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May. 8th, 2024 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsJacob Mikanowski's Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land is a bigger and more sweeping history than the kind I honestly usually prefer -- the friend who recced it to me described it as "undercited and overbroad, but with those caveats, kind of great," and now, having read the whole thing and also read numerous paragraphs of the thing out loud to a patient genarti, I have to agree, I had a great time with this.
Mikanowski is deeply interested in Eastern Europe as a place of complexity and multiplicity, where for hundreds of years people of various different cultures, ethnicities, languages and religions navigated around each other in shifting networks, sometimes separately side by side and sometimes extremely intertwined. This is also interesting and compelling to me, and despite how broad the history is -- the book starts with Marcus Aurelius and progresses through the present day -- Mikanowski has a real gift for finding and relaying evocative, compelling, and often very funny anecdotes that make the topics he's talking about feel human and concrete. An incomplete list of things that made me stop reading immediately to go and tell someone else about them:
- the description of the number of early vampiric legends in which the undead just took the opportunity to move to a different town and get a new working-class job ("a Bulgarian vampire from Nikodin, only seventeen when he died, went to a different city, where he became a very successful butcher's apprentice")
- the anecdote about how the Ottoman Empire not only politely maintained the position of Polish ambassador after the formal dissolution of Poland, but "would make a point of noting, at the start of every audience with Western powers, that 'the deputy from Lehistan [Poland] has not yet arrived" until Poland became a nation again in 1918
- the description of the kobzars, itinerant blind professional singers in the Ukraine, and their powerful guild that maintained the Strict Trade Secrecy about their repertoire through a coded language and met annually for secret professional conferences to make rulings on the finer points of guild law in the middle of the forest
- the note about an author who put the secret policeman in charge of interrogating him so directly into his book that he felt obliged to send him a manuscript; "the major returned the manuscript after a month, commenting that while he wasn't a literary critic, he thought, based on what he had read so far, that Vaculik could 'do better'"
Unexpectedly, my favorite part was the section on nineteenth-century nationalism, which went into enjoyable and satisfying detail on various cultural battles around language, alphabets and orthography, not to mention the national epics. I love alphabet wars and so this whole chapter was to me a delicious feast. Forged 'lost manuscripts' whose authenticity was forbidden to discuss! Poets willing to die for their chosen diacritics! Poets who died for extremely normal and unimpressive reasons ("got sick)" but were nonetheless recast in legend as being willing to die for the cause of national literature ("having poured all his strength into his work, Karel Mácha died spent at the peak of his creative powers")!
Though, that said, even the course of researching this last anecdote reveals a little bit of the undercited quality referenced above -- Mikanowski breezily describes Mácha as having died of "a cold," while Wikipedia says "the official record lists Mácha's cause of death as Brechdurchfall, a milder form of cholera" -- so as much as I enjoyed all the anecdotes I'm holding onto my grains of salt.
Mikanowski's own family is Polish, with roots in the Jewish and Catholic communities, and he weaves anecdotes from his family's history in with his other various sources: here an ancestor who served as master of horse to a hetman and arranged an exchange of hostages; there a grandfather who was offered a bonus of "either a gun or a fur coat" for his role in top-secret Polish counterintelligence operations; and, of course, numerous relatives lost in the numerous devastating horrors of the twentieth century. A paragraph that has stuck with me, from the chapter on empires:
genarti, I have to agree, I had a great time with this. Mikanowski is deeply interested in Eastern Europe as a place of complexity and multiplicity, where for hundreds of years people of various different cultures, ethnicities, languages and religions navigated around each other in shifting networks, sometimes separately side by side and sometimes extremely intertwined. This is also interesting and compelling to me, and despite how broad the history is -- the book starts with Marcus Aurelius and progresses through the present day -- Mikanowski has a real gift for finding and relaying evocative, compelling, and often very funny anecdotes that make the topics he's talking about feel human and concrete. An incomplete list of things that made me stop reading immediately to go and tell someone else about them:
- the description of the number of early vampiric legends in which the undead just took the opportunity to move to a different town and get a new working-class job ("a Bulgarian vampire from Nikodin, only seventeen when he died, went to a different city, where he became a very successful butcher's apprentice")
- the anecdote about how the Ottoman Empire not only politely maintained the position of Polish ambassador after the formal dissolution of Poland, but "would make a point of noting, at the start of every audience with Western powers, that 'the deputy from Lehistan [Poland] has not yet arrived" until Poland became a nation again in 1918
- the description of the kobzars, itinerant blind professional singers in the Ukraine, and their powerful guild that maintained the Strict Trade Secrecy about their repertoire through a coded language and met annually for secret professional conferences to make rulings on the finer points of guild law in the middle of the forest
- the note about an author who put the secret policeman in charge of interrogating him so directly into his book that he felt obliged to send him a manuscript; "the major returned the manuscript after a month, commenting that while he wasn't a literary critic, he thought, based on what he had read so far, that Vaculik could 'do better'"
Unexpectedly, my favorite part was the section on nineteenth-century nationalism, which went into enjoyable and satisfying detail on various cultural battles around language, alphabets and orthography, not to mention the national epics. I love alphabet wars and so this whole chapter was to me a delicious feast. Forged 'lost manuscripts' whose authenticity was forbidden to discuss! Poets willing to die for their chosen diacritics! Poets who died for extremely normal and unimpressive reasons ("got sick)" but were nonetheless recast in legend as being willing to die for the cause of national literature ("having poured all his strength into his work, Karel Mácha died spent at the peak of his creative powers")!
