Eastern Europe is now a periphery like any other - a bit provincial, a bit slow, but mostly calm, almost sedate. After all, what does Albania have in common with Estonia, or Belarus with Slovenia? Besides being fragments of long-vanished empires, they share almost nothing in terms of culture, economy, or creed. If the fall of the Iron Curtain removed the geopolitical rationale for studying the region, it also removed the main thing binding it together. Maybe it was only a figment of the Cold War imagination. You never know if they’re going to be a world-weary janitor (a Pole), a captivating fraud (a Hungarian), a post-Communist gangster (a Serb), or a source of erotic awakening for a literary-minded man (a Czech for Americans, any of the above for residents of Ireland and the United Kingdom).īut then again, perhaps Eastern Europe never existed in the first place. I know a distinguished scholar of the region, a historian who teaches a regular course on Eastern European history, who told me that every year he has to answer questions from his students about whether people actually love and laugh in this “gray place.” It’s always a bit humiliating to read an English-language book with an Eastern European character. Since then, Eastern Europe has been reduced to a backdrop for other people’s fantasies. Gone are the days of Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series or Susan Sontag exhorting us to read Danilo Kiš while we still had time. Literary translations, despite the heroic work of imprints like Twisted Spoon Press and the New York Review of Books Classics series, have likewise slowed to a trickle. Cinema imports - barring the occasional Ida or Romanian breakthrough - have all but stopped. Faculty positions have all but disappeared. As a field of academic study, it is in crisis. With its distinctiveness succumbing to the homogenizing forces of globalization and prosperity, Eastern Europe is in the process of being forgotten. Where are the half-wooden Trabants and miniature Fiats of yesteryear? They watch the same things, drive the same cars. How would you know that you aren’t in Bremen, Charleroi, Newcastle, or Fargo? The stores are all the same. Go to Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bratislava, Wrocław, Debrecen, Timișoara, or Tallinn. Whatever held the region together in the mind’s eye - a shared experience of occupation and exclusion, the permanent-seeming weight of economic backwardness, treasured memories of defeat - is gone, or at least not as present as it had been.

March of empires war of lords review