In the midst of a contentious atmosphere of the interwar period, the far-eastern province of Subcarpathian Rus’ attracted the personal curiosity and professional attention of Russian ethnographer and theoretician Petr Bogatyrev and Czech journalist-writer Ivan Olbracht. Both traveled extensively in the region and immersed themselves deeply in the life and culture of the local residents, Carpatho-Rusyns, and Hasidic Jews. explores for the first time in English the legacy they bequeathed in their respective work: Bogatyrev as an apolitical ethnographic collector and theoretician and Olbracht as a passionately committed Communist whose reports and brilliant stories from the region, including and capture a glimpse of a world destined to change radically as a result of the ravages of war.