Though, that said, even the course of researching this last anecdote reveals a little bit of the undercited quality referenced above -- Mikanowski breezily describes Mácha as having died of "a cold," while Wikipedia says "the official record lists Mácha's cause of death as Brechdurchfall, a milder form of cholera" -- so as much as I enjoyed all the anecdotes I'm holding onto my grains of salt.
Mikanowski's own family is Polish, with roots in the Jewish and Catholic communities, and he weaves anecdotes from his family's history in with his other various sources: here an ancestor who served as master of horse to a hetman and arranged an exchange of hostages; there a grandfather who was offered a bonus of "either a gun or a fur coat" for his role in top-secret Polish counterintelligence operations; and, of course, numerous relatives lost in the numerous devastating horrors of the twentieth century. A paragraph that has stuck with me, from the chapter on empires:
These empires maintained their power by violence, but there was a certain wisdom to the way they were constructed. They possessed a flexibility, and an openness to diversity, that was lost to the nation-states that succceeded them. Here I must admit to stumbling sometimes. There is a parallax effect at work in observing empires. From a distance, the Ottoman Empire appears to have been a multifarious, fascinating place. But if I had lived in one of its subject lands, I might be writing about the "Turkish Yoke" and its "centuries of darkness." In the same way, from afar, the Russian Empire might seem to have been capacious and accommodating. But to me, it is a blinded eye, a toothless mouth, and a severed arm.
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Date: 2024-05-09 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-09 03:45 am (UTC)I am extremely glad you stopped reading to tell me about this one.
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Date: 2024-05-09 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-09 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-10 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-10 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-10 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-10 04:01 am (UTC)(also to be fair again sometimes he'll cite something but it's in Czech. man I can't do further research on this, that's not your fault but I feel the absence regardless!)
fyi I did note in the acknowledgments him crediting McPhee lol
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Date: 2024-05-10 04:15 am (UTC)And then figure out how to use that in writing my own fictionno subject
Date: 2024-05-10 06:06 am (UTC)I still hope that someday the captives of the Prison of Nations will yet go free.
More broadly, I think that paragraph is right on the money about the previous world order. It is both things at once and they cannot be untangled.
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Date: 2024-05-10 12:35 pm (UTC)But yes, I have a Greek-American friend whose family immigrated to America a couple of generations ago, but the family memory of the Turkish Yoke remains strong. I think often empires look more multifarious and fascinating from the outside than they feel from within.
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Date: 2024-05-10 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-10 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-11 03:08 am (UTC)However, I think this is an area where we really suffer from being too general. I'm not a Russia specialist so I won't say too much about that, but speaking to the Ottomans especially, first, the way the state governed and interacted with minorities changed substantially over its lifespan and I think there's a fairly good case to be made that national separatist movements erupted in response to the empire genuinely becoming *more* discriminatory on the one hand and a less functional state economically on the other - there's an extremist movement called the Kadizadelis who rise in the seventeenth century and then are sort of discredited, but Wahhabism in its modern guise rises the next century, the central government loses control over corruption and local dynasties in a lot of places over the eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth century a lot of the rebellions that get painted as nationalist start out as economic grievances.
