Goodbye, Eastern Europe
An Intimate History of a Divided Land
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Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this ambitious debut, journalist Mikanowski draws on his ancestral connections to Eastern Europe to deliver a stunning portrait of a "land of small states with complicated fates." Highlighting the region's diversity and his own Polish-Jewish-Catholic roots, Mikanowski surveys 1,000 years of tumultuous history, describing how pagan belief systems survived in Eastern Europe until the 1200s and the impact of the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires, all of which ruled the region from a safe distance. Vivid sketches of religious sects such as the Hussites, followers of the Czech priest Jan Hus, brush up against insightful profiles of Eastern Europe's many diasporic peoples, including nomadic Vlachs of the Balkan highlands, Sufi dervishes, and Romas. Describing his ancestral homeland as "a powder keg, a nest of assassins, a tangle of murderous animosities," Mikanowski notes that in 1919 alone, six different armies battled in Ukraine, and Kiev changed hands five times. With Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, and Romania allied to Nazi Germany during WWII, the Holocaust "effected a profound, almost metaphysical unraveling of the social fabric." Following the war, the "brief elation and prolonged terror of Stalinism" evolved into an atmosphere of "stasis and scarcity" that settled over the Eastern Bloc until the 1990s, which saw the rise of Solidarity movement in Poland, the independence of former-Soviet republics, and the 1991–1995 war in Yugoslavia. Shot through with lyrical reflections and astute analysis, this is a rewarding portrait of diverse and complex part of the world.
