague Linguistic 
Circle of the 1920s (203), and when Bogatyrev began his study of the brigand 
folklore of the region he referenced Olbracht’s novelistic account (213), but there 
is no evidence of any real contact between the two. They are nonetheless united 
by their interest in the region and its way of life and remain two of the most 
important sources on this from the period before that way of life was to 
dramatically change. Subcarpathia was a multilingual, multiethnic region in 
which traditional lifeways still dominated, though these were facing significant 
pressures of modernization from the new Czechoslovak state, including divisive 
questions of national identity given the diverse population that included Slavs, 
Germans, Hungarians, Jews, and Roma. As Krafcik importantly reminds readers, 
while the region was often seen as backwards, “ancient,” and exotic, it also had a 
history of an emergent high culture (10). Bogatyrev was primarily interested in 
traditional folkways. While he likely shared some of the ethnographer’s temporal 
prejudice about the ancient aspect of these, he interpreted magical acts and rites 
from a synchronic perspective based upon the functions and meanings they had 
for their contemporary practitioners, not as vestiges of ancient beliefs. Olbracht’s 
interest was political, directed against the bourgeois Czechoslovak state’s colonial 
practices, motivated by concern for the residents’ rights and freedom, and marked 
by great sympathy for their way of life. 

Bogatyrev and Olbracht’s sojourns resulted in an impressive list of 
significant publications and cultural products. Both penned notable ethnographic 
studies: Olbracht’s ethnographic reportage from the region was collected in two 
volumes, Země bez jména [Land without a Name] (1932) and Hory a staletí 
[Mountains and Centuries] (1935). Bogatyrev published ethnographic reports and 
his major study, Actes magiques, rites et croyances en Russie subcarpathique 
[Magical Actions, Rites, and Beliefs in Subcarpathian Rus’] (1929). Their 
overlapping interest in brigand tales and songs resulted in Olbracht’s major 
novelization of the life of a recent brigand, Nikola Šuhaj—loupežník [Nikola the 
Outlaw] (1933), and several articles and a book by Bogatyrev. Olbracht also wrote 
stories set in the region, including among the Jewish population in the volume 
Golet v údolí [Exile in the Valley] (1937), which included the masterful “The 
Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karadjich,” and a major motion picture, Marijka 
nevěřnice [Marijka the Unfaithful] (1934) on which he collaborated with the 
writer Vladislav Vančura and the composer Bohuslav Martinů.  

Krafcik provides readers with an information-packed, balanced account of 
their lives and detailed overviews of their works. This is an important introduction 
to two major figures who helped the world to come to better know a region that 
has had real significance in national movements, and in a moment before it was 
utterly transformed by WWII.  

David L. Cooper 
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
Urbana, Illinois  
dlcoop@illinois.edu