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May. 8th, 2024 08:34 pmJacob 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 ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
