With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus' and Carpatho-Rusyns by Paul Robert Magocsi (review)

Paul Robert Magocsi is a well-known and influential, but also somewhat controversial historian. Throughout his career, he has focused not only on scholarly analysis but also on activism concerning the culture, history, and future of the people he identifies as Carpatho-Rusyns. The Carpatho-Rusyns of Magocsi's works are numerous but often forgotten or ignored inhabitants of a large territory in Central and Eastern Europe, who have never had an internationally recognized administrative structure devoted to the protection of their needs and rights. The book under review is a comprehensive introduction to the history of Carpathian Rus' and Carpatho-Rusyns – that is, to the region in the central part of Europe divided today by several nation-states – and to the people who have ancestral links to this region, wherever they might happen to live today.

On the first pages of the book Magocsi explains his choice of the title as well as the relation of this study to his popular 2006 book, The People from Nowhere. This earlier work was conceptualized as a brief, illustrated and easily comprehensible introduction to the history and culture of the Carpatho-Rusyns. Aimed at a broad audience, it explained that there are people in the center of Europe with a distinct and respectable culture, who, nevertheless, have never had their own state or even a single common name. The title of that book provoked criticism from some Carpatho-Rusyn patriots, who did not appreciate the pun. Responding to this criticism, the book under review declares from the outset that Carpatho-Rusyns are from somewhere, namely from Carpathian Rus', on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains.

This new book is intended to become a fuller, more comprehensive handbook on the history and culture of Carpatho-Rusyns, written as a general introduction for students and all interested readers who have no prior knowledge of the subject. The basis for this work was a series of lectures given during the summer course at the University of Prešov (Slovakia) in 2010, and a yearlong course at the University of Toronto in 2011–2012. It is divided into thirty relatively short chapters, which are mostly chronologically arranged. References are scarce in the book, provided only for direct

quotations and some statistical data. This was probably meant to make the text more reader-friendly, but it greatly compromises the book's scholarly merit. The book also contains thirty-four very informative and well-prepared maps. Most of them come from previous publications by Magocsi: Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (1993) and Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture (2002) (coedited with Ivan Pop). Dozens of text inserts (one- or two-page-long subsections highlighted by a background color) present simple summaries of important themes in very accessible language. The book concludes with a useful section "For further reading," which is intended to direct readers to selected works on the history and culture of Carpatho-Rusyns; these are mostly, though not exclusively, in English. This is definitely a useful initial resource for people interested in the region.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to the land and the people. Already on the first page the reader finds a table that juxtaposes "official data" with an "informed estimate" of numbers of Carpatho-Rusyns ca. 2012. In a note the author explains that the "official data" are taken from national censuses, while the method of assessing the "informed estimates" for particular countries is explained in his other works, including The People from Nowhere. I looked it up in this earlier book but, unfortunately, found neither a satisfactory explanation for the estimates nor any references to other sources. I must say that referring readers to other works that also do not contain a thorough explanation, especially given the huge discrepancy between the "official data" and "informed estimate" (110,750 vs...