Juhász  Katalin

Juhász  Katalin

a Ph.D. in History, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology (Research Centre for the Humanities, HAS), a folk singer, an editor at the «DANKÓ» Folk Music Canal of the Hungarian Radio (Budapest, Hungary).

ORCID ID: https://orcid. org/0009-0007-8238-3584

Abstract

Traditional wartime songs of soldiers and recruits have become especially popular during Russia’s nowaday armed aggression against Ukraine. In the Hungarian folk-song space, there have been functioning long-running folk soldier songs, in which the Russian army attacks Hungarians. Those songs are often included in the programmes of modern folk bands and performers. They were already found in the folklore of the anti-Habsburg movement led by Lajos Kossuth in 1848–1849, however, there are obviously also a lot of them among the works on the First World War, in particular about events on the territory of modern Poland and Halychyna. With the beginning of World War I, Halychyna almost immediately became a theatre of military operations, the front line repeatedly went through it, heavy battles of varying success between the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian army continued there, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers died.

The purpose of our research is analysing the WWI-period soldiers’ songs of anti-Russian orientation and considering their main types, themes, motifs, variants, etc. So, works about recruitment, marches and drills, soldiers’ lamentations, the course of the war, songs on peace, etc. are distinguished. The article examines collecting and researching the songs, a contribution of famous folklorists to the recording of their texts and melodies, as well as a link to listen to sound recordings from the online archive. It also provides a link to listening to sound recordings from the online archive. The authoress clarifies the issue of origin, rehash and actualization of texts, problems of historicism, etc. She also exemplifies the mentioned themes with several most typical texts that most vividly depict the emotions and thoughts of soldiers who gave their lives for the freedom of the country. These works not only form a kind of bridge between the past and the present but also indicate the common vicissitudes of fates of Hungarians and Ukrainians, who stand up to defending the Fatherland in the face of Russian conquest.

Keywords: soldiers’ songs, Hungary, Russian enemy, collection, research, subject matter.

References

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