So, for example, the first major one is really the first Serb Revolt in the early nineteenth century and it starts out straightforwardly as a rebellion against illegal economic repression by military officers in the Balkans; early on the Muslim clerics in the cities come out in *support* of the rebelling Christian peasants and the Serb peasant leader initially goes to the Sultan saying, please come and do something about these janissaries who are reducing us to illegal slavery. But the government's efforts to handle this really fall apart, and in the midst of it the Greek Revolution starts and IMO this is where things become really nasty precisely because the Greeks are working out the ideology of modern nationalism and the formula that Christian rebellions in the Ottoman Empire will start using for the next century, which is going to the West and saying we're an independent Christian culture who deserve your support against the tyrannical Muslims, taking money and arms, going back and committing horrific ethnic massacres of Muslims & Jews in Greeece in order to establish sovereignty over as much historically "Greek" land as possible. Shortly after this both Russia and to a lesser extent the other major European powers realize that if they pour money into the nationalist militias they will destabilize Ottoman provinces themselves and the European powers can swoop in to annex the territory, or else establish client states without the power to resist them, and they do, to their great joy, up to and including funding paramilitaries of their chosen allies to go around murdering entire villages. This situation produces huge refugee flows, especially of Muslims, joined by Muslim refugees from areas recently annexed by Russia, coming into central Ottoman territory, many of whom *now* hate Christians, with predictable effects on Ottoman politics/society & the state's efforts to get control of the ethnic violence. Various Muslim majorities form ethno-nationalist ideologies reactively, as nationalism becomes the way people think about states & sovereignty, and many of them engage in retaliatory ethnic violence against totally unrelated Christian or other minority populations, in what becomes an escalating spiral of violence and eventually destroys the empire. I'm skipping a lot of the destructive factors here (e.g. military draft dynamics) but that should give you at least a brief sketch.
Anyway, the thing is, if you look at what the nationalist leaders are saying and doing in this period, they're... pretty openly pro-ethnic violence. There *were* people trying to establish ethnic/religious equality and democratic reform in the Ottoman Empire, and in fact at one point the equality of all men in the Empire was proclaimed and they tried to integrate it into law, but that group tended to be operating in the central areas away from the rebellions, and there just wasn't enough of a constituency for it - Christians tended not to trust the authorities enough to participate (with exceptions) and many Muslims seem to have seen this as giving into real, open European imperialism and designs on annexing the empire. Meanwhile, the Ottoman officials trying to establish reform had expected Europe to be enthusiastic about them adopting progressive egalitarian reforms and instead Europe was irritated, because, well, they really *were* mostly complaining as a pretext for annexation/interference.
So I guess I would say... it's complicated, but in order to come to grips with it I think we need to first accept that the people using western support to establish ethno-states in the Balkans, etc, in the nineteenth century were openly pro-ethnic violence and mostly trying to establish ethnically-based monarchies - the theory was that an autocrat of your same ethnic group would not oppress you. They were not interested in democracy *or* equality. And so the outcome was not a mistake, they got what they were arguing for and what the international western world was willing to pay to make happen (to the entire world's sorrow - it's really striking how many of the current world's conflicts come out of the outcome of WWI, itself the outcome of this mess). ETA: At the same time sometimes revionists will act as though there were *no* problems with the Ottoman Empire and that's clearly not true! But I think there is an alternate universe where Europe responded positively to the Gülhane decree, Abdülhamid II never became sultan and the Ottoman Empire became the same sort of constitutional monarchy/effective democracy as much of western Europe.
Anyway by the time you get to the twentieth century developments like Zionism, communism, British protectorates in the Middle East, etc, the situation has already been pretty dramatically transformed. IMO you really can't understand that stuff without the background.
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Date: 2024-05-11 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-11 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-11 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-11 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-11 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-11 11:25 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's definitely one of the points he's making -- distance makes all the difference, doesn't it? And history is always much, much less distant than it appears.
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Date: 2024-05-11 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-12 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-13 11:30 am (UTC)I'm slowly making my through Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe, so likely would cross over with the above and while I haven't hit the 19th C yet, the author laments a bit about what ended up happening in the Balkans and the fall out to this day.
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Date: 2024-05-14 02:35 pm (UTC)I really want to write fantasy and science fiction influenced by my family history and culture, I'm just worried about whether or not I'll do it Correctly or if my Imperial Core subconscious blind spots will ruin everything somehow...
And then I remember Emily Duncan exists and I can do literally whatever I want foreverno subject
Date: 2024-05-20 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-21 10:12 am (UTC)