Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land

Description

Eastern Europe is disappearing. Not off the map of course, but as an idea. Today it calls to mind a jumble of post-Soviet states paved over with C&A and McDonald's. We could describe Eastern Europe as a group of twenty nations - but why? For most of their history, they weren't nations at all. The region is more than the sum total of its annexations, invasions and independence declarations. Eastern Europe abounds with peoples tied together by tragicomic twists of fate. Lives could be turned upside down by distant decrees from Vienna or Istanbul, or just as easily by a stubborn bureaucrat in your village. In twentieth-century Knust, you could live in six different countries without ever leaving your house. You could get married any day, but buying a teakettle was a singular event. Goodbye Eastern Europe is a eulogy for a world we are losing, a vanishing culture of polytheism, vampires, sacred groves, and movable borders.

Jacob Mikanowski is a writer and academic. His parents were Polish immigrants to the US, and he spent his childhood between Poland and Pennsylvania. He is now a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley in California. Concurrently, he has become a well-known essayist and freelance journalist, writing pieces for publications including the Guardian, New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Harper's, Slate, Aeon, Prospect Magazine and many more. His two long reads for the Guardian were included in the paper's 'Best of the Year' round-up in 2018.

'This wonderful book is a firework display: an unforgettable flash of forgotten past, black humour, wild messianic cult or genocidal horror bursts out of almost every page. Mikanowski, whose own dangerously hybrid family emerged from what he calls this "landscape of rapturous diversity", has written a chronicle rather than a history, a narrative of Eastern Europe which is about personal experiences rather than the crimes and glories of its leaders. He is a master raconteur whose anecdotes show that grotesque events are serious as well as comic. It matters that Hucul people thought God made the world out of cream. It is not just laughable that Baron von Chaos was put in charge of the Habsburg royal mint (which he promptly embezzled). Mikanowski shows that the vast regions between Germany and Russia are not just a zone of blood and tragedy, but of marvellous human vigour and resilience.' -- Neal Ascherson, author of The Black Sea 'Jacob Mikanowski has taken on the seemingly impossible task of writing a comprehensive history of that "Other" Europe, hoping to catch a myriad of vanishing worlds. My initial scepticism was quickly dispelled. Goodbye Eastern Europe succeeds in delighting even a jaded follower of matters East European like me. It is a richly informative and readable book which starts with the Dark Ages and ends with our own even darker era, ranging from the Baltics to the Balkans and covering an enormous swathe of land, describing the ever shifting frontiers and changing nationalities in the course of a historical narrative as vibrant as the area it describes.' -- Vesna Goldsworthy, author of Iron Curtain 'Goodbye Eastern Europe is a collective portrait of people, places, states and ideas, most of which no longer exist. Beautifully written and witty, it presents the region as a place full of magic, vibrancy, diversity, conflict and coexistence. Mikanowski blends together reality and myth, poetry and historical research, personal experience and ideologies to revive and bring us back the civilization that was lost during the calamitous twentieth century but that is still crucial to Eurasian history.' -- Eugene Finkel, Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of International Affairs