Goodbye, Eastern Europe

Informationen zum Autor Jacob Mikanowski Klappentext In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communismilluminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history. "Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide-ranging history defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering. Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour of the various peoples who made Eastern Europe their home over the centuries, including the Roma, Jews, and Muslims; the great kingdoms of the medieval period; the rise and fall of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires; the dawn of the modern era; the ravages of fascism and Communism; the birth of the modern nation-state and beyond. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family's past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity and eclecticism, and of people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating. The result is a loving and ebullient celebration of the distinctive and vibrant cultures that stubbornly persisted at the margins of Western Europe and Russia, and a powerful corrective that re-centers not only our understanding of how the modern Western world took shape but also the ways in which Eastern Europe has evolved throughout history to become what it is today. Leseprobe Part I Faiths 1 Pagans and Christians A great forest, bristling with dangers and the occasional gleam of treasure: that is how the territories of Eastern Europe must have appeared to the average Roman in the time of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. To them, the lands north of the imperial frontiers were largely a mystery. Marcus himself traveled north of the Danube in A.D. 170, to fight a war against a confederation of barbarian tribes. He began writing his Meditations there, camped out with his solders by the banks of the River Hron, in what is now Slovakia. This work, a classic of Stoic philosophy, might be the first piece of literature written in Eastern Europe. Marcus did not mention his surroundings even once, but that should not strike us as too surprising. The territories north of the Roman Empire were empty of cities, writing, temples, or any of the other markers that would have indicated the presence of civilized life to someone arriving there from the shores of the Mediterranean. As far as the Romans were concerned, these cold and rather frightening lands were sources of two things and two things alone: inexhaustible hordes of enemies, and a lightweight precious stone called electrum, or amber. I used to have a cigar box that belonged to my grandfather. It was full of the rough orange pebbles of raw amber that he had gathered with my father on Polish beaches. All along the shores of the southern Baltic, from Denmark to Estonia, amber is just that easy to find: you just have to go to the beach after a storm, or know where to dig in the sand. The routes that brought this precious stone, so mysteriously radiant and light, to the shores of the Mediterranean were already old by the time Marcus Aurelius arrived. A century earlier, during the reign of the ...

Autorentext

Jacob Mikanowski

Klappentext

In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism—illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history.

"Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide-ranging history defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering.

Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour of the various peoples who made Eastern Europe their home over the centuries, including the Roma, Jews, and Muslims; the great kingdoms of the medieval period; the rise and fall of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires; the dawn of the modern era; the ravages of fascism and Communism; the birth of the modern nation-state and beyond.

A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family’s past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity and eclecticism, and of people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating. The result is a loving and ebullient celebration of the distinctive and vibrant cultures that stubbornly persisted at the margins of Western Europe and Russia, and a powerful corrective that re-centers not only our understanding of how the modern Western world took shape but also the ways in which Eastern Europe has evolved throughout history to become what it is today.

Leseprobe
Part I

Faiths

1

Pagans and Christians

A great forest, bristling with dangers and the occasional gleam of treasure: that is how the territories of Eastern Europe must have appeared to the average Roman in the time of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. To them, the lands north of the imperial frontiers were largely a mystery. Marcus himself traveled north of the Danube in A.D. 170, to fight a war against a confederation of barbarian tribes. He began writing his Meditations there, camped out with his solders by the banks of the River Hron, in what is now Slovakia. This work, a classic of Stoic philosophy, might be the first piece of literature written in Eastern Europe. Marcus did not mention his surroundings even once, but that should not strike us as too surprising. The territories north of the Roman Empire were empty of cities, writing, temples, or any of the other markers that would have indicated the presence of civilized life to someone arriving there from the shores of the Mediterranean. As far as the Romans were concerned, these cold and rather frightening lands were sources of two things and two things alone: inexhaustible hordes of enemies, and a lightweight precious stone called electrum, or amber.

I used to have a cigar box that belonged to my grandfather. It was full of the rough orange pebbles of raw amber that he had gathered with my father on Polish beaches. All along the shores of the southern Baltic, from Denmark to Estonia, amber is just that easy to find: you just have to go to the beach after a storm, or know where to dig in the sand. The routes that brought this precious stone, so mysteriously radiant and light, to the shores of the Mediterranean were already old by the time Marcus Aurelius arrived. A century earlier, during the reign of the emperor Nero, a Roman knight had set out north from a frontier post in what is now Austria. He had orders to bring back as much amb…