Dukhnovych Society

Dukhnovych Society (Общество им. А. Духновича; Obshchestvo im. A. Dukhnovicha). A Russophile cultural-educational society in Transcarpathia named after Oleksander Dukhnovych and founded in 1923 by Yosyf Kaminsky, Stepan Fentsyk, and others to compete with the Prosvita societies. For many years its president was Rev Yevmenii Sabov and its secretary was Fentsyk. Among its most active members were I. Hadzhega (the last president), Andrii Brodii, M. Demko, and Edmund Bachynsky. The society’s central offices were in Uzhhorod and Prešov. In its most active period (1934) the society had 315 reading rooms, 16 people's homes, 76 choirs, 39 orchestras, 19 sports clubs, over 200 amateur theater groups, a publishing house for popular books, and a scholarly-cultural monthly in Russian, Karpatskii svet (The Carpathian Light, 1928–33). The society held the so-called Days of Russian Culture. Publication and research were mostly in the hands of Russian émigrés; the society received financial aid from the Czechoslovak government. When the Hungarian government refused to support the Russophile movement in Transcarpathia, the society’s activities came to an end in Uzhhorod in 1939–40 and in Prešov in 1945.

Avhustyn Shtefan

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]