Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) - Softcover

Mikanowski, Jacob

 
9781984898098: Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1984898094 ISBN 13: 9781984898098
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JACOB MIKANOWSKI is a historian, a freelance journalist and a critic. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Aeon, Cabinet, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, The New York Times, newyorker.com, The Point, The Awl, Atlas Obscura, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Berkeley, CA.

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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 amber as he could buy; the emperor needed it to decorate his new Colosseum. The knight traveled north hundreds of miles, to the shores of the Baltic. To everyone’s amazement, he returned with wagonloads of the stuff, pieces the size of pumpkins, enough to decorate the whole amphitheater, down to the knobs on the nets that protected spectators from the wild animals raging within.

The trade in amber between the Baltic and the Mediterranean dates back at least to the Bronze Age. But in this case, commerce did not foster connection. These voyages left only the faintest mark in Eastern Europe—​at most, a few fragile traces: buttons from an equestrian’s uniform found next to a Polish lake, a cavalry helmet in a Lithuanian tomb. And Roman coins—​a profusion of coins. These were not used as money in the countries in which they were received. They were treasure in a truer, purer sense—tokens from another world. In the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania (an area that’s especially rich in amber), there are ancient cemeteries in which every grave contains at least one shiny brass sestertius. These coins were placed next to the head of the deceased, in vessels made from the bark of the sacred birch tree, intended as payment for a Baltic ferryman to the underworld whose name has been lost to time.

A flash of silver unearthed by a plow: that is how the ancient world appears in most of the countries of Eastern Europe. Otherwise, silence. History arrives only with the advent of Christianity and, with it, the written word. Before then, we know hardly anything for certain. Here, the Dark Ages were truly dark: north of the old Roman frontier, almost impenetrably so. But even to the south, the gloom is difficult to penetrate. When the Slavs arrived, in the desperate decades of war, famine, and plague that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, they seemed to come from nowhere, and then, all of a sudden, to be everywhere at once.

Today Slavic languages are spoken in a vast chunk of Europe, from Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia in the south to Poland and all of Russia to the north. This is a vast territory, but only some of it seems to have been inhabited by Slavic-speakers from an early date. The first mentions of the Slavs in ancient sources came toward the end of the sixth century. By the year 1000, they were present everywhere from northern Greece to the edge of Finland.

But where did the Slavs come from? This question vexes historians, since it has no solution but many competing claims. For many decades, the answer depended on who you were. Russians insisted that the Slavs came from Russia, Ukrainians said they came from Ukraine, and Poles said they came from Poland. Then for a time, a loose consensus emerged placing the Slavic homeland in Polesia, a region of endless wetlands stretching along the length of the border between Ukraine and Belarus. I used to imagine them emerging out of a bog wearing great leather waders, with water dripping down their mustaches, ready to conquer Thessaloniki as soon as they toweled off.

This is no longer the preferred view. Today, the cutting-edge theory is that the Slavs came from what is now Romania, rather paradoxically, since there are no Slavic-speakers there today (Romanian is a Romance language). According to this interpretation, they coalesced as a result of the Eastern Roman Empire’s bottomless need for manpower to staff the forts lining the Danubian frontier. There is much to recommend this view, but we will never know for sure. The early Slavs had few notable leaders and no great chroniclers. They came not as a flood but in a series of smaller streams. In the words of one historian, theirs was an “obscure progression,” visible only in sporadic moments, illuminated by a dull and flickering flame.

A similar murkiness clings to Slavic beliefs. We know very little about their mythology or rituals—only that they were pagans and worshipped a pantheon of gods. But when the Christian priests arrived to drive out the old ways, no one thought it worthwhile to record them. One of the paradoxes of religious history in Eastern Europe is that paganism lasted so long there, yet we know so little about it. There is no Slavic equivalent to the great compendium of Norse myth preserved in the Icelandic Edda, or the Celtic tales contained in the Welsh Mabinogion or the Irish Táin. All we have are fragments, recorded by hostile witnesses.

One of the first such testimonies comes from, of all places, Sicily. Around A.D. 700, a Slavic raiding party was taken prisoner by the local militia. An enterprising bishop asked its members what they believed in. By means of a translator, they replied that they worshipped “fire, water, and their own swords.” Almost seven hundred years later, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was still being ruled by practicing pagans who believed something very similar. A vast realm that incorporated much of today’s Belarus and Ukraine, Lithuania was the last country in Europe to give up the old faith. In 1341, when Grand Duke Gediminas died, he was buried in the full, cruel splendor of the pagan rite: burned to ash on a giant pyre, along with his favorite weapons, slaves, dogs, and horses, and a few German Crusaders thrown in for good measure. When the whole thing caught fire, Gediminas’s fellow pagan lords cried out in sorrow and pelted the flames with the claws of lynxes and bears.

Two hundred years later, hardly anything of this pagan faith remained. At most, Polish and Lithuanian chroniclers could recall a few hallowed names. During the Renaissance, humanist scholars amused themselves by inventing ever more elaborate pantheons for their pagan ancestors. To the old gods of thunder, cattle, and grain, they added deities in charge of hogs and wives, a god (and goddess) of beekeeping, as well as humbler spirits to watch...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1984898094
ISBN 13 
9781984898098
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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